In June 1797, about the time when the new volume was published, Charles Lamb and his sister came on a visit to Coleridge at his cottage at Stowey. On the morning of their arrival, Coleridge met with an accident which disabled him from walking during the whole of their stay. One evening, when they had left him for a few hours, he composed the poem, "This Lime-tree Bower my Prison,"* in which he refers to his old friend, while watching him in fancy with his sister, winding and ascending the hills at a short distance, himself detained as if a prisoner. Coleridge This brief visit of Lamb's had been preceded by a still more important event, not only prolific in its immediate consequences, but destined in its issues to affect more or less the whole of Coleridge's future life. In the summer of 1797 Coleridge and Wordsworth, if they did not actually meet for the first time, first became familiarly acquainted worth at with each other at Racedown in Dorset- Racedown. shire. Wordsworth was in his twenty-eighth and Coleridge in his twenty-fifth year, in the spring-tide of his creative faculty. and Words The first impression made by the appearance of Coleridge, is thus described by Miss Wordsworth in a letter to a friend who had left Racedown early in 1797:: "You had a great loss in not seeing Coleridge. He is a wonderful man. His conversation teems with soul, mind, and spirit. Then he is so benevolent, so good-tempered and cheerful, and, like William, interests himself so much about every little trifle. At first I thought him very plain, that is, for about three * See Vol. 11. p. 206. minutes: he is pale, thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips, and not very good teeth, longish, loose-growing, halfcurling, rough black hair. But, if you hear him speak for five minutes, you think no more of them. His eye is large and full, and not very dark, but greysuch an eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest expression; but it speaks every emotion of his animated mind: it has more of 'the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling' than I ever witnessed. He has fine dark eyebrows, and an overhanging forehead.”* Coleridge had come over on a visit to Wordsworth from Nether-Stowey, where he had been engaged in Osorio. writing the tragedy of Osorio, at the request of Sheridan. Wordsworth was also occupied with a tragedy, The Borderers, which was completed in the following November, offered to the managers of Covent Garden Theatre, and summarily rejected by them, and which only saw the light forty-five years afterwards. Charles Lamb writes to Coleridge (June 13th, 1797):-"Lloyd tells me that Sheridan put you upon writing your tragedy. I hope you are only Coleridgeizing when you talk of finishing it in a few days. Shakespeare was a more modest man; but you best know your own power." During the time of the visit above-mentioned, Miss Wordsworth writes from Racedown to a friend :"After tea he (Coleridge) repeated to us two acts and a half of his tragedy, Osorio." Coleridge writing at the time of this visit to his friend Cottle (June, 1797) says "He (Wordsworth) admires my tragedy, which gives me great hopes." * Memoirs of Wordsworth (Lond. 1851), vol. i. pp. 98, 99. In a letter received by Cottle from Coleridge soon after, he says:-I shall now stick close to my tragedy (called Osorio), and when I have finished it, shall walk to Shaftesbury to spend a few days with Bowles.” This letter, as usual, has no date, but a letter from Wordsworth determines approximately the time when Coleridge had nearly completed his play. Wordsworth says, under date September 13, 1797:-" Coleridge is gone over to Bowles with his tragedy, which he has finished to the middle of the fifth Act. He set off a week ago." In the meantime, Wordsworth himself was hard at work on The Borderers. Both the poets, however, were doomed to witness the disappointment of their hopes. "William's play," says Miss Wordsworth (20th November, 1797), "is finished, and sent to the managers of the Covent Garden Theatre. We have not the faintest expectation that it will be accepted." On 21st December she writes:-"We have been in London: our business was the play; and the play is rejected. It was sent to one of the principal actors at Covent Garden, who expressed great approbation, and advised William strongly to go to London to make certain alterations." "Coleridge's play," she adds, "is also rejected;" and for this she expresses great sorrow and disappointment. In the following year (1798), two scenes from Osorio, under the titles of The Dungeon and The Foster-Mother's Tale, were published, together with other pieces * Early Recollections, chiefly relating to the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge. By Joseph Cottle. Lond., 1837. Vol. i. Pp. 234, 235 by Coleridge, in the volume of Lyrical Ballads which he produced conjointly with Wordsworth. Here, with the omission of some of the opening lines of the latter scene, they continued to appear in the successive editions of 1800, 1802, and 1805. "The manuscript of Osorio," says Mr. Gillman, "had been sent to Sheridan, who did not even acknowledge the receipt of the letter which accompanied the drama; he, however, observed to a friend that he had received a play from Coleridge, but there was one extraordinary line in the Cave Scene, drip, drip, which he could not understand: 'in short,' said he, 'it is all dripping.' This was the only notice he took of the play; but the comment was at length repeated to the author through the medium of a third party."* We shall hear more of this play later on. His Annus We have said that the period of Coleridge's residence at Nether Stowey (17971798) was preeminently fruitful in the development of his poetical genius. Not only Osorio, but nearly all the chief works by which his name will live as a poet, were planned or produced during those two fortunate years of his life. Among these were The Ancient Mariner, the first part of Christabel, Kubla Khan, The Three Graves, The Wanderings of Cain, the Ode on France, Frost at Midnight, The Nightingale, and the Circassian Love-Chant. From Racedown Wordsworth shortly afterwards removed to Alfoxden, and thus became a near neighbour of Coleridge. In January 1798, Coleridge was induced to entertain the idea of taking charge of a Unitarian congregation *Gillman's Life of Coleridge (Pickering, 1838), p. 265. at Shrewsbury. He was luckily induced to abandon that project by the opportune liberality of his friends the Wedgwoods, who offered him an annuity of £150 on condition of his retiring from the ministry, and devoting himself entirely to the study of poetry and philosophy. This Shrewsbury episode is so graphically related by William Hazlitt* that we cannot do better than quote his account of it : 66 C. T. C. at Shrewsbury "My father was a Dissenting Minister at Hazlitt's Wem, in Shropshire; and in the year 1798 account of Mr. Coleridge came to Shrewsbury, to succeed Mr. Rowe in the spiritual charge of a Unitarian congregation there. He did not come till late on the Saturday afternoon before he was to preach; and Mr. Rowe, who himself went down to the coach in a state of anxiety and expectation, to look for the arrival of his successor, could find no one at all answering the description but a round-faced man in a short black coat (like a shooting-jacket) which hardly seemed to have been made for him, but who appeared to be talking at a great rate to his fellow-passengers. Mr. Rowe had scarcely returned to give an account of his disappointment, when the round-faced man in black entered, and dissipated all doubts on the subject by beginning to talk. He did not cease while he stayed; nor has he since, that I know of. He held the good town of Shrewsbury in delightful suspense for three weeks that he remained there, 'fluttering the proud Salopians like an eagle in a dove-cote;' and the Welsh mountains that skirt the horizon with their tempestuous confusion, agree to have heard no such mystic sounds since the days of * The Liberal, 1822, vol. ii. pp. 23-46. § My first Acquaintance with Poets. |