Samuel Coleridge - The Complete Essays, Lectures & Letters of S. T. Coleridge (Illustrated)

P. Excellent! But you have forgotten those brilliant flashes of loyalty, those patriotic praises of the King and Old England, which, especially if conveyed in a metaphor from the ship or the shop, so often solicit and so unfailingly receive the public plaudit! I give your prudence credit for the omission. For the whole system of your drama is a moral and intellectual Jacobinism of the most dangerous kind, and those commonplace rants of loyalty are no better than hypocrisy in your playwrights, and your own sympathy with them a gross self-delusion. For the whole secret of dramatic popularity consists with you in the confusion and subversion of the natural order of things, their causes and their effects; in the excitement of surprise, by representing the qualities of liberality, refined feeling, and a nice sense of honour, (those things rather which pass among you for such), in persons and in classes of life where experience teaches us least to expect them; and in rewarding with all the sympathies, that are the dues of virtue, those criminals whom law, reason, and religion have excommunicated from our esteem!

And now — good night! Truly! I might have written this last sheet without having gone to Germany; but I fancied myself talking to you by your own fireside, and can you think it a small pleasure to me to forget now and then, that I am not there? Besides, you and my other good friends have made up your minds to me as I am, and from whatever place I write you will expect that part of my “Travels” will consist of excursions in my own mind.

LETTER III

RATZEBURG.

No little fish thrown back again into the water, no fly unimprisoned

from a child’s hand, could more buoyantly enjoy its element, than I this

clean and peaceful house, with this lovely view of the town, groves,

and lake of Ratzeburg, from the window at which I am writing. My spirits

certainly, and my health I fancied, were beginning to sink under the

noise, dirt, and unwholesome air of our Hamburg hotel. I left it

on Sunday, Sept. 23rd, with a letter of introduction from the poet

Klopstock, to the Amtmann of Ratzeburg. The Amtmann received me with

kindness, and introduced me to the worthy pastor, who agreed to board

and lodge me for any length of time not less than a month. The vehicle,

in which I took my place, was considerably larger than an English

stage-coach, to which it bore much the same proportion and rude

resemblance, that an elephant’s ear does to the human. Its top was

composed of naked boards of different colours, and seeming to have been

parts of different wainscots. Instead of windows there were leathern

curtains with a little eye of glass in each: they perfectly answered

the purpose of keeping out the prospect and letting in the cold. I

could observe little therefore, but the inns and farmhouses at which

we stopped. They were all alike, except in size: one great room, like

a barn, with a hay-loft over it, the straw and hay dangling in tufts

through the boards which formed the ceiling of the room, and the floor

of the loft. From this room, which is paved like a street, sometimes

one, sometimes two smaller ones, are enclosed at one end. These are

commonly floored. In the large room the cattle, pigs, poultry, men,

women, and children, live in amicable community; yet there was an

appearance of cleanliness and rustic comfort. One of these houses I

measured. It was an hundred feet in length. The apartments were taken

off from one corner. Between these and the stalls there was a small

interspace, and here the breadth was forty-eight feet, but thirty-two

where the stalls were; of course, the stalls were on each side eight

feet in depth. The faces of the cows, etc. were turned towards the room;

indeed they were in it, so that they had at least the comfort of seeing

each other’s faces. Stall-feeding is universal in this part of Germany,

a practice concerning which the agriculturist and the poet are likely

to entertain opposite opinions — or at least, to have very different

feelings. The woodwork of these buildings on the outside is left

unplastered, as in old houses among us, and, being painted red and

green, it cuts and tesselates the buildings very gaily. From within

three miles of Hamburg almost to Molln, which is thirty miles from it,

the country, as far as I could see it, was a dead flat, only varied by

woods. At Molln it became more beautiful. I observed a small lake nearly

surrounded with groves, and a palace in view belonging to the King of

Great Britain, and inhabited by the Inspector of the Forests. We were

nearly the same time in travelling the thirty-five miles from Hamburg to

Ratzeburg, as we had been in going from London to Yarmouth, one hundred

and twenty-six miles.

The lake of Ratzeburg runs from south to north, about nine miles in length, and varying in breadth from three miles to half a mile. About a mile from the southernmost point it is divided into two, of course very unequal, parts by an island, which, being connected by a bridge and a narrow slip of land with the one shore, and by another bridge of immense length with the other shore, forms a complete isthmus. On this island the town of Ratzeburg is built. The pastor’s house or vicarage, together with the Amtmann’s Amtsschreiber’s, and the church, stands near the summit of a hill, which slopes down to the slip of land and the little bridge, from which, through a superb military gate, you step into the island-town of Ratzeburg. This again is itself a little hill, by ascending and descending which, you arrive at the long bridge, and so to the other shore. The water to the south of the town is called the Little Lake, which however almost engrosses the beauties of the whole the shores being just often enough green and bare to give the proper effect to the magnificent groves which occupy the greater part of their circumference. From the turnings, windings, and indentations of the shore, the views vary almost every ten steps, and the whole has a sort of majestic beauty, a feminine grandeur. At the north of the Great Lake, and peeping over it, I see the seven church towers of Luebec, at the distance of twelve or thirteen miles, yet as distinctly as if they were not three. The only defect in the view is, that Ratzeburg is built entirely of red bricks, and all the houses roofed with red tiles. To the eye, therefore, it presents a clump of brick-dust red. Yet this evening, Oct. 10th, twenty minutes past five, I saw the town perfectly beautiful, and the whole softened down into complete keeping, if I may borrow a term from the painters. The sky over Ratzeburg and all the east was a pure evening blue, while over the west it was covered with light sandy clouds. Hence a deep red light spread over the whole prospect, in undisturbed harmony with the red town, the brown-red woods, and the yellow-red reeds on the skirts of the lake. Two or three boats, with single persons paddling them, floated up and down in the rich light, which not only was itself in harmony with all, but brought all into harmony.