320 No. XXVII. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, Esq. "Call it not vain! they do not err and "No man was ever more beloved by his friends among them were many of the great as well as the goodthan the poet Coleridge. We so call him; for he alone, perhaps, of all men that ever lived, was always a poet,-in all his moods- and they were many — inspired. His genius never seemed to burn low, to need fuel or fanning; but, gently stirred, up rose the magic flame, and the flame was fire. His waking thoughts had all the vividness of visions, all the variousness of dreams: but the will, whose wand in sleep is powerless, reigned over all those beautiful reveries which were often like revelations; while fancy and imagination, still obedient to reason, the lawgiver, arrayed earth and life in such many-coloured radiance, that they grew all divine." Blackwood's Magazine. Mr. Coleridge was the youngest son of the Rev. John Coleridge, Vicar of St. Mary Ottery, Devonshire, and Ann his wife, and was born in that parish, where he was baptized 30th December, 1772. "St. Mary Ottery, my native village, In the sweet shire of Devon," to commence with a quotation from the beautiful play of his friend and schoolfellow Charles Lamb. His father died in the month of October, 1781, leaving his widow with a family of eleven children, of whom one, the Rev. George Coleridge, eventually succeeded him at Ottery St. Mary. A presentation to Christ's Hospital, London, was procured for the subject of this memoir from John Way, Esq., one of the governors, and the boy was admitted to that most excellent school on the 18th of July, 1782. His father had formerly been a schoolmaster at South Molton, and is said to have assisted Dr. Kennicott in the collation of manuscripts for his Hebrew Bible: he published Dissertations arising from the 17th and 18th Chapters of the Book of Judges, and other works. Samuel must have been well prepared for school by his father; for the age of nine years is rather a late period from which to start for the honours of Grecian and university exhibitionist at Christ's Hospital, honours which he obtained in other nine years. But he has himself, in a work which he published in the year 1817, left us some records of his school education, which must not be omitted. The work is entitled "Biographia Literaria," but, as he himself assures us, "the least part of it concerns himself personally." Throughout this memoir we shall avail ourselves of such parts as are autobiographical, and thus, as far as possible, make Mr. Coleridge his own historian. Of his early and most important days the work tells us : "At school I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time a very severe, master (the Rev. James Bowyer). He early moulded my taste to the preference of Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and again of Virgil to Ovid. He habituated me to compare Lucretius, Terence, and above all, the chaster poems of Catullus, not only with the Roman poets of the (so called) silver and brazen ages, but with even those of the Augustan era; and, on grounds of plain sense and universal logic, to see and assert the superiority of the former in the truth and nativeness both of their thoughts and diction. At the same time that we were studying the Greek tragic poets he made us read Shakspeare and Milton as lessons, and they were the lessons, too, which required most time and trouble to bring up, so as to escape his censure. I learned 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. In the truly great poets, he would say, there is a reason assignable not only for every word, but for the position of every word; and I well remember that, availing himself of the synonymes to the Homer of Didymus, he made us attempt to show, with regard to each, why it would not have answered the same purpose, and wherein consisted the peculiar fitness of the word in the original text. In our own English compositions (at least for the last three years of our school education) he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words. Lute, harp, lyre, muse, muses, and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus, and Hippocrene, were all an abomination to him. Nay, certain introductions, similes, and examples, were placed by name on a list of interdiction. Among the similes there was (I remember) that of the manchinecl fruit *, as suiting equally well with too many subjects." Biog. Lit. vol. i. pp. 7-9. Here we trace the seeds of that enmity to what is called "poetic diction" which the lyrical ballads of himself and Mr. Wordsworth, perhaps, carried to the extreme. But Mr. Bowyer's principle was a just one, especially to be inculcated upon the taste of youth; and the " consummate flowers" of Mr. Coleridge's verse exhibit certainly no barrenness of form, or plainness in their colours. The autobiographer proceeds: "I had just entered my seventeenth year when the Sonnets of Mr. Bowles, twenty in number, and just then published in a quarto pamphlet, were first made known and presented to me by a schoolfellow who had quitted us for the university, and who, during the whole time that he was in And yet this simile is to be found in Mr. Coleridge's own dedicatory poem to his brother. our first form, (or, in our school language, a Grecian,) had been my patron and protector,-I refer to Dr. Middleton, the truly learned and every way excellent Bishop of Calcutta. It was a double pleasure to me, and still remains a tender recollection, that I should have received from so revered a friend the first knowledge of a poet, by whose works, year after year, I was so enthusiastically delighted and inspired. My earliest acquaintances will not have forgotten the undisciplined eagerness and impetuous zeal with which I laboured to make proselytes, not only of my companions, but of all with whom I conversed, of whatever rank and in whatever place. As my school finances did not permit me to purchase copies, I made, within less than a year and a half, more than forty transcriptions, as the best presents I could offer to those who had in any way won my regard. And with almost equal delight did I receive the three or four following publications of the same author. My obligations to Mr. Bowles were indeed important, and for radical good. At a very premature age, even before my fifteenth year, I had bewildered myself in metaphysics, and in theological controversy. Nothing else pleased me: history and particular facts lost all interest in my mind. Poetry, (though, for a school-boy of that age, I was above par in English versification, and had already produced two or three compositions which, I may venture to say, without reference to my age, were somewhat above mediocrity, and which had gained me more credit than the sound good sense of my old master was at all pleased with,) poetry itself (yea, romances and novels,) became insipid to me. In my friendless wanderings on our leave-duys (for I was an orphan, and had scarcely any connections in London,) highly was I delighted if any passenger, especially if he were dressed in black, would enter into conversation with me, for I soon found the means of directing it to my favourite subject, "The child is father of the man." WORDSWORTH. "Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, : "This preposterous pursuit was, beyond doubt, injurious both to my natural powers and to the progress of my education. It would, perhaps, have been destructive, had it been continued but from this I was auspiciously withdrawn, chiefly by the genial influence of a style of poetry so tender and yet so manly, so natural and real, and yet so dignified and harmonious, as the Sonnets, &c., of Mr. Bowles. Well were it for me, perhaps, had I never relapsed into the same mental disease, if I had continued to pluck the flower and reap the harvest from the cultivated surface, instead of delving in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic depths. But if, in after time, I have sought a refuge from bodily pain and mismanaged sensibility in abstruse researches, which exercised the strength and subtilty of the understanding, without awakening the feelings of the heart, still there was a long and blessed interval, during which my natural faculties were allowed to expand, and my original tendencies to develope themselves,-my fancy, and the love of nature, and the sense of beauty in forms and sounds." Biog. Lit. vol. i. pp. 13-17. On the 7th of September, 1791, Mr. Coleridge was sent from Christ's Hospital, with one of the exhibitions belonging to that foundation, to Jesus College, Cambridge. Here we are afraid that both his residence and his studies were desultory and unacademical. The only university honour for which his indolence and indifference allowed him to become a candidate was Sir William Browne's medal for the best Greek ode on a given subject; and even this, we are told, he gained only by the compulsion of his friends, who made him a prisoner in a room containing nothing but pen, ink, and paper, till he had written it. There are other anecdotes afloat, concerning certain answers which he made to his academical superiors upon sitting for an university scholar It is printed in a note to the author's collected poems. |