Writing a little before this to Charles Lloyd, senior, Coleridge had said: "My days I shall devote to the acquirement of practical husbandry and horticulture." "To make yourself for ever known. . ." Cowley's "Motto " has: What shall I do to be for ever known, And make the age to come my own? The poem on Burns was that "To a Friend [Lamb] who had Declared His Intention of Writing no more Poetry." It was printed first in a Bristol paper and then in the Annual Anthology, 1800. Priestley's remark is in the Dedication to John Lee, Esq., of Lincoln's Inn, of "A Free Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism and Philosophical Necessity in a Correspondence between Dr. Price and Dr. Priestley," etc., included in Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit, Vol. III., 1778. The discussion arose from the publication by Priestley of The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated, which itself is an appendage to Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit. Three lives at least of John Wesley were published in the two years following his death in 1791. Coleridge later studied Wesley closely, for he added valuable notes to Southey's life (see the 1846 edition). "Warped and relaxed." See the quotation from Priestley. "A Berkleyan," i.e., a follower of Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753), who in his New Theory of Vision and later works maintained that "what we call matter has no actual existence, and that the impressions which we believe ourselves to receive from it are not, in fact, derived from anything external to ourselves, but are produced within us by a certain disposition of the mind, the immediate operation of God" (Benham's Dictionary of Religion). Coleridge when sending Southey one version of his poem to Charles Lamb, entitled "This Lime-tree Bower my Prison" (to which we shall come later), in July, 1797, appended to the following passage the note, "You remember I am a Berkleian Struck with joy's deepest calm, and gazing round On the wide view, may gaze till all doth seem Less gross than bodily; a living thing That acts upon the mind, and with such hues As clothe the Almighty Spirit, when He makes "A Necessarian." We should now say a fatalist. : Coleridge's work on the "Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion," which has before been mentioned, was, if ever begun, never completed. "Woe is me From Psalms cxx. 5, 1797 66 CHARLES LLOYD IN LONDON 87 Ecquid in antiquam virtutem." See Eneid, III., 342-343 :— Ecquid in antiquam virtutem animosque viriles Et pater Æneas et avunculus excitat Hector? (Do his father Æneas and his uncle Hector rouse him [i.e., Ascanius, i.e., little Hartley] to anything of their ancient valour and manly spirits?)] LETTER 21 CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE [Dated at end: January 18, 1797.] EAR Col,-You have learnd by this time, with surprise, no doubt, that Lloyd is with me in town. The emotions I felt on his coming so unlooked for are not ill expressed in what follows, & what, if you do not object to them as too personal, & to the world obscure, or otherwise wanting in worth, I should wish to make a part of our little volume. I shall be sorry if that vol comes out, as it necessarily must do, unless you print those very schoolboyish verses I sent you on not getting leave to come down to Bristol last Summer. I say I shall be sorry that I have addrest you in nothing which can appear in our joint volume. So frequently, so habitually as you dwell on my thoughts, 'tis some wonder those thoughts came never yet in Contact with a poetical mood-But you dwell in my heart of hearts, and I love you in all the naked honesty of prose. God bless you, and all your little domestic circle-my tenderest remembrances to your Beloved Sara, & a smile and a kiss from me to your dear dear little David Hartley-The verses I refer to above, slightly amended, I have sent (forgetting to ask your leave, tho' indeed I gave them only your initials) to the Month: Mag: where they may possibly appear next month, and where I hope to recognise your Poem on Burns. TO CHARLES LLOYD, AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR Alone, obscure, without a friend, A cheerless, solitary thing, Why seeks my Lloyd the stranger out? Of social scenes, home-bred delights, In brief oblivion to forego Friends, such as thine, so justly dear, For this a gleam of random joy, O! sweet are all the Muses' lays, And sweet the charm of matin bird- The sweeter voice of friend had heard. For when the transient charm is fled, Long, long, within my aching heart, The grateful sense shall cherishd be; That Lloyd will sometimes think on me. 1797. O Col: would to God you were in London with us, or we two at Stowey with you all. Lloyd takes up his abode at the Bull & Mouth Inn, the Cat & Salutation would have had a charm more forcible for me. O noctes cœnæque Deum! Anglice-Welch rabbits, punch, & poesy. Should you be induced to publish those very schoolboyish verses, print 'em as they will occur, if at all, in the Month: Mag: yet I should feel ashamed that to you I wrote nothing better. But they are too personal, & almost trifling and obscure withal. Some lines of mine to Cowper were in last Month: Mag: they have not body of thought enough to plead for the retaining of 'em. My sister's kind love to you all. NOTE C. LAMB. [The verses to Lloyd were included in Coleridge's 1797 volume; but the verses concerning the frustrated Bristol holiday (see pages 35 and 39) were omitted. Concerning this visit to London Charles Lloyd wrote to his brother Robert: "I left Charles Lamb very warmly interested in his favour, and have kept up a regular correspondence with him ever since; he is a most interesting young man." Only two letters from Lamb to Charles Lloyd have survived (see pages 150 and 623). 1797 "VISIONS OF THE MAID OF ORLEANS" 89 "We two "-Lamb and Lloyd. Not Lamb and his sister. The Bull and Mouth, afterwards the Queen's Hotel, was in St. Martin's Le Grand. It was destroyed to make room for the Post Office buildings. The site of the old Bull and Mouth Quakers' meeting was close by, but Lloyd can hardly have found that an attraction. "O noctes cœnæque Deum!" (Horace, Satire II., 6, 65)—“O nights and feasts divine!" For the lines to Cowper see page 37. "Body of thought "-a phrase of Coleridge's.] LETTER 22 CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE [Begun Sunday, February 5, 1797. Dated on address by mistake: January 5, 1797.] SUNDAY MORNING.-You cannot surely mean to degrade the Joan of Arc into a pot girl. You are not going, I hope, to annex to that most splendid ornament of Southey's poem all this cock and a bull story of Joan the publican's daughter of Neufchatel, with the lamentable episode of a waggoner, his wife, and six children; the texture will be most lamentably disproportionate. The first forty or fifty lines of these addenda are, no doubt, in their way, admirable, too; but many would prefer the Joan of Southey. "On mightiest deeds to brood Of shadowy vastness, such as made my heart Throb fast. Anon I paused, and in a state of half expectance listen'd to the wind;" "They wonder'd at me, who had known me once A chearful careless damsel; " "The eye, That of the circling throng and of the visible world Unseeing, saw the shapes of holy phantasy;" I see nothing in your description of the Maid equal to these. There is a fine originality certainly in those lines-"For ' she had lived in this bad world as in a place of tombs, And touch'd not the pollutions of the Dead"-but your "fierce vivacity" is a faint copy of the "fierce & terrible benevolence" of Southey. Added to this, that it will look like rivalship in you, & extort a comparison with S,-I think to your disadvantage. And the lines, consider'd in themselves as an addition to what you had before written (strains of a far higher mood), are but such as Madame Fancy loves in some of her more familiar moods, at such times as she has met Noll Goldsmith, & walk'd and talk'd with him, calling him old acquaintance. Southey certainly has no pretensions to vie with you in the sublime of poetry; but he tells a plain tale better than you. I will enumerate some woeful blemishes, some of 'em sad deviations from that simplicity which 66 was your aim. "Hail'd who might be near" (the canvas-coverture moving, by the by, is laughable); "a woman & six children" (by the way, why not nine children, it would have been just half as pathetic again): "statues of sleep they seem'd." Frost-mangled wretch: " 'green putridity:" "hail'd him immortal" (rather ludicrous again): "voiced a sad and simple tale" (abominable!): "unprovender'd : " "such his tale: " "Ah! suffering to the height of what was suffer'd" (a most insufferable line): “ amazements of affright:" "the hot sore brain attributes its own hues of ghastliness and torture" (what shocking confusion of ideas!) In these delineations of common & natural feelings, in the familiar walks of poetry, you seem to resemble Montauban dancing with Roubigné's tenants, " much of his native loftiness remained in the execution." I was reading your Religious Musings the other day, & sincerely I think it the noblest poem in the language, next after the Paradise lost; & even that was not made the vehicle of such grand truths. "There is one mind," &c., down to "Almighty's Throne," are without a rival in the whole compass of my poetical reading. "Stands in the sun, & with no partial gaze Views all creation "I wish I could have written those lines. I rejoyce that I am able to relish them. The loftier walks of Pindus are your proper region. There you have no compeer in modern times. Leave the lowlands, unenvied, in possession of such men as Cowper & Southey. Thus am I pouring balsam into the wounds I may have been inflicting on my poor friend's vanity. In your notice of Southey's new volume you omit to mention the most pleasing of all, the Miniature "There were Who form'd high hopes and flattering ones of thee, Young Robert. Spirit of Spenser!--was the wanderer wrong?" Fairfax I have been in quest of a long time. Johnson in his life of Waller gives a most delicious specimen of him, & adds, in the true manner of that delicate critic, as well as amiable man, "it may be presumed that this old version will not be much read after the elegant translation of my friend, Mr. Hoole." I endeavour'd-I wish'd to gain some idea of Tasso from this Mr. Hoole, the great boast and ornament of the India House, but soon desisted. I found him more vapid than smallest small beer sunvinegared. Your dream, down to that exquisite line "I can't tell half his adventures," is a most happy resemblance of Chaucer. The remainder is so so. The best line, I think, is, "He belong'd, I believe, to the witch Melancholy." By the way, when will our volume come out? Don't delay it till you have written a new Joan of Arc. Send what letters you please by me, & in any way you choose, single or double. The India Co. is better adapted to answer the cost than the generality of my friend's correspondents,— such poor & honest dogs as John Thelwall, particularly. I can |