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

He has often said, that one of the effects of preaching was, that it compelled him to examine the Scriptures with greater care and industry.

These additional exertions and studies assisted mainly to his final conversion to the whole truth; for it was still evident that his mind was perplexed, and that his philosophical opinions would soon yield to the revealed truth of Scripture.

He has already pointed out what he felt on this important question, how much he differed from the generally received opinions of the Unitarians, confessing that he needed a thorough revolution in his philosophical doctrines, and that an insight into his own heart was wanting.

“While my mind was thus perplexed, by a gracious providence,” says he, “for which I can never be sufficiently grateful, the generous and munificent patronage of Mr. Josiah and Mr. Thomas Wedgewood enabled me to finish my education in Germany. Instead of troubling others with my own crude notions, and juvenile compositions, I was thenceforward better employed in attempting to store my own head with the wisdom of others. I made the best use of my time and means; and there is therefore no period of my life on which I can look back with such unmingled satisfaction.”

He quitted Clevedon and his cottage in the following farewell lines: —

”Ah! quiet dell! dear cot, and mount sublime!

I was constrain’d to quit you. Was it right,

While my unnumber’d brethren toil’d and bled,

That I should dream away the entrusted hours

On rose-leaf beds, pampering the coward heart

With feelings all too delicate for use?

Sweet is the tear that from some Howard’s eye

Drops on the cheeks of one he lifts from earth:

And he that works me good with unmoved face,

Does it but half: he chills me while he aids, —

My benefactor, not my brother man!

Yet even this, this cold beneficence

Praise, praise it, O my Soul! oft as thou scann’st

The Sluggard Pity’s vision-weaving tribe!

Who sigh for wretchedness, yet shun the wretched,

Nursing in some delicious solitude

Their slothful loves and dainty sympathies!

I therefore go, and join head, heart, and hand,

Active and firm, to fight the bloodless fight

Of Science, freedom, and the truth in Christ.

Yet oft when after honourable toil

Rests the tired mind, and waking loves to dream,

My spirit shall revisit thee, dear cot!

Thy jasmin and thy window-peeping rose,

And myrtles fearless of the mild sea-air.

And I shall sigh fond wishes — sweet abode!

Ah! had none greater! And that all had such!

It might be so, but, oh! it is not yet.

Speed it, O Father! Let thy Kingdom come.”

He drew his own character when he described that of Satyrane, the idolocast or breaker of idols, the name he went by among his friends and familiars.

“From his earliest youth,” says he, “Satyrane had derived his highest pleasures from the admiration of moral grandeur and intellectual energy; and during the whole of his life he had a greater and more heartfelt delight in the superiority of other men to himself than men in general derive from their belief of their own. His readiness to imagine a superiority where it did not exist, was for many years his predominant foible; his pain from the perception of inferiority in others whom he had heard spoken of with any respect, was unfeigned and involuntary, and perplexed him as a something which he did not comprehend. In the childlike simplicity of his nature he talked to all men as if they were his equals in knowledge and talents, and many whimsical anecdotes could be related connected with this habit; he was constantly scattering good seed on unreceiving soils. When he was at length compelled to see and acknowledge the true state of the morals and intellect of his contemporaries, his disappointment was severe, and his mind, always thoughtful, became pensive and sad: — for to love and sympathize with mankind was a necessity of his nature.”

He sought refuge from his own sensitive nature in abstruse meditations, and delighted most in those subjects requiring the full exercise of his intellectual powers, which never seemed fatigued — and in his early life never did sun shine on a more joyous being!

”There was a time when, though my path was rough,

This joy within me dallied with distress,

And all misfortunes were but as the stuff

Whence fancy made me dreams of happiness:

For hope grew round me, like the twining vine,

And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seem’d mine.

But now afflictions bow me down to earth

Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth,

But oh! each visitation

Suspends what nature gave me at my birth,

My shaping spirit of imagination.

For not to think of what I needs must feel,

But to be still and patient, all I can;

And haply by abstruse research to steal

From my own nature all the natural man —

This was my sole resource, my only plan:

Till that which suits a part infects the whole,

And now is almost grown the habit of my soul.”

It was indeed an inauspicious hour “when he changed his abode from the happy groves of Jesus’ College to Bristol.” But it was so ordained! He sought literature as a trade, — and became an author:

“whatever,” he would say, “I write, that alone which contains the truth will live, for truth only is permanent. The rest will deservedly perish.”

He wrote to supply the fountain which was to feed the fertilizing rills, — to develope the truth was that at which he aimed, and in which he hoped to find his reward.

On the 16th of September, 1798, he sailed from Great Yarmouth to

Hamburg, in company with Mr. Wordsworth and his sister in his way to

Germany, and now for the first time beheld “his native land” retiring

from him.

In a series of letters, published first in the “Friend,” afterwards in his “Biographia Literaria,” is to be found a description of his passage to Germany, and short tour through that country. His fellow passengers as described by him were a motley group, suffering from the usual effects of a rolling sea. One of them, who had caught the customary antidote to sympathy for suffering, to witness which is usually painful, began his mirth by not inaptly observing,

“That Momus might have discovered an easier way to see a man’s inside than by placing a window in his breast. He needed only to have taken a saltwater trip in a pacquet-boat.”

Coleridge thinks that a

“pacquet is far superior to a stage-coach, as a means of making men open out to each other. In the latter the uniformity of posture disposes to dozing, and the definiteness of the period at which the company will separate, makes each individual think of those ‘to’ whom he is going, rather than of those ‘with’ whom he is going. But at sea more curiosity is excited, if only on this account, that the pleasant or unpleasant qualities of your companions are of greater importance to you, from the uncertainty how long you may be obliged to house with them.”

On board was a party of Danes, who, from his appearance in a suit of black, insisted he was a “Docteur Teology.” To relieve himself of any further questioning on this head, he bowed assent “rather than be nothing.”

“Certes,” he says, “We were not of the Stoic school; for we drank, and talked, and sung altogether; and then we rose and danced on the deck a set of dances, which, in one sense of the word at least, were very intelligibly and appropriately entitled reels. The passengers who lay in the cabin below in all the agonies of sea-sickness, must have found our bacchanalian merriment

a tune Harsh and of dissonant mood for their complaint.