going abroad for his health-prevented the execution of this project. In August the poets and Dora Wordsworth started on a tour in Scotland. They visited together Burns's grave, and his house,-Burns's youngest son was at this time a Blue Coat boy,-and the Falls of the Clyde, Loch Katrine, and the Trossachs. Then Coleridge abandoned his friends. He had been with them a fortnight. He made his way alone to Edinburgh. Wordsworth is inclined to be sarcastic on the occasion. "Poor Coleridge," he says, 66 was at that time in bad spirits, and somewhat too much in love with his own dejection, and he departed from us."-Prose Works, iii. 66. But we think he is hard on his friend. Rogers (Table Talk, p. 205) describes meeting the party, " making a tour in a vehicle that looked very like a cart; "1 and on the 29th-they had .... started on the 15th-Dora Wordsworth records, "It rained heavily this morning. . . . no hope it would be over in less than three weeks at least." Is it any wonder that, as she proceeds to inform us, "Poor Coleridge fled?” He sped on his way to Keswick, to nurse his rheumatism, "suppressed gout," and the like, and ease his pains with "the Kendal black drop." To return on our steps a little. In July of 1803 Southey consults Coleridge about his Bibliotheca Britannica, which he is to edit for Longman. Coleridge at once launches forth into magnificent schemes. He offers to learn Welch and Erse, to go to Biscay and "throw light on the Basque," and so on. Southey's reply (Aug. 3) is cruel :—“To rely upon you for 1 Cart.] De Quincey describes such another, with a female driver, who sat on the shaft, in which he visited Ulleswater, with Wordsworth, in 1807. 2 Records.] In her Recollections of a Tour in Scotland in 1803. Edinburgh, 1874. whole quartos! Dear Coleridge, the smile that comes with that thought is a very melancholy one." To Coleridge's unhappy habit of opium-taking we shall allude later; this is, perhaps, the place to say a word of other shortcomings which that habit fixed beyond cure. We refer chiefly to that irresoluteness and procrastination-misnamed idleness by himself, as well as by others-which rendered so often his learning and talent abortive. Coleridge writes,' even so early as 1794, "To me hath Heaven with bounteous hand assign'd The daring ken of Truth, the patriot's part, But sloth was but the outward and deceptive manifestation of the inward want. It was futile to heap reproaches, as some of his friends would, on Coleridge's idiosyncrasies. They were simply the result of disease and constitutional defect. Sarah Coleridge speaks, alluding to her father, of "the great misfortune of both our lives-want of bodily vigour, adequate to the ordinary demands of life, even under favourable circumstances." (Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge, i. 2.) She hardly puts the case fully. Moreover, the way in which Coleridge flitted from place to place would seem to indicate a fair amount of physical activity.1 Want of "bodily vigour," if we must so name it, was combined in his case with a hyper-sensitive nervous organization,—and a feeble stomach, says Gillman,producing morbidness, and what he calls "mis 1 Writes.] In his poem, Lines on a Friend who died of a Frenzy Fever. 2 Activity.] On one of the days of the Harz excursion he walked forty miles. managed sensibility," over and above irresoluteness of will. says Wordsworth 1 of Coleridge,- -"Of all men I have ever known, Coleridge had the most of passive courage in bodily trial, but no one was so easily cowed when moral firmness was required in miscellaneous conversation, or in the daily intercourse of social life." "Moral firmness" is a somewhat mis leading expression. Coleridge would tremble, in his later years, to open a letter. So would Hartley Coleridge. How like, with many differences, were father and son! Who will dare judge them? It moves our pity. A 3 1 Says.] Prose Works, iii. 87. 3 2 Letter.] Frequently he did not open letters at all. He warns even his friend Allsop to direct letters to Mrs. Gillman, if he would be assured of having them opened. Judge.] We subjoin a passage from Coleridge's Table Talk and Omniana which he calls An Admonition, but which he might well have named An Apology."There are two sides to every question. If thou hast genius and poverty to thy lot, dwell on the foolish, perplexing, imprudent, dangerous, and even immoral, conduct of promise-breach in small things, of want of punctuality, of procrastination in all its shapes and disguises. Force men to reverence the dignity of thy moral strength in and for itself,-seeking no excuses or palliations from fortune, or sickness, or a too full mind that, in opulence of conception, overrated its powers of application. But if thy fate should be different, shouldest thou possess competence, health and ease of mind, and then be thyself called upon to judge such faults in another so gifted,-O! then, upon the other view of the question, say, Am I in ease and comfort, and dare I wonder that he, poor fellow, acted so and so? Dare I accuse him? Ought I not to shadow forth to myself that, glad and luxuriating in a short escape from anxiety, his mind over-promised for itself; that, want combating with his eager desire to produce things worthy of fame, he dreamed of the nobler, when he should have been producing the meaner, and so had the meaner obtruded on his moral being, when the nobler f man's destiny is moulded, as well as his limbs, in his mother's womb. What a novel discourse might we hear from the philosophic preacher, who should take for his text, "He knoweth our frame!" Idleness, we insist, is not the word to describe Coleridge's weaknesses. Southey, unintentionally, puts the case well. "His mind," he writes,-Mar. 30, 1804,-" is in a perpetual St. Vitus's danceeternal activity without action. At times he feels mortified that he should have done so little; but this feeling never produces any exertion. I will begin to-morrow, he says, and thus he has been all his life long letting to-day slip." Connected, as it seems to us to be, with these, we will add one other remark. "If Coleridge could but learn," says Southey, in 1817, "how to deliver his opinions in a way to make them read, and to separate that which would be profitable from all that which scarcely half-a-dozen men in England can understand (I certainly am not one of the number), he would be the most useful man of his age, as I verily believe him in acquirements and in powers of mind to be very far the greatest." The truth is, the digressiveness of Coleridge's was making full way on his intellectual? Think of the manifoldness of his accumulated petty calls! Think, in short, on all that should be like a voice from heaven to warn thyself against this and this, and call it all up for pity and for palliation; and then draw the balance. Take him in his whole,-his head, his heart, his wishes, his innocence of all selfish crime, and a hundred years hence, what will be the result? The good,-were it but a single volume that made truth more visible, and goodness more lovely, and pleasure at once more akin to virtue and, selfdoubled, more pleasurable! and the evil,-while he lived, it injured none but himself; and where is it now? in his grave. Follow it not thither." The reader will easily be able to read between the lines. prose, the confusion and obscurity of it, when there is such, is really traceable to the defects above discussed. To pile thought upon thought, and word upon word, required of him less effort than to express his thought succinctly. He lets go the reins. He finds no end. And so, whether himself he be or no,—which Wordsworth, even of his conversation, denies,' and which H. N. Coleridge denies," in wandering mazes lost," his ordinary readers are. This was particularly the case with his lectures, in which he so often offended by inconsequence and digression. His verse is usually lucid. His feeling for form restrains him. To resume. In August Southey's only child died, and Mrs. Southey was suffering. Southey, feeling she would be "nowhere so well as with her sister Coleridge,” set off with all speed to Keswick.2 We find him established there in September, to remain till his death, in 1843. We promised to describe Greta Hall, but on second thoughts refer the reader to Sara Coleridge's description 3 in the first volume of the Memoir and 1 Denies.] See Table Talk and Omniana, p. 4, and note (Standard Library Edition). 2 Keswick.] Mrs. Coleridge,-Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge, i. 7,-says that Mary Lovell arrived with them. But she states, as well, that her husband was then in Malta. Possibly he might not be returned from Scotland, but he was not in Malta. The point is in itself of no interest. But if Coleridge was not returned, or if Mary Lovell then first arrived, our theory in a note to A Day Dream finally collapses. Then the "Mary" and "Asra" of that poem were- .? 3 Description.] Coleridge himself graphically describes the surroundings, writing to Southey: Our house stands on a low hill, the whole front of which is one field and an enormous garden, nine-tenths of which is a nursery garden. Behind the house is an orchard, and a small Wood on a steep slope, at the foot of which flows the river |