Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

For Wordsworth, like Scott and all that shining group of poets who were Coleridge's contemporaries, stood awestricken before the miraculous imagination which, in the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," but gave forth one flash of its splendor. After that twenty-fifth year of high achievement, the over-burdened life went astray in sad, ignoble confusions; but at last it was the poet who lay dying. "I am dying," he said, "but without expectation of a speedy release. Is it not strange that very recently bygone images, and scenes of early life, have stolen into. my mind, like breezes blown from the spice-islands of Youth and Hope, those two realities of this phantom world?"

[ocr errors]

To Coleridge these might well seem the only realities; for in the days of youth and hope alone had he been true to his own reality, —his one rightful life as poet. In the presence of these words his later years, their errors and their sufferings, even their labors, fade away; and we know Coleridge once again as the "heaven-eyed" youth who roamed with Wordsworth over the Quantock Hills, chanting his magical, dreamland ballads, "exquisitely wild," to the music of his own inspired heart.

PEN PICTURES OF COLERIDGE.

[ocr errors]

COME back into memory, like as thou wert in the dayspring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee — the dark pillar not yet turned · Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Logician, Metaphysician, Bard! - How have I seen the casual passer through the cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus, or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar — while the walls of the old Gray Friars re-echoed to the accents of the inspired charity-boy! — CHARLES LAMB.

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 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 gray; such 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. - DOROTHY WORDS

WORTH.

The noticeable man with large gray eyes. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

In height, he might seem to be about five feet eight (he was, in reality, about an inch and a half taller, but his figure was of an order which drowns the height); his person was broad and full, and tended even to corpulence; his complexion was fair, though not what painters technically style fair, because it was associated with black hair; his eyes were large and soft in their expression; and it was from the peculiar appearance of haze or dreaminess, which mixed with their light, that I recognized my object. This was Coleridge. THOMAS DE QUINCEY.

Coleridge was as little fitted for action as Lamb, but on a different account. His person was of a good height, but as sluggish and solid as the other's was light and active. He had, perhaps, suffered it to look old before its time, for want of exercise. His hair was white at fifty; and, as he generally dressed in black, and had a very tranquil demeanor, his appearance was gentlemanly, and for several years before his death was reverend. Nevertheless, there was something invincibly young in the look of his face. It was round and fresh colored, with agreeable features, and an open, indolent, good-natured mouth. This boy-like expression was very becoming in one who dreamed and speculated as he did when he was really a boy, and who passed his life apart from the rest of the world with a book and his flowers. His forehead was prodigious, a great piece of placid marble; and his fine eyes, in which all the activity of his mind seemed to concentrate,

moved under it with a sprightly ease, as if it was pastime to him to carry all that thought. — Leigh Hunt.

Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill, in those years, looking down on London and its smoke-tumult, like a sage escaped from the inanity of life's battle; attracting toward him the thoughts of innumerable brave souls still engaged there. His express contributions to poetry, philosophy, or any specific province of human literature or enlightenment, had been small and sadly intermittent; but he had, especially among young inquiring men, a higher than literary, a kind of prophetic or magician character. He was thought to hold, he alone in England, the key of German and other transcendentalisms; knew the sublime secret of believing by "the reason what “the understanding" had been obliged to fling out as incredible; and could still, after Hume and Voltaire had done their best and worst with him, profess himself an orthodox Christian, and say and print to the Church of England, with its singular old rubrics and surplices at Allhallowtide, Esto perpetua. A sublime man; who, alone in those dark days, had saved his crown of spiritual manhood; escaping from the black materialisms, and revolutionary deluges, with "God, - Freedom, Immortality," still his: a king of men. The prac

[ocr errors]

tical intellects of the world did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer: but to the rising spirits of the young generation, he had this dusky, sublime character; and sat there as a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma; his Dodona oak grove (Mr. Gilman's house at Highgate) whispering strange things, uncertain whether oracles or jargon.

The good man, he was now getting old, towards sixty, perhaps; and gave you the idea of a life that had been full of

ment.

sufferings; a life heavy-laden, half-vanquished, still swimming painfully in seas of manifold physical and other bewilderment. Brow and head were round, and of massive weight, but the face was flabby and irresolute. The deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow as of inspiration; confused pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind of mild astonishThe whole figure and air, good and amiable otherwise, might be called flabby and irresolute; expressive of weakness under possibility of strength. He hung loosely on his limbs, with knees bent, and stooping attitude; in walking, he rather shuffled than decisively stepped; and a lady once remarked, he never could fix which side of the garden-walk would suit him best, but continually shifted, in corkscrew fashion, and kept trying both. A heavy-laden, high-aspiring, and surely much-suffering man. His voice, naturally soft and good, had contracted itself into a plaintive snuffle and singsong; he spoke as if preaching, you would have said, preaching earnestly and also hopelessly the weightiest things. I still recollect his "object" and "subject," terms of continual recurrence in the Kantean province; and how he sung and snuffled them into "om-m-mject" and "sum-m-mject" with a kind of solemn shake or quaver, as he rolled along. No talk, in his century or in any other, could be more surprising. THOMAS CARLYLE.

To pass an entire day with Coleridge was a marvellous change, indeed [from the talk of daily life]. It was a Sabbath past expression, deep, and tranquil, and serene. You came to a man who had travelled in many countries, and in critical times; who had seen and felt the world in most of its ranks, and in many of its vicissitudes and weaknesses; one to whom all literature and art were absolutely subject; and to whom, with a reasonable allowance as to technical details,

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »