Samuel Coleridge - The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Oh, it's your friends from Alfoxden," said Poole: and, with the resigned expression of one relegated to a back seat, he picked up the empty flip-jug and glasses, and returned to his own domain.

Two people were coming down Coleridge's garden,—a "gaunt and Don-Quixote-like" man in striped pantaloons and a brown fustian jacket, and a slender, pleasing, dark-haired woman in her early twenties. They were William and Dorothy Wordsworth: names dearer than any to the contemplative heart of Coleridge. For nearly a year they had been tenants of Alfoxden Manor-house, about a mile away among the hills: for nearly a year they had been his constant companions, his solace, his inspiration. To their example and society he owed, as he allowed, the awakening and consummation of his genius: for although the "magic and melody" of his verse were all his own,—that magic unsurpassed and unsurpassable, "altogether beyond price," and that melody,

Such a soft floating witchery of sound

As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve

Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy Land,

Where melodies round heavy-dropping flowers,

Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise,

Nor pause, nor push, hovering on untam'd wing!

( The Eolian Harp )

yet it was Wordsworth who had helped him to "find himself," and it was Dorothy whose influence on both men called out their best and deepest. "Three people but one soul," Coleridge had called this ideally-united trio of himself and his friends; and as "three people with one soul," they "walked on seaward Quantock's heathy hills," and had every thought in common.

"We are off for a long walk this lovely noon," explained Dorothy, "and taking our lunch with us: will you come, Mr. Coleridge?" A very hasty wash and brush, and a hurried goodbye to Sara, and the poet had forsaken a distasteful employment for a singularly congenial one. Over the hills and far away, he could postpone for the nonce every workaday question which troubled him, and, deep in the abstrusest consideration of poetry, or speculation of philosophy, could steep himself in the calm which was his ultimate desire.

He had a host of projects to discuss. He had planned, in collaboration with Wordsworth, a "great book of Man and Nature and Society, to be symbolized by a brook in its course from upland source to sea:" much on the lines of his own strophe from the German:

Unperishing youth!

Thou leapest from forth

The cell of thy hidden nativity;

Never mortal saw

The cradle of the strong one;

Never mortal heard

The gathering of his voices;

The deep-murmur'd charm of the son of the rock,

That is lisped evermore at his slumberless fountain.

There's a cloud at the portal, a spray-woven veil

At the shrine of his ceaseless renewing;

It embosoms the roses of dawn,

It entangles the shafts of the noon,

And into the bed of its stillness

The moonshine sinks down as in slumber,

That the son of the rock, that the nursling of heaven

May be born in a holy twilight!

He had begun the Ancient Mariner upon a previous walking-tour, also as a joint composition with the other poet, but had taken it into his own hands and finally completed it this spring. He had an immense proposal for an epic, which should take ten years for collecting material, five for writing and five for revising—nobody could accuse Coleridge of undue haste! He had undertaken a translation of Wieland's Oberon , which was likely to be more troublesome than remunerative. But most of all he desired to ascertain his friends' criticism on his newest fragment, Christabel : the bulk of his achievements were but fragmentary at the best.

GERALDINE IN THE FOREST.

"There she sees a damsel bright,

Drest in a silken robe of white,

That shadowy in the moonlight shone:

The neck that made that white robe wan,

Her stately neck, and arms were bare.

· · · · · · And wildly glittered here and there

The gems entangled in her hair."

( Christabel ).

Coleridge's mind was that extremely rara avis in terra , which combines the artistic with the philosophic temperament—two inherently-opposed qualities. His acute and sensitive perceptions of sound, sight, colour and romantic possibility did not in the least satisfy his heavy logical demands. Of art for art's sake he had the poorest opinion. He was of dual nature,—and where the philosopher, the metaphysician and the divine preponderated in him, they completely over-weighted the exquisite, ethereal imagination, which was so infinitely more precious, had he known it. And although in this golden year of his life, this annus mirabilis of his sojourn at Nether Stowey,—he was still allured to the marvellous, the strange and the supernatural, he sought to disguise his surrender to these phantasies, by clothing his desires in the garb of a severe philosophy of poetry. He decided, in concert with Wordsworth, that it would be well for him to undertake a series of poems in which, as he put it, "the incident and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural: and the excellence arrived at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency."

A cold and unproductive soil this, one would suppose, in which to grow the glowing flowers of Christabel , where night itself, peopled with occult alarms, cannot minimise the mingled horror and splendour of Geraldine's first appearance.

Is the night chilly and dark?

The night is chilly, but not dark.

The thin gray cloud is spread on high,

It covers but not hides the sky.

The moon is behind, and at the full;

And yet she looks both small and dull.

The night is chill, the cloud is gray:

'Tis a month before the month of May,

And the Spring comes slowly up this way.

The lovely lady, Christabel,

Whom her father loves so well,

What makes her in the wood so late,

A furlong from the castle gate?

She had dreams all yesternight

Of her own betrothed knight;

And she in the midnight wood will pray

For the weal of her lover that's far away.

She stole along, she nothing spoke,

The sighs she heaved were soft and low,

And naught was green upon the oak,

But moss and rarest mistletoe:

She kneels beneath the huge oak tree,

And in silence prayeth she.

The lady sprang up suddenly,

The lovely lady, Christabel!

It moaned as near, as near can be,

But what it is, she cannot tell.—

On the other side it seems to be,

Of the huge, broad-breasted, old oak tree.

· · · · · · There she sees a damsel bright,

Drest in a silken robe of white,

That shadowy in the moonlight shone:

The neck that made that white robe wan,

Her stately neck, and arms were bare;

Her blue-veined feet unsandal'd were,

And wildly glittered here and there

The gems entangled in her hair.

I guess, 'twas frightful there to see

A lady so richly clad as she—

Beautiful exceedingly!

And a chilly basis, these solemnly-propounded theories, for the gorgeous fabric of The Ancient Mariner . Originally founded, as regards its main outlines, upon a dream which occurred to Cruikshank,—a dream of a skeleton ship with figures in it,—who could have anticipated such results as that unforgettable scene where "The Ancient Mariner beholdeth a sign in the element afar off"?—