. '•Y,' ■■ ' : CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY THE WORDSWORTH COLLECTION D ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ r 5 il %4Mr£jk. **., n^ ih ' irw Ifu^-i}^ "^-] BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR. THE NATION'S BIRTH, and other National Poems. ESSAYS ./ESTHETICAL. i2mo,cloth 1.50 BRIEF ESSAYS AND BREVITIES. i2mo 1.50 SOME OF THE THOUGHTS OF JOSEPH JOUBERT. With a Biographical Notice. i6mo, tinted paper, cloth, FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE. 1 vol., i2mo 1.50 LIFE AND WORKS OF GOETHE. An Essay. i2mo, THE MAID OF ORLEANS. An Historical Tragedy... 1.50 LEE AND SHEPARD, Publishers, Boston. COLERIDGE, SHELLEY, GOETHE. BIOGRAPHIC ESTHETIC STUDIES. BY GEORGE H. CALVERT. BOSTON: LEE AND SHEPARD, PUBLISHERS. NEW YORK: CHARLES T. DILLINGHAM. Copyright, 1880, By GEORGE H. CALVERT. W / l*i RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE: STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. |RMC| CONTENTS. PAGE Coleridge . . . . . . . fI Shelley I2g Goethe * 2 -g TO COLERIDGE. Coleridge, for many a studious year I have been Thy thankful mate ; climbing the misty heights Of speculation, or when — the delights Of great imagination's realm serene Blessing me through th' impassioned visions seen By ravished genius — thou hast shown me sights, Revealed to mighty Poets with the lights Struck by creative frenzy; visions clean, That mind in purgatorial surges dip, And we come freshened forth, so purified, That ever anew thy rich companionship I court, to warm me at a holy fire, And be with deep soul-logic stoutly plied, Or trance-ensteeped by thy melodious lyre. COLERIDGE. I. Whoever would write becomingly about Coleridge must admire him, and admire him with earnest thankfulness. Sympathy, — so essential to the biographer, aye, and to the full critic, — even a several-sided sympathy, were not enough. " The warmth of admiration will enkindle to its tenderest Our charity, and admiration and charity, with their united glow, will dissolve into vapor any thoughts on the weaknesses and failures of this remarkable man ; so that, if we think of them at all, we think of them only with a plaintive murmur, because through them we have been bereft of some of the harvest we had a right to expect from the healthful growth of such di- verse and peerless powers. And even mild- est murmur will be hushed, through sympathy with the sufferings his weaknesses caused to 12 COLERIDGE. the author and man, our splendent gracious benefactor. Were there left of Coleridge nothing but Kubla Khan, from this gem one might almost reconstruct, in full brightness, its great au- thor's poetic work, just as the expert zoologist reconstructs the extinct megatherium from a single fossil bone. Of this masterpiece, the chief beauty is not the noted music of the ver- sification, but the range and quality of the im- aginings embodied in this music. Were there in these no unearthly breathings, no mysteri- ous grandeur, the verse could not have been made to pulsate so rhythmically. The essence of the melody is in the fineriess of the concep- tion, in the poetic imaginations. In this case, as in all cases, the spirit not only controls but creates the body. Metrical talent must be there to handle the molten words as they flow from the furnace of genius, shaping and placing them while still swollen with genial warmth. Genius, the master, cannot do without talent, the servant. " Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean : " COLERIDGE. 1 3 To present of a sudden to the mind a signal thought, which springs unexpectedly but ap- propriately out of another, the meeting of the two striking a light that flashes a new and brilliant ray upon the attention, — to do this is to perform a high poetic feat. The sacred river running through wood "and dale, then gliding into the earth through caverns meas- ureless to man, to sink " in tumult to a lifeless ocean : " this mysterious picture sets the mind a brooding, awakens its poetic sensibility. Suppose the passage had stopped here. Re- galed by such a fresh, impressive presentation, the mind would have grasped it as an inward boon, to be held tightly hold of by the suscep- tible reader, awakening in him, through quick affinities, thoughts of human fate and woe. But the passage does not stop here ; in the poet's mind, as in the capable reader's, are generated associations with human destiny : and so, instead of a full stop at " ocean," there is only a colon, the poet's thought springing forward into the two wonderful lines, — " And mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war." And the passage, instead of leaving on the reader an impression of calm, strange beauty, 14 COLERIDGE. kindles into a startling splendor. The phys- ical tumult passes into human tumult ; the vague, hoarse swell of a torrent grows articu- late, the " caverns measureless to man " deepen into the abode of former kings, who, from the subterranean darkness to which their warrior- ambition has doomed them, throw upon the ear of their Sardanapalean descendant doleful, menacing predictions. All this, and more, is in those two lines, so laden with meaning and music, whereby the physical picture is magni- fied, deepened, vivified, through psychical par- ticipation. The poetical is ever an appeal to the deepest in the human mind, and a great burst of poetic light like this lays bare, for the imagination to roam in, a vast indefinite do- main. In another part of the short poem is a sim- ilar sudden heightening of effect by the intro- duction of humanity into a scene of purely terrene features : " But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover ! A savage place ! as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted " These lines could have been written only by a poet with the finest ear, an internal ear. When COLERIDGE. 1 5 we come to the last word of the fourth line, we pass into a higher region : " haunted ! " Haunted by what ? " By woman wailing for her demon lover." On this single line is stamped the power of a great poet ; that is, a poet in whom breadth and depth of intellectual and sympathetic en- dowment give to the refining aspiring poetic faculty material to work upon drawn from the grander, subtler, remoter resources of the hu- man soul, — material beyond the reach of any but poets of the first order, whose right, in- deed, to a place in this order rests upon their power of higher spiritual reach united to wider intellectual range. How much is involved in this short passage ! A landscape gift, to present in two lines a clear picture of the " savage place ; " then, by a leap of the poet's imagination, the scene is overhung by an earthly atmosphere that makes it so holy and enchanted that (and here the poet takes the final great leap) it is fit, " under a waning moon," to be haunted " By woman wailing for her demon lover." That is a poetically imaginative leap of the boldest and most beautiful. What an ethereal 1 6 COLERIDGE. springiness, what an intellectual swing, in the mind that could make such a leap ! That par- ticular one Coleridge's friend Wordsworth could not have made, strong as he was in poetic imagination. It implies almost some- thing spectral, superearthly, something uncan- ny. And what an exquisitely musical rhythm the thought weaves about itself for its poetic incarnation. Kubla Khan is a fragment, just as is a much longer, and his greatest, poem, Christabel. In the autumn of 1797 Coleridge, then in poor health, had retired to a lonely farmhouse on the confines of Somerset and Devonshire. One day, from the effect of an anodyne, pre- scribed to him, he fell asleep in his chair while reading in Purchases Pilgrimage a passage like this : " Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden there- unto ; and thus ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed with a wall." He slept about three hours. When he awoke he seemed to have composed two or three hundred lines de- scribing what, in this sleep of the outward senses, he had inwardly seen and heard. So vivid was his recollection that immediately on awaking he seized a pen and began to write as COLERIDGE. 1 7 one would when dictated to. . In the midst of his writing he was called out on business. And he went out ! Suppose a great states- man and orator, in , the full swing of a grave momentous speech before a public assembly, to be suddenly interrupted and asked to listen to a young lady's dream ! Not more imperti- nent were this than the interruption of Cole- ridge by a call of outward business. Nay, it were so much the less impertinent as the po- etic dreams of . Coleridge were more freighted with wisdom and enduring thought than any statesman's oration. To permit himself to be arrested in an immortal flight, as was this of Kubla Khan ! to lay down his pen and go out to talk to some intruder, from a small neigh- boring town, about a prosaic, insignificant, transitory, delusive matter of fact ! And he who was a bungler at these every-day opacities, and was an expert at translucent ideals. The business of Coleridge was to dream poetic dreams, not to act. So grand and new and beautiful and significant were his dreams that, like works of Art, they become stimulative and generative of high thoughts in others. In Coleridge there was so deep an inwardness that, when abstracted from the outer world, 1 8 COLERIDGE. whether in a trance-like sleep, as when he pro- duced Kubla Khan, or in exalted soliloquy, there poured forth, from large sources of sen- sibility and reason, streams of richly-worded invention, floods of imaginative thought. When, after a detention of an hour, he came back and resumed his pe'n, the vision had faded. And so, Kubla Khan, like other of Coleridge's work, is a brilliant fragment. Kubla Khan is likewise typical of Cole- ridge's poetry in that it is more spiritual than passionate. Coleridge, while, as poet, appeal- ing to and touching the feelings, was not a man of fervent predominant desires. His sensibilities — as sound as they were delicate — were not fortified by depth and warmth of passion : he was more tender than impas- sioned. In its shining superexcellence the poetical looks extravagant and visionary, in its prepo- tency it seems preposterous. And this for the same reason why, with our earthly eyes, we cannot see any of the millions of spiritual creatures that " walk the earth both when we wake and when we sleep ; " our vision is not enough spiritualized. The best function of the poetical' is to ascend to the interior spiritual COLERIDGE. 1 9 source ; and to follow it thither is not easy. The poetical is a divine flame, in whose trans- figuring light the concrete grossness of earthly- realities being fused, the causative law of their being becomes discernible. When in the Ser- mon on the Mount we are enjoined to " love your enemies, bless those that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despite^ully use you and persecute you, that you may be the children of your Father which is in heaven," we listen in despair, all this so transcends our conceptions. These in- junctions are a poetic ideal reached by the ut- terer of them through the sublime spirituality of his nature. Dwelling habitually on <;his up- per plane, he was enabled to seize the higher possibilities of humanity. Like the Beatitudes and the rest of this transcendent Sermon, these injunctions are the poetry of the moral sense. To the sensuous, and still more to the sensual, ear they sound impracticable, Utopian. They are a voice from the supreme altitudes, proclaiming to what elevations we are capable of mounting. In the Ancient Mariner, the hero of that great poem, after shooting the Albatross, ex claims, 20 COLERIDGE. " And I had done a hellish thing, And it would work 'em woe : For all averred, I had killed the bird That made the breeze to blow. Ah, wretch ! said they, the bird to slay, That made the breeze to blow ! " In thus reproaching him who had slain the Albatross, the crew obeyed a movement — by no means confined to superstitious sailors — of human shortsightedness, whereby men would fain force the moral law to square with their temporary desires. When the crew per- ceived that the breeze did not cease, and that the fog had disappeared, " Then all averred, I had killed the bird That brought the fog and mist. 'T was right, said they, such birds to slay, That bring the fog and mist. The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, The furrow followed free ; We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea." Thus they sped until they reached the Line. Then the breeze suddenly ceased to blow. In a copper sky the Sun at noon stood right above the perpendicular mast. In the air was no breath; the vessel, without motion, as if pinned to the spot, was COLERIDGE. 2 1 " As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean." And now the water gave out : " Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink." Their lips were baked, their tongues withered at the root. Upon the Ancient Mariner evil looks were turned : " Ah ! well-a-day ! what evil looks Had I from old and young ! Instead of the cross, the Albatross About my neck was hung." A sail ! a sail ! Hope flattered their sink- ing souls. But strange ! as the ship descried passes between them and the setting sun the face of the sun is crossed as with bars. The sail was but the skeleton-phantom of a ship. She came along side ! On the deck are two figures, Death and a woman (a harlot, symbol of death in life), playing at dice : " The game is done ! I 've won ! I 've won ! Quoth she, and whistles thrice." She had won the Ancient Mariner, but the crew is doomed. To give life to these fantastical imaginations • is needed a poet's and a thinker's thought, and 22 COLERIDGE. to give to the poet's thought depth and signifi- cance is needed spirituality, with a strong sense of moral sovereignty. What is more flat and unprofitable than to hear a prosaic man tell his dreams ? That tales to which vivacity is im- parted by poetic imaginativeness are neverthe- less shallow and unattractive when wanting a moral background, is learnt when one attempts to reread the prose tales of Poe. Behind their fantasy are no depths ; their ingenuity is bar- ren; there is no issue out of their horrors. They lack what, notwithstanding their spec- tral quality, Hawthorne's tales have, humanity. The Ancient Mariner is steeped in human- ity. And then, to these visionary inventions a charm is imparted by their inward truth. For, besides that the visions have their birth in feel- ing, in a gifted being like Coleridge his super- natural would be true to nature, because hav- ing in himself, like every other human creature, both the supernatural and the natural, — being bound alike to heaven and to earth, — his per- ceptions and his imaginations are illuminated by the revealing light both of reason and of genius. This light it is which, casting such exquisite shadows, makes the Ancient Mariner to sparkle COLERIDGE. 2 J with irresistible fascination. The fearful pen- alty which follows an act so thoughtless, seem- ingly indifferent, comparatively innocent, as that of shooting an albatross, might be called the poetry of retribution. It is an ascension to the superior spiritual source, an ascension which the poet, through the elevation of his nature, is empowered to achieve, and which his aesthetic gifts enabled him to present in a captivating garb. The story of the Ancient Mariner and the crew implicated in his act is a voice from the supreme heights, which, ut- tered through a gifted poet, comes accompa- nied by weird, musical, significant extrava- gances. Among the high qualities of the Ancient Mariner the highest is the symbolical meaning discernible on the brightest pages, peering through a supersensual radiance, giving in- tenseness to sparkles of poetry. Everywhere the intellectual vivacity is unflagging, and the whole is quickened by a profound moral which, though not obtruded, is uttered by the old sailor, who ends his strange tale with th*.se deep, tuneful words : " Farewell ! farewell ! but this I tell To thee, thou Wedding guest ! 24 COLERIDGE. He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast. " He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small ; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all." The same sound, beautiful moral shines through as through Wordsworth's Hart-leap Well: " One lesson, Shepherd, let us two divide, Taught by what Nature shows, and what conceals ; Never to blend our pleasure or our pride With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels." Coleridge was one of the most original of men ; that is, in his mind there was a light so individual and strong that on human condi- tions and relations it cast fresh illumination ; and thence, since he wrote and talked, the problems of life are less enigmatical, its spirit- ual capabilities more apparent, its hopes more assured and more elevated. Like some other men of his high order Coleridge was too origi- nal to be at once appreciated. To men of rou- tine there is offensiveness in originality. Some people have an honest difficulty in appreciating and appropriating fresh thought. Some, when they have the culture and insight to discern COLERIDGE. 2$ new power, have not the frankness to speak out; and the taking of a pen in one's hand, far from always bracing one's moral respon- sibility, often relaxes it, through the tempta- tion offered by the pen to blacken a rival, or to lame a fresh competitor who looks formi- dable. From honest ignorance and dishonest de- traction Coleridge, like his friend Wordsworth, had, from the very originality of his genius and the superiority of his gifts, to suffer more than most new candidates for literary honors. In the short preface to Christabel he thus, in his gentle way, refers to one of the charges brought against him by some of that class of writers called critics, but who often deserve not the high name ; for, etymologically, critic implies competency to judge. Coleridge says : "There is amongst us a set of critics who seem to hold that every possible thought or image is traditional ; who have no notion that there are such things as fountains in the world, small as well as great; and would therefore charitably derive every rill they see flowing from a perforation made in some other man's tank." Against the Ancient Mariner and Christabel 26 COLERIDGE. hostile criticism was as powerless as a snow- storm would be to quench Hecla in full erup- tion, or earth-fogs permanently to obscure the stars. As in the Ancient Mariner, so in Christabel, excellence is aimed at by " interesting the af- fections through the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real." In both the chief originality consists, not in the supernatu- ral frame in which the tales are set, — an in- vention supplied by mere fancy, — but in the quality of the poetic imagination displayed in the management of the story and in particular conjunctions. Were the whole six hundred lines of Christabel (for unhappily there are no more) in their general quality unelastic, un- imaginative, instead of being, as they are, buoy- ant and sparkling, every page vivid with intel- lectual activity, musical with poetic feeling, "still one would be repaid for the reading of every paragraph, in order not to miss just these two lines which conclude the exquisite descrip- tion of the Lady Christabel praying by moon- light under the old oak tree : " And both blue eyes more bright than clear. Each about to have a tear." COLERIDGE. 27 Coleridge had his share of earthly affliction, — more than his share, we might say, had not much of his distress been of his own making. But whatever his burthens, they were counter- weighed by the joy of harboring within him- self, and projecting upon others, such thoughts. How blessed the brain in whose inlets nestled a perfumed gem like this : " Quoth Christabel, — so let it be : And as the lady bade did she. Her gentle limbs did she undress, And lay down in her loveliness." All three of these poems, Christabel, the Ancient Mariner, and Kubla Khan, were writ- ten when Coleridge was in his twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth year. In each of them are beau- ties which so move our admiration they give us thrills which deeply touch and teach the soul. What was the individuality whence issued such superlative products ? As easily can light- ning be tracked to its lair as genius : both have their birth in a fiery creative centre, too vivid with heat and light to be penetrated or ap- proached. But the conditions under which they flash into exhibition can be studied, and of the medium through which the revelation is made something may be learnt. II. The father of Coleridge was simple-minded, learned, eccentric. At the age of sixteen he quitted the house of 'his impoverished parents, receiving a blessing and the half of his father's last crown. He had walked but a few miles when, overcome by thoughts of his destitution, he sat down by the roadside and wept aloud. A gentleman happening to pass by recognized the son of his neighbor, took him home, and sent him to school. Here he was a hard stu- dent, married at nineteen, shortly after his marriage entered Sidney College, Cambridge, distinguished himself there in Hebrew and mathematics, and, had he not been married, would have been rewarded with a fellowship. On leaving college he became a teacher in Southampton, was afterwards appointed head- master of the school at Ottery St. Mary, Dev- onshire, and obtained the living of the parish. His son, the poet, thus speaks of him : " My father was a good mathematician, and well versed in the Greek, Latin, "and Hebrew Ian- COLERIDGE. 29 guages. He published, or rather attempted to publish, several works. He made the world his confidant with respect to his learning and ingenuity, and the world seems to have kept the secret very faithfully. His various works, unthumbed, uncut, were preserved free from all pollution in the family archives. This piece of good luck promises to be hereditary ; for all my compositions have the same amiable home- staying propensity. The truth is, my father was not a first-rate genius ; he was, however, a first-rate Christian, which is much better. In learning, goodheartedness, absentness of mind, and excessive ignorance of the world, he was a perfect Parson Adams." The poet's mother, Anna Bowdon, was the second wife of the vicar. Of their ten chil- dren, nine sons and one daughter, Samuel Tay- lor, born October 21, 1772, was the youngest. The mother was an admirable economist and manager. She managed so well that she got her sons started in professional careers, in the army, the church, the navy. The unambitious vicar was willing that they should be brought up to trades, except the youngest, Samuel Taylor, the child of his latter years, who, he resolved, should be a parson. Several of the 30 COLERIDGE. poet's brothers died young, and his only sister, Anne, at twenty-one. Her he has immortal- ized in two lines : " Rest, gentle Shade, and wait thy Maker's will ; Then rise unchanged, and be an angel still ! " Circumstances, literally what stands around a man, Being the offspring of general human activity, react upon individual human beings with irresistible effect. Men and circumstances, being of one blood, are indissolubly interwoven for weal or woe. Men make circumstances, and circumstances mold men. Even the most original natures, natures of such deep prolific power of soul that their mission is to generate new circumstances, whereby to lift human life to higher levels, even they cannot escape the pressure of present conditions. One of these generative minds was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a mind of such inward vital- ity that it poured fresh streams into the accu- mulated reservoirs of human thought. The mental movement which at its noon has the exceptional liveliness and momentum to gen- erate new circumstances is apt in its morning to break from routine into a path of its own making. COLERIDGE. 3 1 That in his early surroundings Coleridge was not so favored as his friend Wordsworth is apparent from the subjoined account by himself of his childhood from his fourth to his ninth year. Wordsworth, to be sure, with his decision and will, would have so reacted upon such surroundings as to have modified or even changed them.' For, of those who have in them the inborn force to make new circum- stances it is the privilege (when they have the will and the self-control of a Wordsworth) to resist and in some measure to baffle exist- ing ones. Coleridge was more passive, more practically helpless than his illustrious friend. This passage, so valuable as biography, is worth something as premonition. But parents and teachers are irremediably incapable of discerning, in the wayward sensitive boy an exceptional poetic genius, who ought to have exceptional treatment. Seldom does autobiog- raphy furnish a page so lively and instructive. * From October, 1775, to October, 1778. These three years I continued at the reading school, because I was too little to be trusted among my father's school-boys My fa- ther was very fond of me, and I was my mother's darling ; in consequence whereof I 32 COLERIDGE. was very miserable. For Molly, who had nursed my brother Francis [next above Sam- uel Taylor in age], and was immoderately fond of him, hated me because my mother took more notice of me than of Frank ; and Frank hated me because my mother gave me now and then a bit of cake when he had none, — quite forgetting that for one bit of cake which I had and he had not, he had twenty sops in the pan, and pieces of bread and butter with sugar on them, from Molly, from whom I re- ceived only thumps and ill names. " So I became fretful, and timorous, and a tell-tale ; and the school-boys drove me from play, and were always tormenting me. And hence I took no pleasure in boyish sports, but read incessantly. I read through all gilt-cover little books that could be had at that time, and likewise all the uncovered tales of Tom Hick- athrift, Jack the Giant-Killer, and the like. And 1 used to lie by the wall, and mope ; and my spirits used to come upon me suddenly, and in a flood ; and then I was accustomed to run up and down the churchyard, and act over again all I had been reading on the docks, the nettles, and the rank grass. At six years of age I remember to have read Belisarius, Rob- COLERIDGE. 33 inson Crusoe, and Philip Quarles ; and then I found the Arabian Nights' Entertainments , one tale of which (the tale of a man who was com- pelled to seek for a pure virgin) made so deep an impression on me, (I had read it in the evening while my mother was at her needle) that I was haunted by spectres whenever I was in the dark : and I distinctly recollect the anxious and fearful eagerness with which J used to watch the window where the book lay, and when the sun came upon it I would seize it, carry it by the wall, and bask and read. My father found out the effect which these books had produced, and burned them. "So I became a dreamer, and acquired an indisposition to all bodily activity ; and I was fretful, and inordinately passionate ; and as I could not play at anything, and was slothful, I was despised and hated by the boys : and because I could read and spell, and had, I may truly say, a memory and understanding forced into almost unnatural ripeness, I was flattered and wondered at by all the old women. And so I became very vain, and despised most of the boys that were at all near my own age, and before I was eight years old I was a char- acter. Sensibility, imagination, vanity, sloth, 3 34 COLERIDGE. and feelings of deep and bitter contempt for almost all who traversed the orbit of my un- derstanding, were even then prominent and manifest. " From October, 1778, to 1779. That which I began to be from three to six, I continued to be from six to nine. In this year I was ad- mitted into the Grammar School, and soon outstripped all of my age." Here is another relation of similar interest. Very rare are such autobiographic notes on the childhood of poets. How near were Chris- tabel and the Ancient Mariner being sacrificed to that tender sensitiveness, that delicacy of cerebral fibre, out of which they grew ! " I had asked my mother one evening to cut my cheese entire, so that I might toast it. This was no easy matter, it being a crumbly cheese. My mother however did it. I went into the garden for something or other, and in the mean time my brother Frank minced my cheese, to ' disappoint the favorite.' I re- turned, saw the exploit, and in an agony of passion flew at Frank. He pretended to have been seriously hurt by my blow, flung himself on the ground, and there lay with outstretched limbs. I hung over him mourninsr and in a COLERIDGE. 35 great fright ; he leaped up, and with a horse- laugh gave me a severe blow in the face. I seized a knife, and was running at him, when my mother came in and took me by the arm. I expected a flogging, and, struggling from her, I ran away to a little hill or slope, at the bottom of which the Otter flows, about a mile from Ottery. There I stayed, my rage died away, but my obstinacy vanquished my fears, and taking out a shilling book, which had at the end morning and evening prayers, I very devoutly repeated them — thinking at the same time with a gloomy inward satisfaction — how miserable my mother must be ! I dis- tinctly remember my feelings, when I saw a Mr. Vaughan pass over the bridge at abaut a furlong's distance, and how I watched the calves in the fields beyond the river. It grew dark, and I fell asleep. It was towards the end of October, and it proved a stormy night. I felt the cold in my sleep, and dreamed that I was pulling the blanket over me, and actually pulled over me a dry thorn-bush which lay on the ground near me. In my sleep I had rolled from the top of the hill till within three yards of the 'river, which flowed by the unfenced edge of the bottom. I awoke several times, 36 COLERIDGE. and finding myself wet, and cold, and stiff, closed my eyes again that I might forget it. " In the mean time my mother waited about half an hour, expecting my return when the sulks had evaporated. I not returning, she sent into the churchyard, and round the town. Not found ! Several men and all the boys were sent out to ramble about and seek me. In vain ! My mother was almost distracted ; and at ten o'clock at night I was cried by the crier in Ottery, and in two villages near it, with a reward offered for me. No one went to bed ; indeed, I believe half the town were up all the night. To return to myself. About five in the morning, or a little after, I was broad awake, and attempted to get up and walk ; but I could not move. I saw the shepherds and workmen at a distance, and cried, but so faintly, that it was impossible to hear me thirty yards off. And there I might have lain and died ; for I was now almost given over, the ponds and even the river, near which I was lying, having been dragged. But provi- dentially Sir Stafford Northcote, who had been out all night, resolved to make one other trial, and came so near that he heard me cry- ing. He carried me in his arms for nearly a COLERIDGE. . 37 quarter of a mile, when we met my father and Sir Stafford Northcote's servants. I remem- ber, and never shall forget, my father's face as he looked upon me while I lay in the servant's arms — so calm, and the tears stealing down his face ; for I was the child of his old age. My mother, as you may suppose, was outrage- ous with joy. Meantime in rushed a young lady, crying out, ' I hope you '11 whip him, Mrs. Coleridge.' This woman still lives at Ottery ; and neither philosophy nor religion has been able to conquer the antipathy which I feel towards her, whenever I see her. I was put to bed, and recovered in a day or so. But I was certainly injured ; for I was weakly and subject to ague for many years after." One can see the worthy, tender-souled vicar, tears of joy stealing down his face. A terri- ble blow to him would have been the death of his dear little boy in that way, and a calamity to all whose language is English would have been the cutting short of a life so laden with literary genius. I beg to add to that of Cole- ridge my detestation — a by no means un- philosophical or irreligious feeling — of the "young lady " with the ready whip. This was a hundred years ago in custom-ridden Eng- 38 COLERIDGE. land. To our shame in America the rod is still legal in some of our public schools. Colts and cubs are trained and taught more effi- ciently through love than through fear. What then must be the diabolism of the rod applied to the young immortals of human kind ? This excellent man, John Coleridge, vicar of Ottery St. Mary, and head-master of the King's school,- died when his son, Samuel Tay- lor, was in his ninth year. Connected with his death are two incidents, curious enough to be retold. On his return from Plymouth (whither he had been to start his son Fran- cis for India as midshipman under Admiral Graves), arriving late in the afternoon at Exe- ter, some friends kindly pressed him to stay all night. He declined because, although, as he said, not superstitious, he had a dream the' night before that Death had appeared to him and touched him with his dart. When he reached home the family were up to receive him, all except the youngest, Samuel Taylor, who was asleep in bed. The vicar was in fine spirits and apparently in good health, and told his wife his dream of the night before. On going to bed he complained of a pain in the bowels, to which he was subject. She gave COLERIDGE. 39 him some peppermint ; he lay down again, say- ing he was better. In a few moments his wife heard a noise in his throat, and spoke to him ; but he made no answer. Again she spoke, and again, without answer. Her shriek awoke little Samuel, who cried out, " Papa is dead ! " Thirty years afterwards Coleridge, referring to the death of his father, exclaimed : " Oh ! that I might so pass away, if, like him, I were an Israelite without guile ! The image of my father, my revered, kind, learned, simple-hearted father, is a religion to me." The death of his father made an important change in the schooling of Coleridge. Judge Buller, a friend and former pupil of the vicar, obtained for his son, Samuel Taylor, admission into Christ's Hospital, the celebrated blue-coat free school of London. Coleridge was about ten years of age when he went to London. Before entering Christ's Hospital he spent two months with his uncle, Mr. Bowdon. This visit is thus- described by himself : " Mr. Bow- don was generous as the air, and a man of very considerable talents, but he was fond, as others have been, of his bottle. He received me with great affection, and I stayed ten weeks at his house, during which I went occasionally 40 COLERIDGE. to Judge Buller's. My uncle was very proud of me, and used to carry me from coffee-house to coffee-house, and tavern to tavern, where' I drank, and talked, and disputed, as if I had been a man. Nothing was more common than for a large party to exclaim in my hearing, that I was a prodigy, and so forth ; so that while I remained at my uncle's I was most completely spoilt and pampered, both mind and body." Within the walls of Christ's Hospital were then lodged seven hundred boys, one third of them, like Coleridge, the sons of clergymen. For boys, hardly less than for girls, a daily, hourly need is woman's care and affection. Of human life love is the very sun, that warms and swells it into bloom. For the opening feelings and faculties of childhood love does what solar rays do for the sprouting plant, that would wither and die without their down- streaming parental glow. By removal from the maternal fireside Coleridge was not en- tirely cut off from womanly tenderness. The numerous school was divided into twelve dor- mitories with a matron for each. Then there was, in those days, the head-master's wife, a woman with a heart large enough to be a motherly friend of all the boys. A grateful COLERIDGE. 4 1 memory of her Coleridge carried into his latest years ; only a short time before his death he thus spoke of her : " No tongue can express good Mrs. Bowyer. Val le Grice and I were once going to be flogged for some domestic misdeed, and Bowyer was thunder- ing away at us by way of prologue when Mrs. B. looked in and said, ' Flog them soundly, sir, I beg ! ' This saved us. Bowyer was so nettled at the interruption that he growled out, ' Away, woman, away ! ' and we were let off." Here is also a reminiscence, from the same page of the Table Talk, of Bowyer him- self. " The discipline at Christ's Hospital in my time was ultra-Spartan ; all domestic ties were to be put aside. ' Boy ! ' I remember Bowyer saying to me once when I was crying the first day of my return after the holidays, ' Boy ! the school is your father ; Boy ! the school is your mother ; Boy ! the school is your brother ; Boy ! the school is your sister ; the school is your first cousin, and your second cousin, and all the rest of your rela- tions ! Let 's have no more crying ! ' ' Nevertheless, Bowyer may be looked upon as one of the good fortunes of Coleridge's life. An admirable instructor, he was, what 42 COLERIDGE. is very rare in a professional pedagogue, a sound, penetrating critic, — a superiority of slight avail to the common run of boy-learners, but of profound service to one of uncommon literary capacity. Coleridge, among whose virtues was a cordial gratefulness, thus speaks of Bowyer in the Biographia Literaria : " At school (Christ's Hospital) I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time a very severe, mas- ter, the Reverend James Bowyer. He early molded my taste to the preference of Demos- thenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and again of Virgil to Ovid. He habituated me to compare Lucretius (in such extracts as I then read), 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 the ground 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 Shake- speare and Milton as lessons : and they were the lessons, too, which required most time and COLERIDGE. 43 trouble to bring up, so as to escape his cen- sure. 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 synonyms 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 composition (at least for the last three years of our school educa- tion), he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been con- veyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words. Lute, harp, and lyre, Muse, Muses, and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus, and Hippo- crene, were all an abomination to him." In his boyhood Coleridge was a gluttonous devourer of books, for thus may be translated 44 COLERIDGE. the phrase he applies to himself, helluo libro- rum. It was a diseased, omnivorous appetite. A characteristic incident opened the way for its boundless indulgence. Walking one day in the Strand with eyes half closed, the better to give play to his inward senses, he imagined himself Leander swimming the • Hellespont, and making the motions to correspond, one of his little hands came in contact with the coat pocket of a gentleman, who, turning quickly, charged him with a design of pocket-picking, but, looking into his ingenuous face, accepted at once his denial, and, engaging him in talk, was so struck with his knowledge and intelli- gence that he made him free of a circulating library in King Street, Cheapside. Here he was entitled to two volumes a day, and would steal out. to get them. Then, crumpling him- self up into a sunny corner, he would read, read, read! "Conceive," he says, "what I must have been at fourteen." At fifteen " I had bewildered myself in metaphysics and in theologic controversy." So immersed and fas- cinated was he that nothing else pleased him. History and particular facts lost all interest to his mind. Poetry, and even novels and ro- mances, became insipid. In his wanderings COLERIDGE. 45 on leave-days, his greatest delight was to get into conversation with any passer, especially if he were dressed in black, for he soon di- rected the talk to his favorite subjects, " Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, And found no end, in wandering mazes lost." In after years Coleridge deplored the effects of getting absorbed into these abstruse argu- ments, which, he says, " exercise the strength and subtlety of the , understanding without awakening the feelings of the heart." From this unwholesome pursuit he was withdrawn, partly by the accidental introduction to an amiable family, but chiefly by the poetry of Bowles, the tenderness and naturalness of which were well fitted to attract and influence , at that time a precocious, genial boy. From want of direction what waste of a great mind's resources in its early overflow ! In the budding season genius needs sympa- thetic guidance, tender supervision ; but where, in our actual organization, is to be had the in- sight and the sympathy ? These are at pres- ent little available for this fine function. As schools go, a Coleridge was in rare luck to 46 COLERIDGE. have fallen into the hands of a genuine critic like Bowyer. To have founded at Christ's Hospital such a friendship as that with Charles Lamb was another piece of good fortune. In his reminiscences of these school-days Lamb exclaims : — " Come back into memory, like as thou wast in the day-spring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee, — the dark pillar not yet turned — Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Logician, Metaphysician, Bard ! How have I seen the casual passer through the cloister stand still, intranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the young Mirandola) to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Iamblichus, or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxed not pale at such philosophic draughts), or re- citing Homer in his Greek, or Pindar, — while the walls of the old Grey Friars reechoed to the accents of the inspired charity boy!" By his scholarship and acquirement at Christ's Hospital, during his long abode there of eight years, Coleridge earned an appoint- ment, by the head-master, to Cambridge. He was eighteen years of age when he entered COLERIDGE. 47 Jesus College. In the summer of 1791, only a few months after his entrance, he gained the gold medal for the Greek Ode. But at Cam- bridge, as at Christ's Hospital, he was a vo- racious reader of miscellaneous books rather than a close student of the college course. Mathematics were neglected. He took little exercise. His delight was to talk, and this, from his school-days to the last year of his life, was his chief daily enjoyment. Taking into account the range of his knowl- edge and of his sympathies, his flow of fittest words and sure memory, the poetic light aglow within him, which gave a captivating luminous- ness to all the currents of his affluent mind, together with the innate logical exaction that kept these currents within their proper banks, and recalling the joyful facility he always had in the oral pouring forth of his rich accumula- tions, and not less rich postulations, it may be believed that Coleridge was the most eloquent and eminent and instructive talker told of in literature. This gift was a magnet that at Cambridge drew such of his fellow-students as had enough in them to enjoy good talk, and made the room of Coleridge ( " the ground-floor room on the 48 COLERIDGE. right hand of the staircase facing the great gate") a constant rendezvous, says one of the frequenters. Those were angry times. By the heat of the French Revolution, then at boiling point, were fast engendered passionate pamphlets. Ever and anon came one from Burke. There was no need, says this reporter, to have the book present : Coleridge had read it in the morning, and could repeat whole pages in the evening verbatim. The talk and studies had a strange inter- ruption. In the autumn of 1793, from de- spondency on account of some debts, aggra- vated, it is believed, by a love-affair, Coleridge suddenly left Cambridge for London. The few shillings in his pocket were soon spent, and, attracted by a recruiting-advertisement, he en- listed as a private in the Fifteenth Regiment of Light Dragoons. This extraordinary step — a leap in the dark downwards — should not be hastily im- puted to the eccentricity of genius. Genius, as the originator, the initiator, in human af- fairs, is eccentric, flashing into new paths, into fresh domains, hereby giving proof of its superiority through its eccentricity. To be sure, it is liable to minor exhibitions, which COLERIDGE. 49 are neither tokens of its worth nor useful to mankind. But this sudden move on the part of Coleridge was due to a kind of lawlessness caused by want of strength to tighten the cords that control that helm of man's life, a prac- tical, resolute will. It came from the man, not from the poet. This kind of eccentricity- Wordsworth never would have given in to, nor Shelley, nor Byron, nor Keats, nor Milton, nor Shakespeare. Of a more passive nature than any of these, his great compeers, was Cole- ridge, with less faculty of self-direction. Poets are, of course, and according to the degree of their creative force, more liable than other men to impulsions from within ; but such pro- jection is on planes of thought, not on planes of action, and in Coleridge this poetic sensibil- ity was not accompanied by a strong enough sense of the import of outward movements in the daily prosaic world of roofs and meals un- der them. When asked his name by the enlisting of- ficer, Coleridge answered, Cumberback, a name, he says, his horse would have deemed most suitable, so little equestrian were his habits. To preserve his proper initials, to this he prefixed Silas Titus. For bad riding and 4 50 COLERIDGE. worse grooming he made amends in the troop by nursing the sick and writing letters for the well. He was a dragoon for four months. One day an officer found freshly written with pencil on the stable door : " Eheu ! quam in- fortunii miserrimum est fuisse felicem. ! " The writer was discovered to be Cumberback, whose condition the words suited so well. But the termination of his military career was brought about through his being recognized by an ac- quaintance on the street in Reading, where the regiment was stationed. Information being given to his family, he was, after some diffi- culty, discharged on the ioth of April, 1794. III. An eventful year was 1794 to Coleridge. He went back to the University, and in the summer-vacation started with a companion for a tour in Wales, stopping on the way in Ox- ford to see a friend. Here he met Robert Southey. The two genial young men took to each other warmly. The minds of both were buoyant with literary projects, alight with sunny hopes. Both were hungry for knowl- edge, eager to sharpen their minds on other minds ; both were aglow with refined aspira- tions. Only a keen-sighted observer could then, in their effervescent young manhood, have perceived how radically diverse were the mental structures of these two. The one was to be a versatile, contemporaneous, literary purveyor, the other was destined to rank among the world's profoundest thinkers, a man whose thinking will be precious to future ages ; the one a voluminous, clever versifier, the other a richly-gifted, exquisite poet. The comparatively shallow mind of the one could 52 COLERIDGE. impart little to the deep creative resources of the other. Nevertheless, through his prudent, methodical, industrious living, and through his generosity and affectionateness, the versatile litterateur Southey was enabled in after years to give shelter for some time to the family of the profound, original, thriftless Coleridge. Not the literary fruit it bore gave signifi- cance to the meeting with Southey, but its practical consequences to the life of Coleridge ; for it designated the ticket he took in the lot- tery of marriage. After his excursion into Wales he went to Bristol by appointment with Southey, who here introduced him to Lovell, a young Quaker, just married to Mary Fricker, through whom Coleridge got acquainted with Sarah, her elder sister, who shortly after be- came his wife, Southey marrying a third sis- ter, Edith. Under the aspiring impulse which has, at different periods, moved other young men to make an effort to emerge out of the injustices and artificialities and multiform egoisms of the actual, very imperfect, social organiza- tion, and create around them a healthier, less smothery, self-loaded atmosphere, these three friends formed a plan to found in America, on COLERIDGE. 53 the banks of the Susquehanna, a community one of whose predominant principles should be -the abolition of individual property. The project came to nothing: it was another pro- test against existing social relations, another sigh for emancipation from obstructive, debas- ing slaveries, the chains of which, being self- imposed, will some day be shattered. The possibilities of man, even in his earthly sphere, are almost infinite. From the customs, ways, conditions of Timbuctoo who could infer the conditions and institutions, political, legal, mor- al, social, aesthetical, of London or Paris or New York ? Out of human upreachings and* mental capabilities will be evolved social and industrial conditions to which those that the most advanced of Christendom now enjoy will seem as crude and insufficient as do to us those of Timbuctoo. And this will be achieved by cultivated aspiring thought, working under the sway of a sympathetic discoverer. In the beginning of September Coleridge quitted Bath, where Southey then was, and where the Fricker family lived, and went back for the last time to Cambridge. Here he pub- lished The Fall of Robespierre, in part written by Southey, a tragedy whose chief interest is 54 COLERIDGE. that it was the first poem published by Cole- ridge, whose genius was hardly more dramatic than that of his friend Wordsworth. More- over, the play was written in the very year of the overwhelming event it commemorates, an event so deeply active as to shake a poet's fac- ulties out of the moral calm which is a cardinal condition for poetic creativeness. Moreover, Coleridge's part, a third of the whole and about three hundred lines, was written in two days. On leaving the University, where he took no degree, Coleridge entered manhood vigor- ously and resolutely, devoting the spring and summer of 1795 to giving lectures in Bristol. The first six presented a comparative view of the Civil War under Charles I. and the French Revolution, their spirit vehemently hostile to the policy of Pitt, but at the same time anti- Jacobinical. Another course of six lectures followed on "Revealed Religion, its Corrup- tions and its Political Views," written in the Unitarian spirit. In his school-boy days of omnivorous reading Coleridge had coquetted with skepticism, which the stout Bowyer looked upon as a breach of the rules, demanding, not an appeal to the brain with argument, but an application of birch to a less noble part. In COLERIDGE. 55 his early manhood Coleridge preached occa- sionally in a Unitarian chapel in Taunton, and with such eloquence as to draw crowded au- diences. His Unitarianism lasted but a few years, and his relapse into Orthodoxy cost him the good will of Unitarians, they never recov- ering from the disappointment of having failed to secure, after hooking, this lively leviathan. Their spite they show by a studied deprecia- tion of Coleridge, which in people of so much culture cannot be wholly sincere, — a depre- ciation which is costly, inasmuch as it closes or dims to them the pages of one of the rich- est writers and largest thinkers of all the ages. On the 4th of October, 1795, Coleridge was married to Sarah Fricker. They went to re- side for a time at Clevedon on the Bristol Channel. This was not a well assorted union. Cole- ridge, with inordinate development of the rea- soning, emotional, and poetic mental elements, with deficiency of the determinative and the self-seeking impulses, needed in his life-partner the supplementary gifts of energy and will, to make out of two halves a prosperous conjugal whole. These gifts Mrs. Coleridge does not seem to have possessed in force enough to 56 COLERIDGE. counteract the practical inertness of her hus- band, to inspirit him under failures and dis- couragement. With a mind so far ranging, original, poetical, as was that of Coleridge, full sympathy was not to be looked for, nor was it necessary on the part of his wife ; but Mrs. Coleridge seems to have had none. In this re- spect his friend Wordsworth was far more fa- vored, not to speak of his noble sister, who was a second life-partner, and an especial men- tal helpmate. Nor was Wordsworth deficient where Coleridge was : he had a shrewd busi- ness talent. When, some years after Jeffrey's impotent attempt to crush Wordsworth as a poet, they first met, at a dinner-party in Lon- don, Jeffrey said that had he not been told who it was, he should have taken Wordsworth for a knowing man of the world. Three days after his marriage Coleridge, his mind brimming with happiness and hope, wrote from Clevedon to a friend, that from their cottage he had a variegated land and sea view. Those were Coleridge's few halcyon days. His lovely bride was within the cot- tage ; his young, earnest brain teemed with confident purposes. His plan then was to re- turn to Cambridge, finish " my great work on COLERIDGE. 57 Imitationes" and then issue a prospectus for a school. There was some project of a monthly magazine. But that, he says in the letter, he gives up as "a- thing of monthly anxiety and quotidian bustle." This was written on the 7th of October, 1795. And yet, in Decem- ber, only a few weeks later, he set zealous- ly about to establish a weekly journal to be called The Watchman. The design in estab- lishing The Watchman was set forth in its motto : that all might know the truth and that the truth might make us free. Not only so, but with a pocket full of flaming prospectuses, Coleridge sallied forth in his own person to get subscribers. In these years of his early manhood Coleridge was a Liberal (not a Rad- ical) in politics and a Unitarian in religion. The canvassing for the paper (think of the author of Christabel thus engaged ! ) he en- tered upon in Birmingham, and his first appeal was to a rigid Calvinist, a tallow-chandler, a tall, dingy man, with lank, dark, hard counte- nance. But he was a true lover of liberty, and had proved to the satisfaction of many that Mr. Pitt was one of the horns of the second Beast in The Revelation, that spake as a drag- on. After uttering some imperfect sentences 58 COLERIDGE. his introducer, a citizen of Birmingham, gave the cause into the hands of his principal. De- termined that no pains should be spared on his part, and that he would present his case ex- haustively, Coleridge commenced an harangue of half an hour, varying his notes through the whole gamut of eloquence "from the ratioci- native to the declamatory, and in the latter from the pathetic to the indignant. I argued, I described, I promised, I prophesied ; and be- ginning with the captivity of nations I ended with the near approach of the millennium, fin- ishing the whole with some of my own verses, describing the glorious state, out of Religious Musings." He thus concludes the humorous scene : " My taper man of lights listened with perseverant and praiseworthy patience, though, as I was afterwards told, on complain- ing of certain gales that were not altogether ambrosial, it was a melting day with him. ' And what, sir,' he said, after a short pause, ' might the cost be ? ' — ' Only four-pence/ — (Oh ! how I felt the anti-climax, the abys- mal, bathos of that four-pence !) — ' only four- pence, sir, each number, to be published on every eighth day.' — ' That comes to a deal of money at the end of a year. And how much COLERIDGE. 59 did you say there was to be for the money ? ' — ' Thirty-two pages, sir ! large octavo, closely printed.' — ' Thirty and two pages ? Bless me ! why, except what I does in a family way on the Sabbath, that's more than I ever reads, sir ! all the year round. I am as great a one, as any man in Brummagem, sir ! for liberty and truth and all them sort of things, but as to this, — no offense, I hope, sir, I must beg to be excused.' " Coleridge made but one more attempt in person to get subscribers, and that is described, in the tenth chapter of the Biographia Lite- raria, as amusingly as the first. At Birmingham he preached twice to im- mense audiences. In a letter to his friend Wade of Bristol he tells him : " My sermons (in great part extempore) were preciously pep- pered with politics. I have here at least double the number of subscribers I expected." Indeed, The Watchman might have been suc- cessful but for the procrastinating habits and the constitutional inertness, as to outward things, of Coleridge. Moreover, he was subject to fits of deep melancholy, during which he was like a man imprisoned who has no hope of liberty. 60 COLERIDGE. From Lichfield, towards the close of the canvassing tour, he wrote to Wade a letter concluding thus characteristically : " I verily believe no poor fellow's idea-pot ever bubbled up so vehemently with fears, doubts, and difficulties, as mine does at present. Heaven grant it may not boil over and put out the fire ! I am almost heartless. My past life seems to me like a dream, a feverish dream — all one gloomy huddle of strange actions, and dim-discovered motives ; friendships lost by indolence, and happiness murdered by mis- managed sensibility. The present hour I seem in a quick-set hedge of embarrassments. For shame ! I ought not to mistrust God ; but, indeed, to hope is far more difficult than to fear. Bulls have horns, lions have talons : " The fox and statesman subtle wiles ensure, The cit and polecat stink and are secure ; Toads with their venom, doctors with their drug, The priest and hedgehog in their robes are snug. Oh, Nature ! cruel stepmother and hard To thy poor naked, fenceless child, the bard ! No horns but those by luckless Hymen worn, And those, alas ! not Amalthaaa's horn ! 'With aching feelings and with aching pride, He bears the unbroken blast on every side ; Vampire booksellers drain him to the heart, And scorpion critics cflreless venom dart. " S. T. C." COLERIDGE. 6 1 At Lichfield he would make no effort to get subscribers, because he might thereby injure the sale of The Iris, " the editor of which," he writes, " a very amiable and ingenious young man of the name of James Montgomery, is now in prison for a libel on a bloody-minded magistrate there. Of course I declined pub- licly advertising or disposing of The Watchman in that town." On returning to Bristol Coleridge spent February in getting ready his first volume of poems. Mr. Cottle of Bristol had given him thirty guineas for the copyright. At the same time he was preparing the first number of The Watchman, to be issued on the ist of March. And his wife was ill. On the 22d of February, 1796, he writes to his friend Cottle a plaintive, despondent, touching letter, which opens thus : " It is my duty and busi- ness to thank God for all his dispensations, and to believe them the best possible ; but, in- deed, I think I should have been more thank- ful if he had made me a journeyman shoe- maker instead of an author by trade." After a few lines he continues : " I am forced to write for bread — write the flights of poetic enthusiasm, when every minute I am hearing 62 COLERIDGE. a groan from my wife ! Groans, and com- plaints, and sickness ! The present hour I ani in a quick-set hedge of embarrassment, and, whichever way I turn, a thorn runs into me ! The future is cloud and thick darkness. Pov- erty, perhaps, and the thin faces of them that want bread looking up to me ! Nor is this all. My happiest moments for composition are broken in upon by the reflection that I must make haste. ' I am too late.' ' I am already months behind.' ' I have received my pay be- forehand.' — O wayward and desultory spirit of Genius, ill canst thou brook a taskmaster ! The tenderest touch from the hand of obliga- tion wounds thee like a scourge of scorpi- ons ! " The letter concludes as follows : " If I have written petulantly, forgive me. God knows I am sore all over. God bless you ! and be- lieve me that, setting gratitude aside, I love and esteem you, and have your interest at heart full as much as my own." The Watchman mounted guard over the public welfare punctually on the ist of March. On its score Coleridge soon began to receive anonymous letters. One of these ran thus : "Sir, I detest your principles; your -prose I COLERIDGE. 63 think so so ; but your poetry is so beautiful that I take in your Watchman solely on ac- count of it. In justice, therefore, to me and some others of my stamp, I entreat you to give us more verse, and less democratic scurrility. Your admirer, not esteemer." Alas ! The Watchman kept its high watch for hardly three months. With the tenth num- ber it ceased to appear. Just before its de- cease Coleridge wrote to his friend Thomas Poole : " O Watchman, thou hast watched in vain ! said the prophet Ezekiel, when, I sup- pose, he was taking a prophetic glimpse of my sorrow-sallowed cheeks." Poole was to Coleridge not only a sympa- thizing and generous, but an intellectually re- sponsive, friend, to whom he pours out his thoughts and, feelings so confidentially and freely that his letters to Poole have the frank- ness and fullness and the naivete of a man thinking aloud or speaking to himself. From one written in November, 1796, the following is an important passage : — " I wanted such a letter as yours, for I am very unwell. On Wednesday night I was seized with an intolerable pain from my right temple to the tip of my right shoulder, includ- 64 COLERIDGE. ing my right eye, cheek, jaw, and that side of the throat. I was nearly frantic, and ran about the house almost naked, endeavoring by every means to excite sensation in different parts of my body, and so to weaken the enemy by creat- ing' a division. It continued from one in the morning till half-past five, and left me pale and fainty. It came on fitfully, but not so vio- lently, several times on Thursday, and began severer threats towards night ; but I took be- tween sixty and seventy drops of laudanum, and sopped the Cerberus just as his mouth be- gan to open. On Friday it only niggled, as if the Chief had departed, as from a conquered place, and merely left a small garrison behind, or as if he had evacuated the Corrica, and a few straggling pains only remained. But this morning he returned in full force^and his name is Legion. Giant-Fiend of a hundred hands, with a shower of arrowy death-pangs he trans- pierced me, and then lie became a Wolf and lay gnawing my bones ! — I am not mad, most noble Festus ! but in sober sadness I have suffered this day more bodily pain than I had before a conception of. My right cheek has certainly been placed with admirable exact- ness under the focus of some invisible burn- COLERIDGE. 65 ing-glass, which concentrated all the rays of a Tartarean sun. My medical attendant decides it to be altogether nervous, and that it origi- nates either in severe application, or excessive anxiety. My beloved Poole, in excessive anx- iety I believe it might originate. I have a blister under- my right ear, and I take twenty- five drops of laudanum every five hours, the ease and spirits gained by which have enabled me to write to you this nighty, but not exag- gerating, account." Here then was Coleridge's first acquaint- ance with this smiling sycophantic demon, masked in the guise of a helper. How many thousands of drunkards have been begotten by unsanctified prescriptions of alcohol in cases of disease ! Certain constitutions are pecul- iarly liable to be thus permanently poisoned. Coleridge was of a lymphatic temperament. And when, in addition, we recollect how, in his tenth year, he was taken about by his uncle from tavern to tavern in London, during several weeks, " where," he relates, " I drank and talked and disputed as if I had been a man," it behooves us, when we come to the disabling effects of opium in Coleridge's mid- dle life, to be liberal of that charity we owe to 5 66 COLERIDGE. all men, and to use an exceptional degree of forbearance towards one who was not stoutly organized and who was exceptionally afflicted and tempted. The seeds of those agonizing neuralgic at- tacks may have been planted when, a child of six years, he lay out all night on the damp ground. On another occasion, several years later, while at Christ's Hospital, he swam across a stream in his clothes and let them dry on him. At no time of his life had Cole- ridge quite an average share of the homely virtue, prudence. He was better equipped with wings than with legs : he could soar to the region, and revel there, where broad vis- ionary reason overlooks and rules human af- fairs, but he could not walk steadily among them, providing for the smaller wants of the day. In few superior men has the spirit been more clogged by the body than in Coleridge. Irksome to him were the stoopings, the declen- sions, that have to be made to meet the neces- sities of the bodily being. Of him might partly be said what was spoken of Joubert by one of his lady friends, "that he seemed to be a soul that by accident had met with a body and tries to make the best of it." COLERIDGE. 67 In this partnership between soul and body, not only is the soul the head of the firm, as furnishing the capital which gives credit and power to the house, but to it is due any popu- larity and acceptability the house enjoys. To his reach and liveliness of soul Coleridge owed not merely the significance and attractiveness of his writings, prose and verse, but also his personal fascination, which was always re- markable, and which, in these the days of his first failures, became the source of nourishing streams. The noble Thomas Poole, drawn to him by the charm of his genius and conver- sation, was serviceable to Coleridge in other ways than through the sympathy he gave the poet and thinker, rare and precious as was to Coleridge that sympathy. A little later the two brothers Wedgwood, inventors and pros- perous manufacturers of a new tasteful delft ware, through admiration of Coleridge, be- stowed on him an annuity of one hundred and fifty pounds, which continued many years, and the half of which he enjoyed till towards the end of his life. In that day one hundred and fifty pounds a year was a very substantial con- tribution to the housekeeping fund of a young married couple. Wordsworth began on a hun- dred pounds. 68 COLERIDGE. A few years later still, De Quincey, just come of age, moved by admiration of the genius and extraordinary mental powers of Coleridge, made him an anonymous gift of three hundred pounds, through the interme- dium of a common friend, Cottle, the book- seller of Bristol. A most timely relief was this generous gift, for Coleridge was then much embarrassed and depressed, notwith- standing that a short time before he had re- ceived in one year eight hundred pounds as Secretary to the Governor of Malta. A good story is told by Coleridge of him- self and a Jew. More than usually annoyed one day in London by the nasal monotony of a crier of old clothes, he went up to him and said : " Pray, why can't you say Old Clothes as I do ? " The Jew stopped, and looking gravely at his reprover, said in a clear and even fine tone : " Sir, I can say Old Clothes as well as you can, but if you had to say so ten times a minute for an hour together, you would say Ogh Clo as I do.: " and then walked on. So confounded was Coleridge by the justice of the retort, that he ran after the man, and gave him a shilling, the only one he had. That shilling being the last is as characteristic as COLERIDGE. 69 the generous impulse to give it to the wronged Jew. Money burned in Coleridge's pocket. It may be doubted whether, with his organiza- tion, any probable provision — say an annuity of four hundred pounds instead of one hun-. dred and fifty pounds — would have secured him against occasional pinching for want of a guinea or a shilling. Some grandly gifted men are irremediably thus constituted. Dan- iel Webster was also a victim of this magnani- mous impecuniosity, which has a noble air of large-hand edn ess in contrast with the minute meannesses of avarice, but which closes the hand to many a generous opportunity, and constrains an honorable man to doings that bring a blush to his cheek. Coleridge was a rich-toned, sonorous, high-wrought harp, with some of the strings incorrigibly unstrung. IV. Notable years in the life of Coleridge were 1797 and 1798. In 1797 he took a house in Nether Stowey, near the Bristol Channe], and Wordsworth established himself at Alfoxden, a pleasant country-house among the Quantoc hills, in order to be near him. The friendship between Goethe and Schiller was entered upon when Goethe was in his forty-fifth and Schiller in his thirty-fifth year, and, though begun at so comparatively late a period, was prolific of good to both. Close con- tact with a younger aspiring poet rekindled in Goethe his poetic fires, which for some time had been smoldering. Schiller's intellectual horizon was enlarged by the far outlook and experience of his friend, while his poetic aims gained in definiteness and fidelity. When Wordsworth and Coleridge became intimate friends Coleridge was in his twenty-sixth year, and Wordsworth two years older. To both the brilliant boundless realm of poetry was un- folding its unspeakable attractions. And so COLERIDGE. Ji on the mind of his companion each beheld mirrored objects and vistas in this realm, the whole wondrous region was doubly illuminated. What Coleridge thought, twenty years later, of the poetic faculty and performance of Words- worth is recorded in several successive chap- ters of the Biographia Literaria, chapters which embody some of the truest and highest criti- cism, and as profound an exposition of aes- thetic principles as was ever written. So intimate was at this time between Words- worth and Coleridge interchange of thought, so cordial their association, so close their aes- thetic concord, that they undertook to write a poem conjointly. Of this the impracticability showed itself at the very outset. In a great poet the current of inspiration flows from too individual a spring and with too strong a mo- mentum to accommodate itself to the move- ment of another inspiration ; and when that other is as fresh and vigorous as its own, the two poets at once discover that between them there can be no cooperation upon the same poem. When to talent more than to genius is due the efficiency of two poets, such coopera- tion may be successful. In Coleridge and Wordsworth genius used talent as its instru- 72 COLERIDGE. ment ; and it was owing to deficiency of talent in certain directions that Wordsworth's genius was not more effective. This was the era of the Lyrical Ballads. If genius forbade the combining of their poetic forces for a joint achievement, by their contact and congenial converse the genius of each was enlivened and inflamed, and empowered for in- dependent effort. Now it was that Coleridge produced the poems commented upon in the opening chapter. Of these poems a character- istic is their objectivity. The French Revolu- tion, and the mental movement which engen- dered it, developed, stimulated individuality. The more susceptive the mind,.the more liable was it to be rapt into this cyclone of thought and feeling, which promised to sweep away all barriers and obstructions to individual free- dom. Poets were filled, inspired, by the prom- ises of the time. In Wordsworth subjectiv- ity took the form of sympathy for the poor, which was a broad and noble feature of the new spirit. In him this influence was facili- tated by the republican and primitive habits of Cumberland and Westmoreland, where he was born and brought up. At the same time his intense self-consciousness made it easy, nay, COLERIDGE. 73 inevitable, for him to imbue his poetry with his personality. On every page of Shelley, who came two decades later, the noblest feat- ure in the movement of the age is impressed, in the form of fiery protest against tyranny, of a deep yearning for emancipation. In Byron's verse much of the restlessness and tumult of the age finds expression ; but it is through the strength of his egoism that he is the most sub- jective of the brilliant band of poets of that upheaving period. His Laras and Giaours and Childe Harolds are but superficially variegated reduplications of himself. . Some people have not enough of disinter- ested sympathy, of generic breadth, to be able to swing themselves beyond the circuit of their individuality. They get at last to be impris- oned in themselves, — the most awful form of solitary confinement. Byron is the poetic rep- resentative of this self-entombed class. He is the opposite of Shakespeare. Byron's per- sonages are mirrors in which he sees himself ; Shakespeare is himself a mirror, in which his personages are reflected. Shakespeare is in all his personages because all humanity is in him. How unlike Byron is to Shakespeare let himself declare. In the Introduction to 74 COLERIDGE. Sardanapalus is this sentence : " You will find all this very tmllke Shakespeare ; and so much the better in one sense, for I look upon him to be the worst of models, though the most ex- traordinary of writers. It has been my object to be as simple and severe as Alfieri, and I have broken down the poetry as nearly as I could to common language." Here is subjec- tivity with a vengeance ! That " unlike. Shake- speare " came from a thought, and not a mo- mentary thought, of likeness. Shakespeare is not called the greatest of poets, but the most extraordinary of writers. The greatest of poets is another Englishman. To reject Shakespeare as a bad model, and take .the juiceless Alfieri as a good one! Were this a study of Byron, pages of comment might be written on this one characteristic, most signifi- cant passage. The opposite of Byron in feeling towards Shakespeare, Coleridge had not the presump- tion to be jealous of the mightiest of poets. He • kindled his own great faculties to their brightest to pour light upon the master's page in rich, most discriminative eulogy. Straining to make admiration come up to Shakespeare's unparalleled performance, he coined a grand COLERIDGE. 75 new epithet to be applied solely to him, — myriad-minded. Like Shakespeare himself, and unlike By- ron, was Coleridge in the objectivity of his mind's movement. His was not a nature that is self-busied while depicting imaginary per- sons and scenes. In presence of large or lively themes, the self in him was effaced. In its poetic flights, his imagination freed itself from personality. This was not owing to the largeness of his intellect, or to the power. of his poetic imagination, but to the sobriety of his self-seeking impulses. Coleridge was the opposite of a self-sufficient man ; there was no assumption, no arrogance, in him. In Words- worth there was, and in Byron inordinate van- ity ; and these were largely the sources of their subjectivity as poets, — a subjectivity dif- fering in quality and degree in the two, being more intense in Byron, saturating most of his poems with himself, while imbuing many of Wordsworth's with the spirit of the times. Now in Christabel, The Ancient Mariner, and Kubia Khan there is not a trace, neither of the yearnings and aspirations of the French Revolution period, nor of personal characteris- tics. They belong to no age or country ; their j6 COLERIDGE. personages and conditions, while warmly hu- man, have on them no soilure of the earth ; they are woven out of poetic sunbeams. They are creations of imaginative potency, more sparkling with the ethereal essence of poetic life than any product from any of his great contemporaries, except Shelley. The friendship between Wordsworth and Coleridge led to their making a trip to Ger- many together. Coleridge had at times in his mind the vision of a select school to be kept by him. To accomplish himself more thor- oughly for this duty was part of his motive for going to Germany and Gottingen. The school never came to be more than a scheme. Coleridge was a man of unexecuted projects in practical life, in philosophy, and in poetry. The difference between the ease and rapidity of imaginary work — especially to a mind so copious and creative as his — and the labor and slowness of execution, the difference be- tween building in the brain and building on the ground, was never more distinctly exhib- ited than in the case of Coleridge. But, untike most visionaries, there was solidity as well as splendor in his thoughts. So stored are these with learning and knowledge, and, what is bet- COLERIDGE. Jj ter than either, with wisdom, that his volumes are among the most valuable, as well as the most brilliant, in our language. I was at Gottingen a quarter of a century- later than Coleridge. Professor and Librarian Benecke, my very capable teacher of German, then a man of nearly sixty, told me that when the Confessions of an Opium-Eater appeared, he attributed it to Coleridge, because when at Gottingen he took opium. The terrible drug, taken at first as medicine, transformed from a soother of pain into a syren of destruction, had now laid its enduring spell upon another illus- trious victim. Benecke related how Coleridge, shortly after his arrival, would declaim in German one of Klopstock's odes, mystifying his English fellow- students into the belief that he had mastered it. But Coleridge, before going to Gottingen, had passed several weeks at Ratzeburg, daily busied, no doubt, with dictionary and gram- mar. Before he went to Germany, Coleridge, as we have seen, had written some of his best poems. Wordsworth thought that by his visit to Germany he was drawn astray from poetry into metaphysics. By learning German he 78 COLERIDGE. was enabled to read Kant and Schelling ; but it appears that he did not give in to the study of them until some years later. Superior as well as inferior men are liable to all kinds of influences, sometimes injurious influences ; but is a man of the high poetic originality, the deep inwardness, of Coleridge likely to be in- juriously affected, to the degree that Words- worth affirms, by external attractions ? We have seen how, even in his boyhood, he be- came absorbed in speculative thinkers. He had a metaphysical as well as a poetic genius. To regret that he did not write more Christa- bels and Ancient Mariners were not only idle, but ungrateful. Few writers have left to their fellow-men so much that is good as Coleridge has. Not only should we thankfully hug what he has given, without grumbling that he gave no more, but it were perhaps wise to conclude that he gave us all he had to give. A lesser poet could not have written Christabel, from defect of poetic imagination. Coleridge left Christabel unfinished, from defect of other qualities than poetic imagination. Had he possessed these qualities to the degree he did that, they would have rounded him to a super- human perfection. Some of his inherent inev- COLERIDGE. fg itable human deficiency lay behind the opium and lifted it to his lips. The first fruit of his German studies was a translation of Schiller's Wallenstein, a trilogy, the three parts being Wallenstein s Camp, The Piccoluomini, and Wallenstein s Death. The Camp is introductory, is written in rhyme, and depicts the heterogeneous character and the lawlessness of Wallenstein's army, together with its devotion to and belief in its General. This Coleridge did not translate on account of the difficulty of rendering it with fidelity and at the same time with spirit. The Piccoluo- mini and Wallenstein s Death are two separate plays, each of five acts. Without aiming to detract from the great merit of Schiller's mas- terpiece, I cannot but think that, had the two plays been compressed into one under the name of Wallenstein, a more intense, a higher and more poetical, work of Art might have been produced. Schiller has the rare good fortune to have his greatest drama translated into, a cognate tongue by one who, himself a poet, executed his labor of love with the zeal of genius. Cole- ridge is, indeed, superior, both as poet and as thinker, to Schiller himself. The translation, 8o COLERIDGE. made from manuscript, was published in Lon- don simultaneously with the original in Ger- many. Coleridge was probably hurried, in or- der to be up to time. There are frequent marks of haste, especially in the want of con- densation, and in the use of polysyllabic Latin- English, instead of monosyllabic Saxon-Eng- lish. The translation had hardly any sale, and so Coleridge had no opportunity for remedy- ing the defects caused by haste. V. When Coleridge, at the close of the last century, returned from Germany, armed with a new language and a new literature, he was in his twenty-ninth year, he was in the bloom of an uncommonly rich young manhood. Into the lively arena, where great principles were then interlocked in a death-grapple, no man in England of that wakeful period brought more mental force, more intellectual accomplishment. Mr. Stuart, the active, able conductor of The Morning Post, for which paper Coleridge was engaged to write, declared, many years after, in reviewing his connection with Coleridge at that period : " To write the leading para- graph of a newspaper I would prefer Cole- ridge to Mackintosh, Burke, or any man I ever heard of. His observations not only were confirmed by good sense, but displayed ex- tensive knowledge, deep thought, and well- grounded foresight ; they were so brilliantly ornamented, so classically delightful. They were the writings of a scholar, a gentleman, 6 82 COLERIDGE. and a statesman, without personal sarcasm or illiberality of any kind. But when Coleridge wrote in his study without being pressed, he wandered and lost himself. He should always have had the printer's devil at his elbow with Sir, the printers want copyT Irresolution caused by bad health is not enough to account for the failures of Cole- ridge. He seems to have been deficient in what the phrenologists call concentrativeness, the faculty of holding the intellect continu- ously to its task. Opium, no doubt, had some- thing to do with the inaptitude for steady work. The pretended cure for disease be- came the generator of worse disease. The want of will to resist the fascination of the dis- guised demon gave this demon the power to dethrone an ill-guarded will. On another oc- casion, a few years later, speaking of what Coleridge wrote for The Courier about the war in Spain, Mr. Stuart said : " Could Coleridge have written the leading paragraph daily his services would have been invaluable, but an occasional essay could produce little effect." From a successful conductor of London daily newspapers this is strong testimony as to the capability of Coleridge. To those who COLERIDGE. 83 now read his prose-volumes, with that high enjoyment imparted by the pages of Plato, drawing from him the calm inspiration of pro- found and spiritual thoughtfulness, ft seems almost incredible that the same man was able to produce, in their most effective potency, those stirring paragraphs best fitted to spur men's minds to instant action. In 1804 Coleridge, on account of ill health, and to visit a friend, made a voyage to Malta. Here he became intimate with a superior man, Sir Alexander Ball, Governor of Malta, who made Coleridge for a time his secretary. From Malta he went to Rome, where he met Allston. Congenial spirits were these two, both splendidly gifted, richly poetical as well as intellectual, and both spiritually-minded. Two or three years before he died, Allston, in his studio at Cambridgeport, on my mention- ing Coleridge, spoke of him with reverence as well as intense admiration : " The greatest man that ever I accosted." In uttering these words his voice fell and his manner grew al- most solemn, as though for the moment his vision had before it his great friend. Other eminent contemporaries who came in contact with him (and the closer the contact the 84 COLERIDGE. stronger the impression) were similarly im- pressed by his presence and converse. Charles Lamb, who admired not less than he loved Coleridge, called him, with Lamb's peculiar humor, " an archangel a little damaged." The scholarly, eloquent De Quincey, with a dash of that polished exaggeration into which he is occasionally seduced, speaks of him as " the largest and most spacious intellect, the subtlest and most comprehensive, in my judgment, that has yet existed amongst men." Wordsworth says: "The only wonderful man I ever knew was Coleridge." Coleridge quitted Rome suddenly, on a con- fidential hint that Napoleon had ordered his arrest. That such an order was given has been denied, on the ground that the King-crush- ing Emperor would not have condescended to notice the then unknown private English- man. But Napoleon was as minute as he was unscrupulous in the instrumentalities of his despotism, and had all the hate and dread in- stinctive to despots, of independent thinkers and bold men of genius, — a feeling deepened in this case by his hatred of England. His spies and informers were everywhere. In 1802 and 1803 Coleridge wrote in The Morning Post COLERIDGE. 85 against him, and we know how watchful Na- poleon was, especially in those years of transi- tion, of the London newspapers, and how sen- sitive to their comments. The order may not have been issued, but the reason cited above for its non-issue is assuredly unsound. Coleridge, acting on the hint given him, made his way to Leghorn, where he took pas- sage in an American vessel bound to England. They were chased by a French cruiser, and the captain obliged Coleridge to "throw over board his papers, — a precautionary measure not creditable to the captain of the American merchantman, and one less likely to be re- sorted to in 1876 than in 1806. Coleridge thus lost all the notes he had taken at Rome. On returning to England he went back to reside at Keswick, where he had left his family on starting for Malta. At this period he was again much with Wordsworth, who then had a cottage at Grasmere, thirteen miles from Kes- wick. To one so poetically gifted, so richly endowed, so highly cultivated, this decade of his life, between his thirty-fifth and forty-fifth years, ought to have been, and might have Deen, a period of joyous mental activity and productiveness and manful expansion. But 86 COLERIDGE. Coleridge was restless, unhappy, irresolute, de- pressed. For years he was the sorrowful, ab- ject slave to opium. By this accursed habit his health and spirits were blasted, his plans frustrated, his undertakings baffled, his use- fulness crippled, his conscience seared. En- gaged by the Royal Society to deliver a course of lectures on Poetry and Art, the intelligent, refined audience had sometimes to be dismissed on the plea of the sudden illness of the lect- urer. The performance of his duties at the Courier office, where he was engaged to write, was irregular. Coleridge, clogged in his movement by this impure habit, is as though an eagle, snatching •from the ground a polecat, should become so infatuated with its odor as not to be able to drop it when he found his flight impeded. — This starts a reflection. The eagle, though by his size and strength, by the elevation and range of his winged sweep, the first among the fowls of the air, is a bird of prey. So there are human beings, and some among the strong- est, who are men of prey. Foremost among these was Bonaparte, and therefore most fitting it was that he should adopt as his Imperial emblem the eagle, borrowing it from Rome. COLERIDGE. 87 Rome, as a conquering nation, is to be classed among animals of prey. Thence the eagle is not a suitable emblem for the United States, for we are not a conquering nation. Our aims are other than the ravenous devouring of neighbors, and, to bring our national emblem into harmony with our nature and principles, we should discard a carnivorous bird of prey, leaving the eagle to Prussia and Austria and Russia, all of whom have with a sound instinct chosen it ; leaving, too, to England her prowl- ing, voracious lion. — To return to Coleridge, from whom this eagle-flight has borne us away. Through The Watchman, a dozen years ear- lier, he had had proof of his unfitness to con- duct a paying periodical work, — an unsuita- bleness due to the deep alternations in his health and spirits, to his procrastinating hab- its, to the elevated range and ideal aim of his thoughts. Untaught by this trial, about the year 1810 he issued the first number of The Friend, the object of which was to present and unfold first principles in philosophy, politics, ethics, literature. The wide and lofty scope of The Friend is an exponent of its projector. The mental life of 88 COLERIDGE. Coleridge was in the deep places and the high places of being. So impressed was he with the power and grandeur of generative ideas, so possessed by them, so intimate with them, that he was ever striving to share them with others, to imbue the educated and thoughtful with them, and thus elevate mankind through the force and beauty there is in fundamental divine principles. His ascensions and ranges were like those of the mountain-haunting, sky- piercing eagle, but alas ! unlike those of the eagle, his were not predatory, and brought no food to his eyrie. It were easy to wish that he had been more earthly-minded, had practiced a little more worldly prudence. By this deficiency his fam- ily and contemporary friends could not but be pained and provoked. They, no doubt, did what they could to remedy it ; but for us, his posterity, the heirs of rich legacies, it becomes us to be reserved and thankful. To throw re- proachfully, even at a living fellow-man, the commonplaces about duty is not a profitable proceeding, is, indeed, immoral, weakening the thrower through assumption and self -flattery, and irritating rather than correcting the delin- quent. Moments there are when the assertion COLERIDGE. 89 of moral principles is appropriate and impera- tive ; but this is not one of them. The great and good Coleridge is not a subject for shallow rebuke. His infirmities affected those nearest to him in an indirect negative way, however potently ; directly and aggressively he never in- jured a human being, save himself. He was not ambitious, not greedy of power, and thence he was not touched by that curse to so many of his tribe, envy and jealousy. In his under- takings he was moved by aspiration after the true and good, not by worldly desires. Leaving out of view the disabling effects of opium, it may be doubted whether Coleridge had enough of practical talent and prudence, of daily provident outlook, to supply the ever re- current demands of a family. To himself this inability was a source of anxiety, depression, self-reproach. On the margin of Lamb's copy of Dramatic Scenes by Proctor, at the end of an acute and generous criticism of Proctor's verse, he makes this reflection : " Oh ! for such a man worldly prudence is transfigured into the highest spiritual duty ! How generous is self-interest in him, whose true self is all that is good and hopeful in all ages, as far as the language of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton 90 COLERIDGE. shall become the mother-tongue." And then he acids in a separate paragraph : " A map of the road to Paradise, drawn in Purgatory, on the confines of Hell, by S. T. C. July 30th, 1 8 19." Made aware by these startling words to what a depth of soul-suffering so great a being may be brought by his own acts, we can only heave a sigh of sympathy for the illustrious victim, and reflect on the fallibility of man. Whoever would know Coleridge — and to, know him well is something like a privilege — should not dwell on the picture drawn by De Quincey when, about the year 1807, Coleridge was living at the Courier office, often "strug- gling with pain, his lips baked with feverish heat and often black in color," when, in short, his great soul was vexed and shadowed by the vices of the body ; but should take in the im- age of him that is presented by Henry Nelson Coleridge in the Table Talk on such a day as the 24th of June, 1827, when he "talked a vol- ume of criticism which, printed verbatim as he spoke it, would make the reputation of any other man but himself. The sun was setting behind Caen wood, and the calm of the even- ing was so exceedingly deep that it arrested COLERIDGE. 9 1 Mr. Coleridge's attention. He left off talking, and fell into an almost trance-like state for ten minutes, whilst contemplating the beautiful prospect before us. His eyes swam in tears, his head inclined a little forward, and there was a slight uplifting of the fingers, which seemed to tell me he was in prayer. I was awe-stricken, and remained absorbed in look- ing at the man in forgetfulness of external nature, when he recovered himself and after a word or two fell by some secret link of associa- tion upon Spenser's poetry." The Friend, as a periodical publication, was a failure ; and Coleridge, being not merely editor but publisher, lost money by it. As issued afterwards in three volumes, containing profound disquisitions, illustrated and enriched with apt and various knowledge, The Friend is 'a casket full of precious thoughts. Take this as a sample (from page 132 of Marsh's Amer- ican edition of 183 1) : " The understanding of the higher brutes has only organs of outward sense, and consequently sees material objects only ; but man's understanding has moreover organs of inward sense, and therefore the power of acquainting itself with invisible real- ities or spiritual objects." To thoughtful schol- 92 COLERIDGE. ars this is valuable ; but think of a man trying to make " the pot boil " with such fuel. Or read, on page 410, a long passage on Nature, Idea, Intuition, and Plato. Truly one who sought to meet daily family expenses through the means of such material was infatuated with high philosophy and abstruse thinking. There are, to be sure, many practical, easily intelligible sentences and pages, like this, for example : " Like arms without hearts are the widest maxims of prudence disjoined from those feelings which flow forth from principle as from a fountain." The writings of Coleridge are ballasted with common sense, and his common sense is the more solid because strengthened by the ideal, and because his nature was large and lofty enough to furnish sound Meals to draw from. A man's life is multiplied, enlarged, enno- bled, by interest in his fellow-men, by devotion to those spiritual and intellectual principles that advance and uplift mankind.' Thus am- plified and elevated was Coleridge. The high and wide range of his intellect and his sympa- thies is exemplified in The Friend, the first, chronologically, of his prose works. In this, as in those that follow it, we have everywhere COLERIDGE. 93 a clear, strong, brilliant mind disinterestedly in earnest. The thought is vivid, the expres- sion apt. He never deals in decorated or pol- ished commonplace. In the writings of Cole- ridge, through his effective intellectual endow- ment, especially through his sure perception of likeness, the associative power is uncom- monly active, and thence rare vivacity and at- tractiveness are imparted to his printed page. This, too, was a chief source of his fascinating speech, thought suggesting thought in an end- less series of concatenated imaginations, which his poetic sensibility enfolded in its radiance. And of his pages a crowning virtue it is that they all tend to the spiritualization of man. The mind of Coleridge was so copious and fluent that upon the margins of volumes he was reading it overflowed in rapid, pithy com- ment. Charles Lamb liked to lend him books, they came back, he said, so enriched. Many of these marginalia have been collected into four volumes of Literary Remains, edited by his nephew, Henry Nelson Coleridge. These volumes are a treasury of critical judgments on an endless variety of subjects, literary, philosophical, theological, all of them derived from or grounded on generative principles. 94 COLERIDGE. Whether you accept them or not, they feed your thought with suggestion or stimulation. In them is the pulse of thoughtful life, the gleam of genial light. The most valuable chapters are the reports of lectures on Liter- ature and Art and on Shakespeare. The notes on Shakespeare are a lively stream of sympa- thetic commentary, flowing from heights which stretch into the infinite and invisible, and re- plenished, invigorated, by springs that rise up from the practical along men's daily walks. These springs are deeper and these heights loftier than most men have access to, and so all critics and commentators on Shakespeare, even the most accomplished, fail not to look into Coleridge to get assurance of their suc- cess as interpreters of the profoundest of poets. From the coincidence between certain prin- ciples and judgments put forth by Coleridge and those found in Schlegel's lectures on Dra- matic Literature, it was inferred by some, whose wish was father to the thought, that Coleridge had borrowed without acknowledg- ment from Schlegel. In the following valu- able letter, written in 1818, Coleridge disposes of this calumny : " My next Friday's lecture will, if I do not COLERIDGE. 95 grossly flatter-blind myself, be interesting, and the points of view not only original, but new to the audience. I make this distinction, be- cause sixteen or rather seventeen years ago I delivered eighteen lectures on Shakespeare, at the Royal Institution ; three fourths of which appeared at that time startling paradoxes, al- though they have since been adopted even by men who then made use of them as proofs of my flighty and paradoxical turn of mind ; all tending to prove that Shakespeare's judg- ment was, if possible, still more wonderful than his genius ; or rather, that the contra- distinction itself between judgment and genius rested on an utterly false theory. This and its proofs and grounds have been — I should not have said adopted, but produced as their own legitimate children by some, and by oth- ers the merit of them attributed to a foreign writer, whose lectures were not given orally till two years after mine, rather than to their countryman; though I dare appeal to the most adequate judges, as Sir George Beaumont, the Bishop of Durham, Mr. Sotheby, and after- wards to Mr. Rogers and Lord Byron, whether there is one single principle in Schlegel's work (which is not an admitted drawback from its 96 COLERIDGE. merits) that was not established and applied in detail by me. Plutarch tells us that ego- tism is a venial fault in the unfortunate, and justifiable in the calumniated," etc. In another letter, written in 1819, he thus recurs to this subject: "The coincidence be- tween my lectures and those of Schlegel was such and so close that it was fortunate for mf moral reputation that I had not only from five to seven hundred ear-witnesses that the pas- sages had been given by me at the Royal Institution two years before Schlegel com- menced his lectures at Vienna, but that notes had been taken of these by several ladies and men of high rank." More even than most men of genius Cole- ridge was a target for the shafts of envious or ignorant detraction, embittered in England during the first decades of the present century by the gall of party -politics. Thus Jeffrey, in the Edinburgh Review, called Christabel " a mixture of raving and driveling." Now, nei- ther Jeffrey nor any of his coadjutors, however great their merits (and their merits were great, for the permanent breach they made in the Chinese wall of old abuses, and the example they set of bold discussion), not one of them COLERIDGE. gy had' the fineness of faculty or the winged rate and quality of motion required to reach the poetic atmosphere where such a genuinely new poem was breathed forth. Christabel Coleridge drew out of his spirit- uality, exalted by an exquisite poetic aspira- tion. The clever company of early Edinburgh Reviewers were not a spiritually-minded set : the good work they had to do required grosser material and coarser tools than those with which Christabels are conceived and con- structed. Jeffrey, their chief critic of verse, could appreciate Scott, but not Wordsworth and Coleridge. Towards them, from spiritual and poetic deficiencies, he was unjust, and from self-complacency he gave impertinent ut- terance to his injustice, himself hardly aware that he was impertinent. Among critics and would-be critics Jeffrey will always have fol- lowers as self-sufficient as he was, cultivated but not poetically-minded men who have more ambition than insight, much more self-admi- ration than modesty. And the shallowest of this class will deal in the easy, graceless method of scoff, just as by the Edinburgh Re- viewers was fastened upon the three poet- friends, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, 7 98 COLERIDGE. the preposterous misnomer the Lake School. You will hear it now and then applied to them at this late clay, so pertinaciously will a nick- name stick. The three differed in their poetic' principles as well as practice, and agreed only in one thing, says Mr. Shairp, " their opposi- tion to the hard and unimaginative spirit which was then the leading characteristic of the Edinburgh Review." Political rancor, in stormy times, sprinkled wormwood in the ink of whig critics when writing of these three, especially Coleridge, who was acknowledged to be a powerful polit- ical writer ; but he was a political writer who wrote like a philosopher, not like a partisan. In 1 800' Coleridge was with Fox in opposing the war with France, but when he sagacious- ly discerned, as Bonaparte unfolded himself, that he was an unscrupulous, grasping despot, he separated himself from the eloquent whig leader. The self-justification of Coleridge for going over to the tory side is complete. He passed over to the tories, he says, " only in the sense in which all patriots did so at that time, by refusing to accompany the whigs in their almost perfidious demeanor towards Napoleon. Anti-ministerial they styled their COLERIDGE. 99 policy, but it was really anti-national. It was exclusively in relation to the great feud with Napoleon that I adhered to the tories. But because this feud was so capital, so earth-shak- ing, that it occupied all hearts, and all the councils of Europe, suffering no other ques- tion almost to live in the neighborhood, hence it happened that he who joined the tories in this was regarded as their ally in everything. Domestic politics were then in fact forgotten." In more ways than one Coleridge suffered for his unworldliness. The world loves world- lings : it erects statues to ambitious public self-seekers. To the world an idealist is hate- ful, partly because it cannot understand him, but chiefly because he is a reproach to its grossness and stolidity. The world is busy with petty interests ; Coleridge dealt in large principles. He was ever looking beyond the present, either backward or forward. He had no aptness for superficiality : the world's work is, most of it, necessarily on the surface. Coleridge was a meditater, not an actor. He was, to be sure, an exquisite artist as well as a deep thinker ; but his artist-work was too deli- cate for the daily market. By the originality of his genius he opened a road which enabled 100 COLERIDGE. Scott and Byron to cultivate th.e more pros- perously their fields. Them the immediate public rewarded with guineas by the thou- sands ; him it left to starve. Coleridge was always pecuniarily pinched, and those who love and admire him are pained when they think what extremities of indigence he might have suffered but for the annuity of the generous Wedgwoods. Towards the lat- ter end of his life he enjoyed a pension from the Crown, but of -this, during his very last years, when from grievous sickness he needed it most, he was deprived, through the mean- ness of some cruel adviser of the new King, William IV. VI. In literature poetry is supreme, aiming to reach the quintessence of being, to make per- ceptible the very aroma of thought and life. And, as to divulge and present the essential nature of men and things is the purpose of all high literature, in its every department should be active that creative power which at its flood swells into poetry. The orator, the historian, the critic, the philosopher, the essayist, each fails to swing up to the height of his theme, to outfill the capability of his subject, unless his pulse be enlivened by draughts of the same breath that immortalizes Hamlet and Faust. That his work be not tame and unprofitable it must be illuminated by light from the beauti- ful. From this poetic source he gets a clearer insight, a readier mastery. Now Coleridge was philosopher, essayist, critic, and, in his social monologues, an irresisti- ble orator. And these diverse fields, through his rare competence to work them, had for him such attraction that they drew him from a full 102 COLERIDGE. culture of the most fruitful of all literary fields, from a field in which his genius proved itself so generative. Or was it that his vein of po- etry, genuine, rich, and refined, was neither broad nor thick ? Or was the ardor wherewith every poet plies his gift somewhat damped by outside opinion ? Coleridge was, as Words- worth said, a wonderful man. He was a giant with one arm paralyzed, a sun with deep spots in it that dimmed its radiance. Possibly, but for the crippling contradictions in him, but for his unmanning weaknesses, his many-sided splendor would have been too dazzling. What a curse opium was to him no one knew so well as himself. Whoever would reproach Coleridge, let him pause. If he is one to value what was great and good in this eminent man, his reproaches will turn into tears of sympathy after he shall have read these sentences writ- ten by Coleridge to his friend Wade : " In the one crime of opium, what crimes have I not made myself guilty of ? Ingratitude to my Maker ; and to my benefactors injustice ; and unnatural cruelty to my poor children After my death, I earnestly entreat that a full and unqualified narrative of my wretchedness, and its guilty cause, may be made public, that COLERIDGE. IO3 at least some little good may be effected by the direful example." One of the most genuine, ever fresh and de- lightful, of Coleridge's poems is Youth and Age. Written before he had entered his forti- eth year, it is a plaint that youth is gone and age is come ; but it is not at all a wail, it is, I should say, more imaginative, than personal. I make room for a third of it : " Flowers are lovely ; Love is flower-like : Friendship is a sheltering tree ; Oh the joys that came down shower-like, Of Friendship, Love, and Liberty, Ere I was old ! Ere I was old ? Ah, woeful ere ! Which tells me Youth 's no longer here ! Youth ! for years so many and sweet, 'T is known that you and I were one ; 1 '11 think it but a fond deceit — It cannot be that thou art gone ! " Kindly, tender, affectionate, not despondent by nature, neither restless with ambitious schemes, nor cast down by ambition's disap- pointments, with immense and various intel- lectual means, Coleridge had it in him to be happy, cheerful, and successful. But, like many others, and in a greater degree than most, he was a joint victim of circumstances and 104 COLERIDGE. himself. Men of mere talent are much less liable to be injured by circumstances than men of sensibility and genius, especially of poetic genius. The world is a prosaic world. In its daily doings and aspects it shows little of the poetry it is capable of. It does not know, or care, how to cherish and help men of creative mind. Sometimes it fondles and spoils them. Neither in his childhood, his boyhood, nor his youth, had Coleridge the affectionate further- ance, the sentimental support, the sympathetic guidance, which a large sensitive nature needs, if it is to be unfolded adequately to its endow- ments and capabilities. Great men make cir- cumstances ; but boys and youths who are to become great men are, on account of that very latent power and in proportion to its strength, exposed to be diverted and partially thwarted by meagre or perverse circumstances. Coleridge was not a man of worldly ambi- tions ; he was a man of intellectual and spir- itual aspirations. Nevertheless, like other gifted natures, he had his lower moods, his moments of downward solicitation. In the re- bound from one of these he probably penned the well-known lines called Complaint and Reply. These lines are a perpetual rebuke, COLERIDGE. 105 warning, and encouragement to genuine men of letters : " How seldom, friend ! a good great man inherits Honor or wealth, with all his worth and pains ! It sounds like stories from the land of spirits, If any man obtain that which he merits, Or any merit that which he obtains. For shame, dear friend ! renounce this canting strain ! What wouldst thou have a good great man obtain ? Place — titles — salary — a gilded chain — Or throne of corses which his sword hath slain ? Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends ! Hath he not always treasures, always friends, The good great man ? — three treasures, love, and light, And calm thoughts, regular as infant's breath ; And three firm friends, more sure than day and night — Himself, his Maker, and the angel Death." Ktibla Khan, The Ancient Mariner, and Christabel — new beings begotten on the brain of genius — are fragrant with subtle meanings, penetrated by refined flames that impart to every limb poetic life, and hang around the whole an unquenchable luminous- ness. The poems he wrote in middle life have more substance and a more direct bearing on daily human affairs. If less ethereal than these famous three, they are not less spiritual. The controlling, the generative power of the soul is an ever-present thought with Cole- 106 COLERIDGE. ridge. Of this the following lines from the ode on Dejection is a happy illustration : " And would we aught behold of higher worth, Than that inanimate cold world allowed To the poor, loveless, ever anxious crowd, Ah ! from the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the earth — And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet sounds the life and element ! " The fidelity of Coleridge's intuitions to the divinest demands of human nature, and the prolific union in him of moral and poetical sensibility, are nowhere more distinctly pre- sented than in his -poem entitled Love, Hope, and Patience in Education : "O'er wayward childhood wouldst thou hold firm rule, And sun thee in the light of happy faces ; Love, Hope, and Patience, these must be thy graces, And in thine own heart let them first keep school. For as old Atlas on his broad neck places Heaven's starry globe, and there sustains it, — so Do these upbear the little world below Of education, — Patience, Love, and Hope. Methinks, I see them grouped, in seemly show, The straightened arms upraised, the palms aslope, And robes that, touching as adown they flow, Distinctly blend, like snow embossed in snow. Oh, part them never ! If Hope prostrate lie, Love too will sink and die. COLERIDGE. IO; But Love is subtle, and doth proof derive From her own life that Hope is yet alive ; And bending o'er with soul-transfusing eyes, And the soft murmurs of the mother Love, Woos back the fleeting spirit and half-supplies ; Thus Love repays to Hope what Hope first gave to Love, Yet haply there will come a weary day, When, overtasked, at length Both Love and Hope beneath the load give way. Then with a statue's smile, a statue's strength, Stands the mute sister, Patience, nothing loth, • And both supporting does the work of both." An able critic in the London Quarterly Re- view for July, 1863, in an article on "Cole- ridge as a Poet," commenting on this poem, asks : " Can any other poem of this century be cited in which, within so small a compass, there is so wide a range ? " The tragedy of Remorse, written in his first period, was accepted at Drury Lane Theatre in 1 813, partly owing to the good offices of Lord Byron, at that time one of the directors of Drury Lane. Remorse had a run of twenty nights. This success encouraged Coleridge to write, and offer to Drury Lane, another trag- edy, Zapolya, which was rejected. The best and brightest of Coleridge is not in his dramas. The acceptance and preparation of Remorse brought him into personal intercourse with I08 COLERIDGE. Byron, of whose countenance he gives this vivid portraiture : " If you had seen Lord Byron you could scarcely disbelieve him. So beautiful a countenance I scarcely ever saw ; his teeth so many stationary smiles ; his eyes the open portals of the sun — things of light, and made for light ; and his forehead, so am- ple, and yet so flexible, passing from marble smoothness into a hundred wreaths and lines and dimples, correspondent to the feelings and sentiments he is uttering." In 1816, after desperate but ineffectual struggles against the tyranny of opium, he voluntarily put himself under the control of Dr. Gilman, of Highgate, and took up his abode with him. Dr. and Mrs. Gilman proved to be kind, appreciative friends. Through their tender, watchful care the curse of opium was lifted from his soul. Beneath their roof he lived for eighteen years, until his death. The mind of Coleridge was multifold. It had pinions, and it was armed with blades; it could soar, and it could delve ; it was poetical and philosophical, it was critical and creative. It was moved to embody the beautiful and to penetrate the abstruse. During his latter years he strove to dig deeper into the mines COLERIDGE. IO9 of metaphysics and theology, whose subtle problems he had sought to solve in his younger years. The first direction given, even to a mind of largest mold, is sometimes due to what is called chance. Hartley had been a member of Jesus College, Cambridge, where Coleridge had rooms, and the upper atmosphere of Cam- bridge was imbued with his philosophy, whose principles, being derived from Locke, were materialistic. With these principles Coleridge became infected so strongly that he named his first-born son Hartley. But no mind of full rich endowment can finally rest in phil- osophical doctrines so insufficient ; and so Coleridge, before he went to Germany, was, by the movement of his own higher mental wants, drawn upward towards a wider, cleaner track. His consciousness prompted him to infer that man were an abject creature, a mere earthling, if only through the senses and ex- perience he got all his knowledge. He felt that within the mind itself there must be an originating life. The Transcendental philos- ophy confirmed this consciousness, demon- strating the existence of a priori conceptions independent of experience. If Kant did not IIO COLERIDGE. absolutely reveal to Coleridge a new domain in the realm of mind, he laid bare the divisions of that realm with so much comparative clear- ness, that with his support and that of Schel- ling Coleridge gave his thought freer play in the region of metaphysics and speculative philosophy. In a note to the concluding chapter of the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge exclaims : " Poor unlucky Metaphysics ! and what are they? A single sentence expresses the object and thereby the contents of this science : know thyself. And so shalt thou know God, so far as is permitted to a creature, and in God all, things. Surely, there is a strange, nay, rather a too natural, aversion in many to know themselves." Was there ever penned deeper, greater, wiser sentences than these ? In a few lines what insight, what concentrated truth ! To know thyself were to hold in thy hand a key to that richest and most roomy of palaces, the mental constitution of man, and thereby have a clew -to all that is within the ken of the human mind. We should be walking firmly, with sure hope, on the road to the solution of deepest problems, of those inclosed in met- COLERIDGE. 1 1 1 aphysics, in theology, in politics, in philosophy, in aesthetics. Thus armed, Coleridge could have cut his way through what he calls " the holy jungle of transcendental metaphysics." But, like most other metaphysical thinkers, he took such delight in his own subjective mental activities that he could not gather up his intellectual forces for an unbiassed delib- eration upon certain startling objective phe- nomena then lately laid'" bare, and thus seize their immense significance. That there is a close connection between brain and mind, especially intellectual mind, has always been vaguely acknowledged, or, rather, indistinctly felt. Toward the end of the last century, Dr. Gall, a physician of Vi- enna, proved, by a thoroughly Baconian method, not only that there is a connection, close and indissoluble, between them, but that the brain is the indispensable organ of every kind of mental power ; and further, that, instead of being one single organ, it is a congeries of or- gans, and that every intellectual aptitude, every animal propensity, every aspiration, every sen- timental movement, has in the brain its individ- ual instrument. What a helpful auxiliary was here offered to the metaphysician, to the psy- 1 1 2 COLERIDGE. chologist, to the theologian, to the moralist ! Kant's rare intuition would have caused new delight in Coleridge, who, by means of this new potent objective discovery of Gall, could have given precision, enlargement, definite- ness, depth, to the subjective conclusions of Kant and of himself. Through the various and urgent activity of his splendid brain, Coleridge had also given in to theological speculation. A Unitarian in his young manhood, he had in middle life plumped out into a high churchman. But he was top independent a thinker, and too much of a thinker, for any body of priests. In her Intro- duction to the Biograpliia Litcraria, — an In- troduction worthy of her great father, — his daughter says : " My Father's affectionate 're- spect for Luther is enough to alienate from him the High Anglican party, and his admiration of Kant enough to bring him into suspicion with the anti-philosophic part of the religious world, — which is the whole of it, except a very small portion indeed." And here, from Aids to Reflection, is an aphorism too pro- foundly true and verifiable to be grateful to sectarians : " He who begins by loving Chris- tianity better than truth, proceeds by loving . COLERIDGE. 1 1 3 his own sect or church better than Christian- ity, and ends in loving himself better than all." Through Spurzheim, a pupil of Gall, who was in London about the year 1826, Coleridge got a glimpse of the great discovery. But whether from being too old (most people are, after forty, to accept a large, new, revolutionary truth), or whether, though having an intellect apt for philosophic search, he yet lacked the warm hospitality to new truths, what may be called the philosophic temperament, which not many even capacious minds are blessed with, or whether he was not just then in the mood for such study, — whatever the cause, while he admitted to his nephew (see Table Talk) that " all the coincidences which have been observed could scarcely be by accident," the presentation of the new phenomena did not flash into his mind the Mght of a new pro- lific principle, as the fall of an apple did into that of Newton. Had he seized the import of these phenomena, by following the high logic of their revelations, both his philosophy and his theology would have been expanded, clarified. The division made by Kant of mental fac- 114 COLERIDGE. ulties under the two heads of Vernunft and Verstand (Reason and Understanding), — a division which involves the transcendental principles, — he would have discovered to be incomplete and even crude, however firmly- grounded in truth, and however admirable as an intuition. On the wings of his fine sensi- bility, guided now by this new, infallible com- pass, mounting into the hallowed infinitudes of human spirituality, he would have discov- ered how deeply and solidly are laid in the constitution of man the saving, elevating prin- ciples of hopefulness, justice, love, disinterest- edness, and of reverence, " that angel of the world," as Shakespeare calls it. The consciousness of Coleridge, his deep spiritual inwardness, would have made easy for him the acceptance of the commanding position, impregnably fortified by these new phenomena, that, innate in man, are loftiest spiritual and moral capabilities. But as he did not look into the phenomena, only at them half playfully, the theological fruit of his conscious- ness remained what it had always been, mere notions, what himself declares the unica sub- stantia of Spinosa to be, " a subject of the mind and no object at all." What lay at the foun- COLERIDGE. 115 dation-stone of his theology was not only a sub- ject of the mind, a subjectivity, it was a foreign fiction, an adopted imagination, for the garden of Eden and man's fall and consequent expul- sion from the garden are Hebrew mythology, and a mythology which does not imply a very elevated conception of divine rule and methods. Modern theology, issuing out of the brains of mediaeval ascetics and scholastic dreamers, has adopted the fall as its fundamental belief, all Christian denominations agreeing to make it the kernel, the soul, of their various creeds. Being a mere notion, a subject of the mind, a subject concreted into a fable, an imaginative representation, it cannot be a perennial source of binding law, but was from the first doomed to pass away, and is just now fast losing its factitious authority. Love Mercy, Do Jus- tice, Walk Humbly, being substantial reali- ties in the depths of man's nature, objective truths, not mere subjects of the mind, being sovereign principles in Deity and in Humanity, can never pass away. Astrology is notional, subjective, Astronomy is objective : theologies are subjective, transitory, religious and moral principles are objective, eternal. Had Coleridge taken the hint offered to him 1 16 COLERIDGE. by a pupil of Gall, a hint almost more pregnant even than that given to Newton in the fall of an apple, he would have got to know — not through his consciousness merely to believe — that spiritual disinterested impulses are objec- tive principles, inborn in human nature. Be- lief and truth may be as far asunder as nadir and zenith. When coincident with truth be- lief is elevating, when not it is lowering. Be- lief is often the child of ignorance and egotism, as is the heathen belief in fetishes and the Christian belief in relics, and in arbitrary dog- mas, which are spiritual relics. Infinitely easier is it to believe than to know. A faith may be false, but nothing is so religious as truth. Coleridge, with his philosophic faculty, would have been among the first to acknowledge the unsoundness of making imaginations the basis of religious beliefs ; but the " Fall of Man " and all its theosophic corollaries are so im- bedded in the modern mind, so interwoven with the aspirations and spiritual yearnings of many noble and highly endowed men, that the dogmatic, mechanical, non-vital elements of belief usurp upon the dynamic and vital, and thus lead towards excluslveness, intolerance, pharisaism. COLERIDGE. WJ But Coleridge was by nature too large and liberal to become the victim of any Calvinistic hardness and narrowess. Through his ecclesi- asticism shone the genuine Christian ; and the genuine Christian is he who, convinced of the primordial inherence in man of certain un- selfish, spiritual, moral feelings, and of their rightful supremacy in life, aims and strives to make these feelings, and the principles they father, rule in his conduct. He need not, in- deed, take cognizance of them theoretically, if he proves that he walks daily in their sun- shine, by being just, merciful, hopeful, hum- ble. Thence it is that the pages of Coleridge have more life and light in them than those of most writers. While he was both a thinker and a poet, he had besides, springing out of his consciousness, a generous conception of the capabilities of human nature. And this con- ception gives warmth and depth and truth to his delineations and reflections. From the printed pages of Coleridge, rich, various, and original as. they are, we do not get a full image of his mental stature. He had a marvelous, a unique, gift of speech. He was a sovereign talker, sovereign through Il8 COLERIDGE. the range, elevation, luminousness, fluency of his talk. All through his manhood, even from the days when at Cambridge he drew a choice circle around him, he instructed, he stimulated, he awakened men's minds by his affluent, ready, expressive discourse. Nay, we have seen that strangers, visiting Christ's Hospital, were arrested to listen to the eloquent outgiv- ings of the charity-boy. In early manhood Wordsworth, his equal as poet and thinker, and his senior by two years, was his pupil, the two friends being to each other both teacher and scholar. De Quincey had the good fortune to come in contact with Coleridge, or, rather, had the early discern- ment to seek him, in his own budding man- hood, and had his literary and philosophic fac- ulties expanded, encouraged, and emboldened, his powers all quickened, by converse with one whose mental gifts he continued through life to regard with unabated admiration. But it was in the last quarter of his life, particularly in its last decade, that Coleridge was sought for the eloquence and wisdom of his speech, and that the parlors of Dr. and Mrs. Gilman at Highgate were resorted to by many eager, admiring listeners, among them COLERIDGE. 1 19 some of the master-spirits of the age, in whose susceptive brains he sowed ideas that are still coming up laden with nutritious thought. Among these were Arnold of Rugby, who said that Coleridge was the greatest intellect that England had produced within his memory ; and Julius Hare, and J. H. Newman, and Mau- rice, and Hazlitt, who was called a brain-sucker of Coleridge and Carlyle. Carlyle, in a chapter on Coleridge in the Life of Sterling, describes him " as a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma ; his Dodona oak-grove (Mr. Gilman's house at Highgate) whispering strange things, uncertain whether oracles or jargon." At the same time, almost in the same sentence, he calls Coleridge "A sublime man ; who, alone in those dark days, had saved his crown of spiritual manhood, es- caping from the black materialisms and revo- lutionary deluges with ' God, Freedom, Im- mortality' still his : a King of men." To one who would have a view of Coleridge in his lat- ter years, when he talked so wonderfully at Highgate, indispensable is this chapter, exe- cuted in Carlyle's most vivid strain, at once picturesque and penetrating, broad and keen, touched, though it be, with that grudging 1 20 COLERIDGE. jealous spirit toward eminent contemporaries which is a blot on Mr. Carlyle's brilliant page. Of the soundness of Coleridge's critical and ethical judgments, of his range of knowledge and fertility of resources as exhibited in con- versation, we have convincing evidence in the volume of Table Talk. And rich as those pages are, they are but a partial expression of what fell from Coleridge in the converse of a dozen years between him and his nephew and son-in- law, Henry Nelson Coleridge. The admiring, but not unduly partial} reporter concludes his preface with these 'cordial, honest words : " Coleridge himself, — blessings on his gentle memory ! — Coleridge was a frail mortal. He. had, indeed, his peculiar weaknesses as well as his unique powers ; sensibilities that an averted look would rack, a heart that would have beaten calmly in the tremblings of an earthquake. He shrank from mere uneasiness like a child, and bore the preparatory agonies of his death-attack like a martyr. Sinned against a thousand times more than sinning, he himself suffered an almost life-long punish- ment for his errors, whilst the world at large has the unwithering fruit of his labors, his genius, and his sacrifice." COLERIDGE. 121 In a thoughtful volume, published ten years ago, entitled Nouvelles Etudes Morales stir le Temps Present, M. Caro, in a paper on Heine, quotes approvingly from the witty German the following passage on Schelling : " Schelling is one of those beings whom nature has endowed with more taste for poetry than poetic faculty, and who, incapable of satisfying the Muses, betake them to the forests of philosophy, where they contract with abstract Hamadriads liaisons that are utterly unproductive." A keener stroke of satirical wit it were hard to find ; but that M. Caro is justified in his full approval of it as aimed at Schelling may be doubted, seeing the large place filled by Schel- ling in the annals of German philosophy. Coleridge, too, had penetrated into the forests of philosophy and got entangled in the "jungle of metaphysics," but, being at the same time a genuine poet, this satire is inapplicable to him. Philosophy itself, whatever may be the short- comings of philosophers, is a genuine and a great thing, its aim being to reach first prin- ciples in all subjects, to get down to and up to primordial elements, controlling causes. He who would master philosophy must descend 122 COLERIDGE. into the deepest deeps, mount to the highest heights, grasp with his thought the principles which rule all science and all art and all prac- ' tice. Philosophers, lovers and seekers of this highest wisdom, have failed to compass their object partly from want in themselves of com- plete mental endowment, partly from want of outward material in the yet imperfectly un- folded human knowledge. Kant was too pre- dominantly intellectual, lacking in full measure the spiritual religious faculties. Coleridge, with a grand intellect, was probably too sen- timental, and thence set too much value on ecclesiasticism. Socrates and Plato, whatever may have been their inborn faculty, certainly wanted material, verified data. That Coleridge had a philosophic mind, that is, a mind that sought and could reach first principles, is apparent in every chapter of his prose volumes. 'His large discourse of reason, his emotional sensibilities, his sense of the beautiful, give to his pages that unfading life which is sustained by constant reference to the most comprehensive and vital truths. When, on the 25th of July, 1834, Coleridge passed away from the earth, in his sixty-third year, there was in the minds of the multitude COLERIDGE. 1 23 little reverberation of the solemn toll that announced his decease. His name had never been lifted and flattered by the breath of popularity. The funeral bell had a much livelier and wider echo at the decease of Byron or Scott. And yet, the life-work of Coleridge is more valuable than that of either of these. His poetic genius was at least equal to theirs, and he, much more than either of them, dealt in ideas, in generative thought. Only a choice circle felt what a void was made in the intel- lectual atmosphere of England. The pen and tongue of an original thinker, of an eloquent expounder of fruitful truths, had ceased to move forever. By one who had known him from boyhood, who for fifty years had enjoyed the privilege of unbroken friendship with him, a touch- ing tribute was paid to Coleridge. For some weeks after his decease, in the midst of con- versation among friends, the noble counte- nance of Charles Lamb would suddenly grow abstracted, and solemnly, half interrogatively, he would exclaim, "Coleridge , is dead!" as though such a death were too enormous to be taken into the mind : " Coleridge is dead ! " TO SHELLEY. Upon thy subtile nature was a bloom, Unearthly in its tender, gleamful glow, As thou hadst strayed from some sane star where blow But halcyon airs, and here, blinded by gloom, Didst stumble, for the lack of light and room, And strike and wound with purposed good ; and so, Through Highest pity, thou hadst leave to go Early to where for each earth-life its doom Awaits it, as the fruit the seed, and where Thy multitudinous imaginings, So truthful pure, on Heaven's fulgent stair Fit issue find, and mid the radiant rings Of mounting Angels thy great spirit's glare Adds to the brightness of the brightest things. SHELLEY. I. Man might be symbolized by the attitude of Mercury a-tiptoe on the earth, his figure tend- ing, and his eyes and upper limbs turned, sky-, ward, with wings on his heels, to waft him toward the Heaven whence he came. Man on earth is an aspiring animal, the only animal that aspires, the only animal that can behold the constellations, and, therefore, more than an animal, " A budded angel graft on clay." He is both spirit and matter, ethereal and gross, celestial and earthly. The conflict of these within him, — the upward swing of spirit, the downward pull of sense, — while it unfolds and displays his inborn powers, developing and disciplining his nature, schools him for pro- gression and immortality. The equipment of man being thus com- pounded of the immeasurable elements of spirit 9 130 SHELLEY. and matter, the scale of humanity is immense, from the black abysms of beastly earthiness in the Emperor Vitellius ascending to the celes- tial spirituality of Jesus, the lower half of the countless intermediate degrees being repre- sented by Louis Napoleon, who was of the earth earthy, of the world worldly ; the upper half by Goethe, in whose orbicular brain there was a prolific equilibrium, and who, being in warm sympathy with all the affections, was yet enough under the supreme sway of the spirit- ual and moral elements to make renunciation his law, and active beneficence his practice, and who, a born poet, became, through his rich humanity, a luminous sage, while he remained a genial man of the world. High on the upper division of the scale glows Shelley. From spiritual currents were distilled into his brain the finer essences of humanity. His eyes glistened with messages from the Infinite : his was the privilege to hear angels whisper. With the earthy he was not in full sympathy, and from the worldly he was repelled. In him the human compound of spirit and matter lacked closest fusion, and thence his composite being had not the com- plete elastic play needed for the most effective SHELLEY. 131 outward expression and practical manifesta- tion, such play as is exhibited in the being of Shakespeare. But Shelley was drowned in the Mediterranean at the age of thirty. Had he lived on earth the other twenty-two years, who can presume to guess what he would or would not have been or done ? On the 4th of August, 1792, at Field Place in Sussex, the seat of his father, Timothy Shelley, was born Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose lot it was, through the light of resplen- dent poetic genius, to make an ancient and honorable name forever illustrious. He was called Percy after an aunt distantly connected with the Northumberland family. Ambition of aristocratic affiliation must have been in- ordinate, even desperate, when an aunt's being " distantly connected " with (not related to) the house of Northumberland was seized upon in order to give the infant heir of the Shelleys the semblance of relationship to the famous Percys. And see the irony of fate." If by such spasmodic effort anybody would get a flitting glimmer of glory, it was not to be the house of Shelley that this baptismal act would serve, but the house of Northumberland, thenceforth presumed to have some kinship to the exalted 132 SHELLEY. poet. To another poet, the greatest of poets, to the transfiguring pen of Shakespeare, this house owes most of its historic renown and all of its immortality." In pertinacity of will, in dauntless courage, Shelley is not unlike his namesake, Shakespeare's great Harry. The name of Bysshe the poet had from his paternal grandfather, who, born in 1731, was made a baronet in 1806. Bysshe was re- markably handsome, tall, courteous, and clever. He eloped with two heiresses of good family, and thereby strengthened his interest in his county, and at the same time so enlarged his pecuniary basis, that, by economy and shrewd management, he was enabled to leave at his death in 18 15 ^300,000 in the funds and an estate in land that yielded ,£20,000 a year. The man who, beginning poor, piled up such a fortune and got himself made a baronet, de- serves to be called the refounder of his family. Money and influence got him a title, and the title added "to his influence and dignified his wealth. Sir Bysshe Shelley's eldest son, Timothy, born in 1753, married in 1791 Elizabeth Pil- fold, a woman of rare beauty. Of their six children, two sons and four daughters, all SHELLEY. 133 beautiful, the poet was the first-born. Timo- thy Shelley was a commonplace country gen- tleman, not cultivated, a little pompous on occasion, hospitable and kindly, and a good landlord. One wonders how a mind so unil- luminated could be the immediate -precedent of m a mental blaze. Lightning transpierces dense ■material without coruscation ; and so the de- ■ scending stream of genius passes through, without kindling the brain that is not its des- tined point of discharge, to explode at the next human stage in a burst of electric life. The poet's mother, besides being beautiful, is said to have been of a mild and liberal nat- ure, intelligent, with some culture. In her talent for letter-writing she gave token of lit- erary capacity. . More akin was the poet to his grandfather than to his father. Sir Bysshe had mental power ; he could take the initiative, and he was independent in his speculative opinions. His son Timothy he did not like, and would at times curse him to his face. At the begin- ning of the present century the manners of English gentlemen were coarser than they are now. Timothy did not go to the trouble of having speculative opinions ; he was a con- 134 SHELLEY. formist and a nominal Christian. Like his father he swore roundly at times, and like him was somewhat penurious. As was the case with most of his class at that day, in morals his model was Lord Chesterfield, whom he at- tempted to imitate ; he told his son Percy that he would provide for any number of illegiti- mate children, but would not forgive a mesal- liance. One could linger on the lives of the imme- diate progenitors of the poet, and delve far back into genealogy, if the search could yield any light on the mystery of poetic genius ; but this celestial fire is as untraceable to its origin as it is incommunicable when present. Of Shelley's earliest years nothing is re- corded, nor could there be much to record. To mothers and genuine nurses no two infants are alike, any more than to shepherds are any two sheep ; nevertheless, with their little ways and doings, their tears and smiles, they can- not in their callowness have much individual- ity, and, like spring buds in an orchard, their bloom is quickly swallowed up by devouring sapful growth. Happily Shelley, as he was in boyhood from his seventh to his tenth year and later, is SHELLEY. I35 brought before us in the recollections of one of his sisters. A beautiful boy, with large blue eyes, his head covered with ringlets, a slender figure and finely formed hands and feet, he was uncommonly intelligent, gentle, loving, and beloved by every one. Delight in the marvelous, a hunger to know, interest in the transearthly, showed themselves in these early years, and, backed by his daring spirit, made him a fearless questioner, an ar- dent investigator. Already the invisible world had great charm for him. As a boy he was haunted by curiosity about death. He longed to see a ghost. He was ever on the watch to catch some glimpse into the mysteries of nat- ure. In that wild, beautiful poem, A las tor, or the Spirit of Solitude, written in his early manhood, in an opening passage addressed to the "Mother of this unfathomable world," he says : " I have made my bed In charnels and on coffins, where black death Keeps record of the trophies won from thee, Hoping to still these obstinate questionings Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost, Thy messenger, to render up the tale Of what we are. In lone and silent hours, When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness, Like an inspired and desperate alchymist I36 SHELLEY. Staking his very life on some dark hope, Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks With my most innocent love." At Field Place there was a large garret, and a room which had been closed for years except an entrance made by the removal of a board in the garret floor. This mysterious room Bysshe made the abode of an old alchemist with a long beard. To his sisters, on and about his knees, listening breathless with a " pleasant dread," Bysshe would, evening after evening, weave out of his boy's brain wonderful stories of this magician, promising them that "some day" they should go and see him. Then he would make them enact strange tales, dressing them as spirits and fiends. A little later, when with premature curiosity he had taken to chemistry, he nearly set fire to the laundry with his experiments. He would collect his sisters and as many other children as he could, place them hand in hand around the nursery-table, and give them a shock with an electric machine. His memory was astonishing ; as a child of eight or nine years he recited Gray's lines on the Cat and the Goldfish, after once reading them. At the bidding of his father he would repeat pieces of Latin verse. SHELLEY. I37 His sister relates that he was " full of cheer- ful fun, and had all the comic vein so agreeable in a household." This is noteworthy ; it tends to show what was his essential nature. At home with his sisters and mother, he was cheerful, ready with playful tricks, happy as boys are. At school he came in contact with the coarseness and tyranny of the world, and, being refined, independent, and, though gentle, not acquiescent, contact turned into conflict. An earnest seeker after hidden and forbidden knowledge so early as ten, his mind was in ad- vance of his years. At Sion House, a private academy in Brentford, he kept aloof from boys' games ; for him physical sports had no attrac- tion. Already in his brain were fermenting the juices from which were to be distilled some of the most poetically-perfumed pages in our language. The prescribed lessons he mastered without effort. Greek and Latin he seemed to learn by intuition. Shelley was precocious as boy and as man ; he was ahead of his school-fellows, far ahead of his fellow-men. Ever reaching forward for more and better than was around him, instead of sympathy he met with frowning opposition. To one of his nature it was a joy to give pleas- 138 SHELLEY. ure, and he was ever giving offense. The prod- uct of his life here turns out to be a source of delight to all who can value whatever is best in literature ; but as to himself, he was uncom- fortably misplaced. Ever on the stretch after something purer and higher than he found about him, he was in boyhood and in youth so much in conflict with persons and institutions, that he seemed like one astray on the earth. Shelley was occasionally subject to somnam- bulism. Thi^ began so early as his tenth year. Within the sleepwalker are mysterious agen- cies that move him, that guide him safely along precipices with his eyes shut, and empower him to act and speak beside himself, as it were. For the time a passive instrument, when he awakes he has no consciousness of what hap- pened in the sleepwalking state. As boy, as youth, as man, Shelley had a yearning towards the world of spirits. He watched and prayed to see a ghost. This was an unlikeness to his companions that would help to isolate him. Poets, the higher poets, are inspired media for the annunciation and presentation of beauty and truth. Inspiration descends upon the poet. By mere effort of will he cannot write a line ; he is dependent SHELLEY. 139 on his Muse. An ideal presentation of the poet were an upturned countenance listening with dreamy, intelligent joy. The poet, the genuine poet, he who is liable to inspiration, is conscious that fresh thoughts, new combina- tions, flashes of beauty, come to him suddenly, unsought for, unbidden, come, he knows not whence. Shelley's world was within ; but thence he drew inspirations to nourish his aims in the outward world. In these aims there was no self-seeking. At school — and the lesson is repeated at college — boys are taught, with ingenious method, to be selfishly ambitious. The universal system of extreme competition of itself embodies this teaching, and insures its success. Who can make the best show is the best man. And the instruction is bettered at home, most parents being in full accord with the intellectually superior mother who, being asked -as to her son at school, whether he was fulfilling her expectations, answered : " Yes : he is ambitious, and that, you know, is every- thing." Now Shelley was not ambitious. The aim, the earnest aim, of his manhood and his youth, aye, and of his boyhood, was to better his mind, 140 SHELLEY. to emancipate his fellows. More light in him- self and other men, not more power for him- self that he might rule other men, this was his incessant desire. All his pulses throbbed with love, and therefore he hated tyranny, and he instinctively felt that ambition is the root of tyranny. Had ever a noble life so young a consciousness of its destiny ? Did ever a great man take so early a resolution to be benefi- cent ? Did ever a benefactor leap in boyhood into his high career ? Shelley was about twelve years of age when he made that lofty — stern shall I call it ? — vow : " I will be wise, And just, and free, and mild, if in 'me lies Such power." But the whole passage should be given. Of- ten as it may have been read, it will bear read- ing again, and should be quoted in full, as it describes a most important moment in the life of Shelley : " Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear Friend, when first The clouds which wrap this world from youth did pass. I do remember well the hour which burst My spirit's sleep : a fresh May-dawn it was, When I walked forth upon the glittering grass, And wept, I knew not why ; until there rose, From the near school-room, voices, that, alas ! SHELLEY. 141 Were but one echo from a world of woes — The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes. " And then I clasped my hands and looked around — But none was near to mock my streaming eyes, Which poured their wan drops on the sunny ground — So without shame I spake : ' I will be wise, And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies Such power, for I grow weary to behold The selfish and the strong still tyrannize Without reproach or check.' I then controlled My tears, my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold. " And from that hour did I with earnest thought Heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore, Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught I cared to learn, but from that secret store Wrought linked armour for my soul, before It might walk forth to war among mankind. Thus power and hope were strengthened more and more Within me, till there came upon my mind A sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I pined." Shelley was always going out of himself. So deep, and so beautiful in its depths, is hu- man nature, so wonderful in its composite ele- ments and seeming contradictions, that there is no truth more solid and prolific than this, that the surest, happiest way of serving one's self is to forget one's self. Shelley began when young to practice this profound truth. As a boy he had the wish to be helpful to 142 SHELLEY. others. When not much more than a child himself he took a sort of paternal interest in children. His sister relates how he wanted to purchase a little girl to bring her up into better conditions. A tumbler, who came to the back door at Field Place to perform her feats, at- tracted his attention for this purpose. A boy had no means of setting a practical hand to such a project, but his heart was in it. When he went to see his sisters at the boarding- school in Clapham he would ask questions about their comfort. One day his ire was roused at finding one of them with a black mark hung about her neck for some slight of- fense. His wrath was more against the sys- tem than that his sister should be so punished. At the age of fourteen or fifteen his clear pure intuitions told him that for the healthfullest unfolding of the faculties in youthful education more profitable are appeals to the higher feel- ings than to the lower. With all this unjuvenile interest in others, this forward-reaching benevolence, Percy was a thorough boy in animal spirits and fondness for fun. On one occasion he came to the school with the elders of the family, and was so full of pranks that the assistance of his SHELLEY. 143 cousin Harriet Grove, his first love, had to be invoked to keep the wild boy quiet. He was fifteen when sent to Eton. At the core of Shelley there was an intense fire that heated his impulses to irresistible momentum, and projected him into manhood prematurely in certain directions. At Eton he was a de- fiant member of the institution. He defied his teachers by chafing against their rule, and by neglecting their imposed exercises, giving his time to translating Pliny's Natural History, and to getting an insight into the mysteries of chemistry and electricity. He defied his school-fellows by standing aloof from their games and sports, by exceptional studies, and more than all by resistance to the fagging system, against which he tried to organize re- volt. Fagging, whereby the younger boys were made to do the hests of the older, even at times in menial offices, was the result of ar- istocratic privilege, which fosters a domineer- ing spirit, combined — strange as this may sound — with a British love of freedom, whose spirit tends by no means to equality, but to each one being free to exercise his powers as he pleases and can. A satirist might say that this combination was soldered together by 144 SHELLEY. English animalism, which is sometimes bru- tality. Wanting the bold spirits who take the initi- ative in resisting tyranny and abuses, civili- zation would stagnate, its vitality smothered under formalism and usurpation. The most glorious and venerable figures in history are they whose sounder instincts and clearer vis- ion made them beneficent prophets, and whose courageous speech made them martyrs for truth, through the ignorance and obliquity of their contemporaries. The directors of Eton were too obtuse, and too much ruled by routine in place of principle, to take a hint from the preference of their brightest scholar for natural history, a scholar so bright that without effort he was at the same time one of the foremost in Greek and Latin. The great soul of Shelley revolted against the odious practice of fagging, and by his courage and the individual force of his per- sonality he successfully resisted its application to himself. His school-fellows would sometimes goad him into a momentary rage, and then run away : their offensive mischievousness he re- quited by helping them with their tasks. The SHELLEY. 145 boys of his own age are said to have been de- voted to him ; but it is the nature and fate of high gifts to isolate their possessor. That which is the source of new revealments of beauty and life, for the delight and profit of millions through the ages, is often the cause of unpopularity and even odium among con- temporaries. At Eton, Shelley was sometimes called the "mad Shelley." Genius, having few fellows, is at first cut off from one of the sweet- est joys of humanity, fellow-feeling. This is the price paid for its superiority. Shelley may be accounted rarely fortunate in that he found in one of his teachers a sympathizing friend. Dr. Lind, a tutor at Eton, appreciated and loved him, encouraged him in his fondness for chemistry, and assisted him in the study. What a boon was this sympathy to his young, warm, hungering heart, already dimly athrob with the coming music of Prometheus and Ado- nais. The gratitude of Shelley has given Dr. Lind a twofold immortality, in the form of re- vered sages, one in the Revolt of Islam, the other in Prince Athanase, where he is thus presented : " Prince Athanase had one beloved friend ; An old, old man, with hair of silver white, 10 146 SHELLEY. And lips where heavenly smiles would hang and blend With his wise words, and eyes whose arrowy light Shone like the reflex of a thousand minds." In Shelley " love and life were twins." Love will ever be giving, and in all ways during his whole life Shelley was a giver. When, just before leaving Eton, he received from a publisher forty pounds for Zastrozzi, a novel, he spent most of the money in giving a supper to eight of his young friends. Zas- trozzi, written at the age of seventeen, is de- scribed as an extravagant tale, without sub- stance or form. At this early age Shelley dashed courageously into the battle-field of authorship. That he was as crude as he was young, we learn from this, that his favorite poets were Southey and Monk Lewis, and that he delighted in Mrs. Radcliffe's romances. He and his sister Elizabeth offered to Mathews a play of their joint production, which was at once declined. When he was eighteen he sent a poem to Thomas Campbell for his opinion of it. Campbell returned it with the comment that there were only two good lines in it : " It seemed as if an angel's sigh Had breathed the plaintive symphony." At this time the beautiful earnest youth SHELLEY. 147 seems to have so magnetized the publisher Stockdale as to make him the instrument of bringing into the world volumes that were, as merchantable wares, of very little value. As Mr. Symonds, in his admirable Life of Shel- ley, says : " Throughout his life Shelley exer- cised a wonderful fascination over the people with whom he came in contact, and almost always won his way with them as much by personal charm as by determined and impas- sioned will." Between Shelley's quitting Eton and his entering Oxford there is an interval of many months. He is said to have left Eton ab- ruptly, withdrawn to avoid expulsion. This may have been. A youth of seventeen, ten- der, yearning for love and finding little, disin- terested, wrathful at injustice, premature in mental capacity, with the insight and impul- siveness of genius, and with that unreserve which is sometimes an attendant upon genius, wanting in worldly self-restraint and prudence, would, in a public school such as Eton then was, inevitably be a protester and a rebel. But his revolt was the opposite of Lucifer's ; it was a revolt, not against God but against the Devil, not against good but against evil. Shel- 148 SHELLEY. ley ever chafed at unjust inequalities. The world around him — and Eton was a type of the world — bristled with such inequalities, was encrusted with the obstructive indurations of custom, was offensive with soulless formali- ties and pedantries, with fat pretensions and lean performance, with lies that would pass themselves off for truth. This chapter cannot be more fitly closed than with a letter from a friend and school-fel- low of Shelley. Mr. Halliday, one can discern in his beautiful letter, is a clear-minded, sound- hearted, genial gentleman, whose name, as that of one of the few who loved and valued Shelley, deserves to be associated with that of the immortal poet. Glenthorne, February 27, 1857. My dear Madam, — Your letter has taken me back to the sunny time of boyhood, " when thought is speech, and speech is truth ; " when I was the friend and companion of Shelley at Eton. What brought us together in that small world was, I suppose, kindred feelings, and the predominance of fancy and imagination. Many a long and happy walk have I had with him in the beautiful neighborhood of dear old SHELLEY. I49 Eton. We used to wander for hours about Clewer, Frogmore, the Park at Windsor, the Terrace ; and I was a delighted and willing listener to his marvelous stories of fairy-land, and apparitions, and spirits, and haunted ground ; and his speculations were then (for his mind was far more developed than mine) of the world beyond the grave. Another of his favorite rambles was Stoke Park, and the picturesque churchyard, where Gray is said to have written his Elegy, of which he was very fond. I was myself far too young to form any estimate of character, but I loved Shelley for his kindliness and affectionate ways : he was not made to endure the rough and boisterous pastime at Eton, and his shy and gentle nature was glad to escape far away to muse over strange fancies, for his mind was reflective, and teeming with deep thought. His lessons were child's play to him, and his power of Latin versification marvelous. I think I re- member some long work he had even then commenced, but I never saw it. His love of nature was intense, and the sparkling poetry of his mind shone out of his speaking eye, when he was dwelling on anything good or great. He certainly was not happy at Eton, 150 SHELLEY. for his was a disposition that needed especial personal superintendence, to watch, and cher- ish, and direct all his noble aspirations, and the remarkable tenderness of his heart. He had great moral courage, and feared nothing but what was base, and false, and low. He never joined in the usual sports of the boys, and, what is remarkable, never went out in a boat on the river. What I have here set down will be of little use to you, but will please you as a sincere, and truthful, and humble tribute to one whose good name was sadly whispered away. Shelley said to me, when leaving Ox- ford under a cloud : " Halliday, I am come to say good-by to you, if you are not afraid to be seen with me ! " I saw him once again, in the autumn of 1 8 14, in London, when he was glad to introduce me to his wife. I think he said he was just come from Ireland. You have done quite right in applying to me direct, and I am only sorry that I have no anecdotes, or letters, of that period, to furnish. I am yours truly, Walter S. Halliday. II. At the age of eighteen Shelley entered Ox- ford, an impassioned lover of his cousin, Har- riet Grove. A boyish fancy had deepened into ardent devotion. They had corresponded for some time, and looked upon themselves as en- gaged. About the period that Shelley went to Oxford some startling speculative opinions in one of his letters alarmed Harriet and her parents, and loosened the tie between them, which was entirely severed some months later on his expulsion from college. Shelley was matriculated as a commoner of University College, Oxford, towards the end of October, 1810. His first appearance is thus described by a fellow-freshman, who happened to sit next to him at the dinner-table in the college hall : " His figure was slight, and his aspect re- markably youthful, even at our table, where all were very young. He seemed thoughtful and absent. He ate little, and had no acquaintance with any one. I know not how it was that we 152 SHELLEY. fell into conversation, for such familiarity was unusual, and, strange to say, much reserve prevailed in a society where there could not possibly be occasion for any. We have often endeavored in vain to recollect in what man- ner our discourse began, and especially by what transition it passed to a subject suffi- ciently remote from all the associations we were able to trace. The stranger had ex- pressed an enthusiastic admiration for poetical and imaginative works of the German school. I dissented from his criticisms. He upheld the originality of the German writings. I as- serted their want of nature." They got at once into a warm discussion on the comparative merits of German and Italian literature, talking, as most young and some older men will, earnestly and dogmatically of matters about which they knew little or noth- ing, as both afterwards confessed to one an- other. After dinner Shelley's new acquaint- ance proposed to him that they adjourn to his room. Here Shelley went off with like zeal into a eulogy of the physical sciences, espe- cially chemistry, of which, however, he knew something. His companion gives a picture of him as he appeared on that evening which has the lifelike look of a sun-portrait : SHELLEY. 153 " His features were not symmetrical (the mouth, perhaps, excepted), yet was the effect of the whole extremely powerful. They breathed an animation, a fire, an enthusiasm, a vivid and preternatural intelligence, that I never met with in any other countenance. Nor was the moral expression less beautiful than the intellectual ; for there was a softness, a deli- cacy, a gentleness, and especially (though this will surprise many) that air of profound relig- ious veneration, that characterizes the best works, and chiefly the frescoes (and into these they infused their whole souls), of the great masters of Florence and of Rome." He discoursed long about chemistry, some- times sitting, sometimes standing befcre the fire, sometimes pacing up and down the room. When the clocks struck seven he said suddenly that he must go to a lecture on mineralogy, from which, he said warmly, he expected great pleasure and instruction. His host's invitation to return to tea he gladly accepted ; then, snatching up his cap, he hurried out of the room, and his footsteps were heard as he ran through the silent quadrangle and along High Street. In an hour again were heard the footsteps 154 SHELLEY. of one running quickly. Shelley burst into the room, and, shivering while he rubbed his hands over the fire, declared how much he had been disappointed. Few were there and the lecture was dull, languid. " What did the man talk about ? " asked the host. " Stones ! stones ! About stones, stones, stones, nothing but stones ! and so dryly. It was wonderfully tiresome." Stones instead of bread are what even earth- iest plodders are liable to receive, especially in youth ; but to their buoyant brothers, the ideal- ists, the stones are heavier and harder, and come oftener, even into manhood and age, for, to the last, your idealist hugs the visions of his poetic brain. This dull lecture was but a peb- ble to some of the stones already thrown at Shelley and to many yet to be thrown. But if they wounded, they never crushed, nor even embittered him. In his soul there was a fer- vor and force that bore him up, while the ideal- ist found a twofold utterance, in speech and in deeds. His deeds were fragrant with the poetry of disinterestedness, generosity, noble- ness, love. His poetry is enriched with the gold of truth and wisdom. The substantiality of Shelley's poetry is not at first apparent, ow- SHELLEY. 155 ing to flowers and garlands of blooming imagi- nations that hang thick about it, just as the countless ribbed lines and delicate tracery- mask the solidness of a great cathedral, while they give lightness to its spire and upstretch- ing arches. The fellow-student with whom Shelley thus became intimate in a day was Thomas Jeffer- son Hogg, to whose graphic pen we owe, what is a priceless legacy to posterity, a picture of Shelley's short Oxford life, and of his first years afterwards. The two became insepara- ble friends, talked and read and strolled to- gether, day and night. Hogg was a positivist, who gave in to no imaginative flights, a dry, somewhat caustic humorist. He became in after years an eminent lawyer and staunch tory, but seems to have seized at once the greatness of Shelley. Among the books they read, together was Plato, who is so full of charm and light to those of the thoughtful who are spiritually-minded. To take up with all his soul any theory that struck him favorably was the way with Shel- ley's earnest, zealous nature. Plato's doc- trine of preexistence delighted him. To chil- dren it gave a mysterious significance. One 156 SHELLEY. day, after a long session over Plato, sallying out for their daily walk, they met on Magda- len Bridge a woman with a child in her arms. " Will your baby tell us anything about pre- existence, madam ? " said Shelley, with an ear- nestness which for a moment alarmed the mother, who made no reply. Shelley repeated the question in the same tone, looking wist- fully at the child. " He cannot speak, sir," said the mother serenely. " Worse and worse," cried Shelley, with a look of disappointment, pathetically shaking his long hair about his beautiful young face. "But surely the babe can speak if he will, for he is only a few weeks old ; he cannot have forgotten the use of speech in so short a time." It was a fine placid boy, who looked up and smiled. Shel- ley lovingly pressed the fat cheeks with his fingers, ejaculating, as they walked away, " How provokingly close are these new-born babes ! But it is not the less certain, notwith- standing the cunning attempts to conceal the truth, that all knowledge is reminiscence." In Hogg's account of this Platonic inter- view with one of the latest comers from ante- natal realms, there is one omission. He gives no hint that this was subtle humor. Shelley SHELLEY. 157 was in earnest play with Plato's fanciful theory. Such play is the surest and quickest means of stripping a proposition of its plausibilities, and of showing whether it be a truth or a preten- sion. Tossing it up into the glancing rays of humor lets in upon it side lights and cross lights that help much to reveal its real nature. Shelley could not have written Don Quixote, but earnest as life was to him, he not only had buoyancy to rise mentally above its realities, which he was, indeed, too prone to do, but from this elevation to seize the absurd and gaze at it, not with scorn, but with sympa- thetic pity. Humor might be defined as a ten- der, gay efflorescence out of the spiritual fac- ulties. It has a poetic element, but all great poets are not, by virtue of their creative gift, susceptible of humor; witness Dante, Milton, Wordsworth. A very good man may be with- out humor, but a bad man is inherently inca- pable of it ; his earnestness is a selfish, not a spiritual earnestness. Did Bonaparte ever ex- hibit a ray of humor ? Humor develops itself somewhat late. Shelley gives evidence of it in Peter Bell the Third, and in Swellfoot the Tyrant. Shelley's being was founded on love, fed 158 SHELLEY. upon love. His life-blood was quickened by- love, he yearned for love in order to grow, to put forth his flowers, to ripen his fruit, to out- fill his high, beautiful stature. There was no love at Oxford ; instead of love were academic rules. Here was a warm, a very warm, hu- man being, a most loving and most lovable young man of eighteen, blooming into man- hood, sparkling with intelligence, glowing with affectionateness. Cold, and bleak, and hard was everything about, above him. Among the tutors and professors and head masters not a soul that cared to gauge the throb of this great soul. Among the numerous staff of university officers there was not one who thought of dismounting from his old spavined steed of routine to go forward and question this new recruit. No, indeed, the system was military in its impersonality. Here was a chief seat of learning on the earth, a temple of the Muses, overhung by the halo of religious consecration. And now within its walls, just inscribed as a fresh mem- ber, was a youth, athirst, beyond his age, for knowledge, ready, eager to learn, eager to be taught, outreaching toward the unknown, long- ing for recognition by invisible power, looking SHELLEY. 159 earnestly for a sign from above. But the signs at Oxford were all from below, a little heavenliness smothered under veils of earthi- ness, fat places and mechanical performance, in the religion no soul, and thence in the life no daily beauty. When a student at Cam- bridge Wordsworth became disgusted with the hollowness of his superiors. His biogra- pher and nephew, the Rev. C. Wordsworth, intending to give a playful blow to his uncle's presumption, says : " The youthful undergrad- uate looked down upon some of his instruct- ors." Bad is it for the pupil when he has a right to look down upon his teachers, but worse for the teachers. Youths, nineteen out of twenty, are willing, are rejoiced, to be taught. Could Shelley, that young visionary Plato, have found a genial Socrates, how he would have loved him, and listened to him, and revered him ! We saw what Dr. Lind was to him and he to Dr. Lind. To a fit teacher at Oxford, Shelley would have been docile, pliable, grateful. With what hope he went to the lecture on mineralogy ! With what disappointment he came back from it! Hungry for bread, they gave him stones ; eager for principles, for the reason of things, l6o SHELLEY. they gave him the dryest facts. And so throughout. What, for his unfolding and strengthening, the youth entering manhood primarily needs, and the poet especially needs, is sympathy, rec- ognition, appreciation through the heart. His friend Hogg thus eloquently describes the pas- sionate, joyful expectation with which Shelley approached an ancient volume of promise : " His cheeks glowed, his eyes became bright, his whole frame trembled, and his entire attention was immediately swallowed up in the depths of contemplation. The rapid and vigorous con- version of his soul to intellect can only be com- pared with the instantaneous ignition and com- bustion, which dazzle the sight, when a bundle of dry reeds, or other light inflammable sub- stance, is thrown upon a fire already rich with accumulated heat." If, instead of an old volume, there had been a new living man to read ! If among his Ox- ford teachers a single one had to this glowing uplooking youth put forth a friendly hand, had opened to him a sympathetic heart ! To the poet — and Shelley had in him the material for one of the greatest of poets — the most attractive, the most influential, of created be- SHELLEY. l6l ings is an able, soulful man. The poet's priv- ilege it is to be drawn with resistless force to the works of God, to outward nature and in^ ward nature, and a soulful man is God's mas- terpiece. To a Shelley what was a formal, reserved, distant tutor or professor ? This youth was full of sap : he wanted sunshine to help it to mount, and these people were full of shade and chill. Years after this period, a gentleman meeting Shelley at a social party, and seeing him uncomfortable, remarked that there must be something wrong about such gatherings when a man like Shelley was glad to get away from them. But the social instinct is irrepres- sible, and ought not to be repressed. People ought to hold such meetings although a Shel- ley does not feel comfortable at them. Goethe has a playful fling at them. A scholar, he re- lates, having been persuaded to go to such a party, on being asked afterwards how he liked the company, answered, " Were they books I would not read them." But the one social gathering was not gotten up to please the scholar, nor the other to give enjoyment to Shelley ; whereas, Oxford was gotten up to instruct and unfold youth, and here was the 1 62 SHELLEY. brightest of youths, in whom there was more to unfold than in any other youth at that day within the confines of the British Isles, and him Oxford expelled. Shelley was a diligent reader, an indefatiga- ble student, but not in the beaten track of col- lege exercises. Besides Plato he read Locke and Hume, and their followers, the French materialists. A youth who enjoyed the verse of Southey and Monk Lewis and delighted in Mrs. Radcliffe was still young in judgment. For a time the materialists took him captive. Like other ardent natures, Shelley concen- trated upon what he took in hand all the pow- ers of his mind. He assailed a subject as with the focused flame of a blowpipe. He poured the intensest warmth of his faculties upon a question to make it yield more light. He was not merely a seeker, but a high-strung seeker, of knowledge and truth. He wrote letters to noted people, strangers to him, to open discus- sions on topics that for the time absorbed him. In this spirit, under the temporary influence of Hume, he penned and printed, for private circulation, two or three pages of reasoning which he called The Necessity of Atheism. This trifle (for such it was notwithstanding the ter- SHELLEY. 163 rible aspect it wore) a Fellow of another col- lege took to the Head of Shelley's college. The Head (where was the Heart ?) called to- gether his Fellows. They passed a decree ex- pelling Shelley, engrossed it in due form, and sealed it with the college seal. They then summoned Shelley, and asked him if he was the author of the pamphlet. Upon his refus- ing to answer : " Then you are expelled," said the Head Master, " and I desire you to quit the college early to-morrow morning at the latest." They handed him the sealed packet, and he left them. Thus, through the soulless blunder of one of her colleges, Oxford snatched from the glittering intellectual diadem that encircles her venerable brow its brightest jewel, and trampled it in the mud. Were these Fellows and their chief Chris- tians ? They believed themselves to be, and on the street and in the halls they passed for model Christians. O Christ ! in thy holy name what absurd and what diabolical deeds have been, and continue to be, enacted. The devil- self weaves so dark a veil about the soul that the angel-self is nearly smothered into blind- ness. How could these Fellows pray to " our Father which art in Heaven," so unfatherly 164 SHELLEY. and cruel were they to one of God's heaven- liest children ! What sense of responsibility had they, except to that cold corporate ab- straction, University College ? To their pride- stuffed pharisaic ears were inaudible the beat- ings of the warm pulse of an ingenuous, as- piring youth. The Roman satirist's profound words, maxima debetur puero reverentia, were shallow paganism to their unchristian hearts. For this beautiful youth, with his angelic coun- tenance, who stood before their judgment-seat they had as much fellow feeling as the scribes around Pilate had for the culprit Jesus. With covetous looks they eyed him as a choice vic- tim. They wanted to show their power, they wanted to show their piety, they wanted to show their academic virtue. And those aca- demic laws, were they made for the young col- legians or the young collegians for them ? The executors of those laws, was it designed that their relation to undergraduates should be that of sympathetic protectors, of paternal guard- ians, of kindly helpers ? This act looked as though, whatever was their original design, they were become like self-absorbed spiders that greedily spin and stretch their web to catch unwary wanderers. SHELLEY. 165 Here is Hogg's report of Shelley's account of what happened : " It was a fine spring morning on Lady-day, in the year 181 1, when I went to Shelley's rooms ; he was absent ; but before I had col- lected our books he rushed in. He was terri- bly agitated. I anxiously inquired what had happened. " ' I am expelled,' he said, as soon as he had recovered himself a little, ' I am expelled ! I was sent for suddenly a few minutes ago ; I went to the common room, where I found our master, and two or three of the Fellows. The master produced a copy of the little syllabus, and asked me if I were the author of it. He spoke in a rude, abrupt, and insolent tone. I begged to be informed for what purpose he put the question. No answer was given : but the master loudly and angrily repeated, " Are you the author of this book ? " If I can judge from your manner, I said, you are resolved to pun- ish me, if I should acknowledge that it is my work. If you can prove that it is, produce your evidence ; it is neither just nor lawful to interrogate me in such a case and for such a purpose. Such proceedings would become a court of inquisitors, but not free men in a free 1 66 SHELLEY. country. " Do you choose to deny that this is your composition ? " the master reiterated in the same rude and angry voice.' Shelley complained much of his violent and ungentle- manlike deportment, saying, ' I have experi- enced tyranny and injustice before, and I well know what vulgar violence is ; but I never met with such unworthy treatment. I told him calmly, but firmly, that I was determined not to answer any questions respecting the publi- cation on the table. He immediately repeated his demand ; I persisted in my refusal ; and he said furiously, " Then you are expelled ; and I desire you will quit the college early to-mor- row morning at the latest." One of the Fel- lows took up two papers, and handed one of them to me ; here it is.' " And this young member of University Col- lege, who had still three years to grow before entering legal manhood, against whom, with- out premonition, was thus suddenly hurled this thunder-bolt of academic power, what were his qualities, his inward dispositions ? His daily companion and friend, T. J. Hogg, describes Shelley as he impressed him at Ox- ford and afterwards, and his description is con- firmed by some of the highest and best men SHELLEY. 167 who knew Shelley during the latter years of his short life. The following are a few of the briefest sentences taken from a number of similar purport found in the pages of Hogg's Life of Shelley. " His speculations were as wild as the ex- perience of twenty-one years has shown them to be ; but the zealous earnestness for the augmentation of knowledge, and the glowing philanthropy and boundless benevolence that marked them, and beamed forth in the whole deportment of that extraordinary boy, are not less astonishing than they would have been if the whole of his glorious anticipations had been prophetic ; for these high qualities, at least, I have never found a parallel." " In no individual, perhaps, was the moral sense ever more completely developed than in Shelley ; in no being was the perception of right and of wrong more acute." " As his love of intellectual pursuits was vehement, and the vigor of his genius almost celestial, so were the purity and sanctity of his life most conspicuous." " I never knew any one so prone to admire as he was, in whom the principle of veneration was so strong." 1 68 SHELLEY. " I have had the happiness to associate with some of the best specimens of gentlemen ; but with all due deference for those admirable persons (may my candor and my preference be pardoned), I can affirm that Shelley was al- most the only example I have yet found that was never wanting, even in the most minute particular, of the infinite and various observ- ances of pure, entire, and perfect gentility." III. To the upright, affectionate, sensitive young poet the decree of expulsion from Oxford was a heavy blow. Its first effect was to incense against him his father, who forbade his return to Field Place. It broke off finally his engage- ment to Harriet Grove ; it arrested his studi- ous reading, which the quiet of Oxford favored ; it put a brand upon his name in the world. Showered as arrows from the deadly quiver of angered Apollo fell suddenly upon him the shafts of adversity. Did he quail, did he suc- cumb ? Can a hurricane blow out the flame of yEtna ? The flame bends, writhes before it. As for Shelley, neither his purposes nor his outward being yielded a jot to this concen- trated storm. In the depths of his being was a fire too strong and too pure that the flame of his life should even waver before the blast of circumstances. A deep glowing soul kept his gait as upright and steady as itself. Only in his love was he stricken. He loved Harriet Grove. That she should give him up wounded 170 SHELLEY. him sorely. Deep compassion, cheered by deeper admiration, holds us as we call up the image of this boy-man, alone in multitudinous London in the summer of 1811, not yet nine- teen, with his tall, slight figure and radiant countenance, a refined, courteous, tender gen- tleman, suddenly bereft of all those outward supports so needful to a youth just passing into manhood, — paternal aid and protection, family sympathy, favor of elders, good-will of friends, — all suddenly snatched from him, and he standing erect, uncrushed, unbowed, undis- mayed. By an image so imposing, one's thought is called off from what the name of Shelley brings before us, his poetry with its inex- haustible imaginations, its aerial nights, its mu- sical reverberations out of the unknown, its sparkling draughts from the fountains of nat- ure, — from all this we are called to gaze with a new admiration at the steadfast manliness, the moral courage, the stoical fortitude, of a youthful figure, wrenched in a moment from its dearest social ties, loosed from all its sweet dependencies. But to a great soul what are the world's animosities ? They are what to the rising sun SHELLEY. I^I is the darkness of a stormy night. To the risen sun the darkness has ceased to be. To the young Shelley, strong and truthful, when he asserted himself, outward adversities were not. Among other hostilities, his father had stopped his allowance. It is said (and the statement is readily credible, so in accord is it with the generous spirit of Shelley's whole life) that at this time he pawned his solar mi- croscope, a pet instrument, in order to relieve a case of distress. In his first disgrace, his sisters sent him their pocket-money. But the stoppage of the allowance did not last long. His father soon relaxed and had him at Field Place, when an arrangement was made where- by he was allowed two hundred pounds a year. Shelley's bearing toward his father was not always what it should have been. In the way he sometimes spoke to him and of him there was a want of filial propriety. Through the Shelleys the paternal stream did not flow clear and steady ; it was liable to obstructions and eddies and turbid eruptions. Sir Bysshe, we have seen, would damn his son Timothy to his face, and though his son did not repay him in verbal coin of the same mintage, his affection 172 SHELLEY. and respect could not be expected to maintain themselves at due filial heat. Timothy, on his part, could not understand his son Percy ; for that he should not be blamed. Many men, with far more insight and culture than he, have failed to understand Shelley. Fully to appreciate him is needed a healthy, genuinely Christian sympathy, allied to poetic insight. The father's obtuseness led to arbitrary or ir- ritating acts. Percy was certainly as right not to heed the paternal advice to get himself converted to the Timothean type of Christian- ity by reading Paley's Evidences, as he was to disregard the hint in the matter of illegitimate children. And now came an event which assuredly would not have come so soon, nor in the form it did come in, but for the dislocation of Shel- ley's life through his expulsion from Oxford, and the consequent frowns of friends and rela- tives, the alienation of Harriet Grove, the dis- satisfaction of his father : I mean his marriage. Among the schoolmates of his sisters was Harriet Westbrook, the daughter of a re- tired London innkeeper. Harriet was very pretty, with a slight figure, a sunny counte- nance, and beautiful hair. She was the me- SHELLEY. 173 dium through whom his sisters conveyed to Shelley the savings from their pocket-money. One day Harriet, accompanied by a much older sister, came to his lodgings to bring this little treasure. He had seen Harriet before. Her name was that of his first love. She too was lovely, not without accomplish- ment. Shelley's heart was still warm with the passion for his cousin. He was a general lover of women. His ideal of woman was high, drawn out of his own rich, pure heart. To him the companionship of woman was a deep need. To a young poet's imagination behind beauty lie all other perfections. Shelley now visited Harriet at her father's house. Such a visitor had never passed that threshold before : a young man of rare per- sonal attractions, and heir to a rich baronetcy. The father and elder sister would not fail to encourage his visits. ' Harriet had an illness which kept her some time at home. Shelley escorted her back to school. She complained to him of bad treatment at home. This of it- self was enough to blow into a matrimonial blaze the delicate flame already kindled in Shelley's heart. He was a man to marry a lovely woman purely out of pity. 174 SHELLEY. It was for both a misfortune, — the union of these two. They were paired, not mated. Harriet had all the qualities to have suitably filled the place of wife to a commonplace, re- spectable citizen. For a fervent, aspiring, in- tellectual poet she was unsuited. Shelley, with his ardor and earnestness, his imaginative dis- course, his air and bearing of refined gentle- manhood, his seraphic beauty of countenance, was irresistible to women. Even with Har- riet's love for him, their marriage might be called superficial, not molded out of solid sen- timent, not grown out of hearty sources. A very pretty, pleasing young woman, whose fam- ily worked to bring about a match with a splen- didly-gifted young man of great worldly ex- pectations. This is not rightly worded — it should be, a match between a boy and a girl, for at the time of their elopement, about the beginning of September, 1811, Shelley was nineteen, Harriet sixteen. They went straight to Edinburgh, where they were married ac- cording to the forms of the Scottish law. The letters of Shelley to his friend Hogg (who was studying law at York) during the summer of 181 1, before the elopement, have great biographical value. They show the in- SHELLEY. 175 genuousness and nobility of Shelley, his chival- rous nature, how easily he could throw him unselfishly out of himself, and they also show that Harriet threw herself upon his protection. Moving about with his bride and her sister Eliza (who had fastened herself upon them), Shelley found himself, in the autumn, at Kes- wick. Here a friendly relation, if not intima- cy, grew up between him and Southey. Even this could not have endured, the two being of opposite, not to say hostile, types. Southey looked more to institutions than to the ideas and principles that underlie them. Shelley struck right for the heart of . a subj ect, its or- igin and cause of being. His own soul was so large and vivid that it ever sought the soul of things. He did not go too much for princi- ples, — that no one can, — but he did not, even later, put their due value upon institutions. In comparison with the mind of Shelley that of Southey was shallow. At Oxford, and even earlier, at Eton, Shel- ley indulged himself in opening epistolary cor- respondence with any one, though a stranger to him, whose book or verses pleased him. Under this impulse he wrote to Felicia Browne, afterwards Mrs. Hemans, who did not encour- 176 SHELLEY. age the interchange of letters. In this way he first became acquainted with Leigh Hunt. He greatly admired Godwin's Political Jus- tice, and while at Keswick he began with its author a correspondence which led to moment- ous consequences. When Shelley visited the Lake region he saw Wordsworth, but Coleridge was absent. This was unfortunate, and Coleridge himself regretted it, thinking that he might have been of service to the young metaphysical poet. Shelley longed for what he seldom got, — sym- pathy. Southey's nature was too shallow and too unlike that of Shelley to have sympathy with him, and Wordsworth was not generous enough to give him much. Coleridge would have felt with him and for him, and this would have so affected Shelley that it might have been a most salutary influence. Like all gen- uine poets, Shelley cut his own track, but he was just the man to have received great fur- therance in the cutting from the brotherly en- couragement and the utterances, at once cor- dial and preeminently intellectual, of so supe- rior a man. Personal intimacy with Coleridge would have steadied his purposes. Through direct, kindly intercourse Coleridge would have SHELLEY. ijj won his confidence, as Godwin did through the indirect intercourse of letters. A distinction of Shelley it is, that more than almost any man of whom we have record, whether philanthropist or martyr, he lived out of himself, serving or striving to serve others. A noble, a celestial distinction is this. The dominant desire of his heart was to help his neighbors, all men. This gives to certain pe- riods of his life a Utopian air. The practical progeny of marriage between a large generous heart and the poetic imagination of an impul- sive youth of twenty would not have much bone and muscle. From Keswick Shelley betook him to Ire- land, with the intent of obtaining for the Irish more political justice than they had yet en- joyed. He wrote, printed, and circulated an Address to the Irish people. As one means of circulation he threw copies of the Address out of his hotel window. Walking out he would thrust one into the hand of any passer whose visage gave promise of sound political senti- ment. One day he convulsed Harriet with laughter by poking one into the hood of a lady. All this was easy to an enthusiastic youth. But had the Address the flightiness and im 178 SHELLEY. practicability of a crude, Quixotic brain ? Far from it. Its chief stress was on Catholic eman- cipation and dissolution of the Legislative union with England. Catholic emancipation, after a long struggle, has since been achieved. Thirty years after Shelley, O'Connell turned a pretty penny (from six to ten thousand pounds a year) by ringing the changes on legislative disunion, and this is now the demand of the Home Rulers. Shelley also spoke (eloquently, it was said) at public meetings, once in the presence of O'Connell and other magnates. The methods he recommended in his Address and speeches were peaceful, not violent. In Shelley there was no bloodthirstiness. In early spring he recrossed the Irish Chan- nel and took a house at Tanyrallt in Carnar- vonshire. While there an unusually high tide broke an embankment, threatening loss and danger to many cottagers. Shelley took the matter up with his love-driven vigor, went about to solicit subscriptions (a hateful duty to one of his spirit), heading the list with five hundred pounds. Owing to his promptness and energy and liberality the embankment was saved. At this time Shelley's yearly in- come was four hundred pounds, his father al- SHELLEY. 179 lowing him two hundred pounds, and Harriet's father the same amount to her. If on similar occasions every man in a com- munity gave a year's income, the consequences would be disastrous, and soon there would be no incomes to give. The watchful activity of the cumulative impulse is a primary element of individual, and therefore of general, welfare, and there is no more likelihood of an over- whelming current setting in against this con- servative principle than there is that children playing round their home should with their little fingers push out its stone foundations. But, for the higher well-being of communities, equally indispensable are self-forgetfulness and self-sacrifice. Gold-capital, important as it is, is less important than spiritual capital. With- out money danger from the breach of the em- bankment would not have been warded off; but in the impulse to head the subscription with five hundred pounds was a spiritual power that gave life to the whole enterprise. The giving of such a sum by Shelley was a splen- did, an angelic, extravagance. Those who pos- sess so much spiritual capital that they can freely commit such extravagances are heav- enly lights that illuminate the earth. Among the courtiers and attendants of Queen Eliza- l8o SHELLEY. beth only Raleigh felt and acted on the impulse to throw down his cloak. Much greater occa- sions there are, calling for infinitely deeper self-sacrifice, when it is immortally becoming in a man to throw down, not his cloak that a Queen may step on it dry-shod, but his body that cottagers may step on it. At rare mo- ments of sympathetic elevation one feels as if upon one's self weighed the burden of human misery. You seem responsible for every case of suffering you meet ; you are ashamed of your own prosperity. To Shelley such mo- ments were not rare. The feeling of unifica- tion with all mankind pressed upon him daily. More than once he arrived at the coach-office at Great Marlow without money to pay his fare, having given all he had about him to poor petitioners on the road between his house and the office, and thus had to go on foot to town. He one day entered the grounds of his neighbor, Mr. Maddocks, without shoes, hav- ing just given his to a poor woman. At the sentence of fine and imprisonment against John and Leigh Hunt for a libel on the Prince Regent, "he boiled with indigna- tion," and offered one hundred pounds towards the support of the Hunts in prison, and twenty- five pounds towards paying the fine. IV. Society, as an organic institution with spir- itual roots, suffers, of course, from violations of its laws. On their observance its well-being depends. In the social organization marriage is a primordial constituent, its inviolability im- perative. In the manful upward swing which throughout Christendom has been made in the past fifty years towards larger liberty, much has been thought and said and written about freedom in love. A relaxation of the laws and usages that now predominate over the re- lations between the sexes would lead, not to more freedom in love, but to more license in lust. Even the most advanced civilized com- munities could not yet bear any loosening of the marital bonds that have been self-imposed for the common security. The profound Fou- rier showed his farsightedness nowhere more clearly than when he declared that freedom in love would be the last freedom achieved, and that only when, through the practical applica- tion of his great discovery of the law of work 1 82 SHELLEY. by groups and series, and the consequent lib- eration of men from most of the oppressions and abuses and perversions and corruptions that now afflict and enslave them, only then would they have become enough purified to be entitled, and able, to enjoy freedom in love. In our present social organization this free- dom would not be a means to such purification, but the reverse, and, instead of liberating any- body, would surely lead to a heavier enthrall- ment and degradation of that sex upon whose virtue chiefly depends the health and beauty of the human race, its physical as well as its moral health and beauty. Than Shelley no man had a purer love and higher respect for woman. In him this love sought a full union, by means of all the facul- ties, between two beings of different sexes, not a partial gratification, the full union involving subjection to the moral and spiritual law, par- tial gratification involving the demoralizing breach of that law. But Shelley, from the very purity of his feelings, as well as from the impetuosity of his nature, was prone to act out hastily his desires and conceptions. Amid so much that is false and foul he was true and sweet, and so true that he was incorruptible. SHELLEY. 183 He longed to admire, and to be lifted by ad- miration. His so early enjoyment of Plato showed what depths of good were in him. He sought for men whom he could love and rever- ence, and he was almost too ready to love and reverence a lovely woman. To a young poet outward loveliness implies inward loveliness. Harriet Westbrook was lovely to look at, nor have we evidence that she was inwardly unlovely ; but she was made of common opaque clay, while Shelley's clay was luminous with glintings of gold. Between the two there was an inherent fatal unfitness. This unfitness might have been, for some time longer at least, smoothed down by a sense of duty on his part and by pliancy on hers, but for Eliza. Eliza Westbrook was, by a dozen years or more, the elder sister of Harriet, one of those prosaic, persistent, self-sufficient persons, ter- rible in a household, whose diabolic function it is to deaden the native glow, to stay the streams, of life in those near them, by fear- lessly taking upon themselves the direction of other people's vital currents. To her Harriet was still but a child in years, and, from Eliza's autocratic bent, had doubtless always been subordinate to her. Moreover, Eliza had done 1 84 SHELLEY. her part to secure " so brilliant a match " for Harriet, and possibly would exaggerate that part and assume upon the exaggeration. Her presence was thus a misfortune to the young married couple. She was a prickly burr that stuck to them, and, at the same time, a wedge that was daily splitting them further asunder. To Harriet Shelley dedicated Queen Mab, his first long poem, written when he had hardly reached legal manhood. Was the dedication, as well as the poem, in his mind when, nearly ten years later, in 1 821, on the occasion of a piratical edition of Queen Mab, he wrote this protest : " I doubt not but that it is perfectly worthless in point of literary composition ; and that in all that concerns moral and political speculation, as well as in the subtler discrim- inations of metaphysical and religious doctrine, it is still more crude and immature. I am a devoted enemy to religious, political, and do- mestic oppression ; and I regret this publica- tion, not so much from literary vanity as be- cause I fear it is better fitted to injure than to serve the sacred cause of freedom." If, instead of being rudely expelled from Ox- ford, Shelley had been treated there with pa- ternal dutifulness, with Christian kindness, it SHELLEY. 185 may be doubted whether Queen Mab would ever have been written. This promising, but juvenile and crude, performance was probably a bravado thrown by a defiant athlete into the teeth of hoary Oxford, — a bravado tempered by rhythmic verse, but flanked by very out- spoken prose in the shape of long, elaborate, heterodox notes, — notes which seventy years ago, in the then tory-and-bishop-ridden, unfa- miliar England, looked dark, minatory, danger- ous, diabolical, damnable. To the present gen- eration, happily more familiar with heretical freedom and the deeps of thought, far more dis- enthralled intellectually and spiritually, these notes wear a very neutral tint, seem threaten- ing only to timid theological laggards, are dan- gerous to nobody, their diabolism having faded before that sun of common sense which has transformed the fearful hoofs and tail of Satan into materials of fun in comic wood-cuts. White horses are harder to match than black : the purer the color, the more apparent and discordant are the differences when paired. Poets, from their deeper and warmer sensibil- ities, which empower them to be spokesmen of humanity, are harder to mate than other men, and suffer more from mismating. Of Shelley's 1 86 SHELLEY. great contemporary peers, one, Keats, died single ; only one, Wordsworth, was happily married ; Coleridge lived the last twenty years of his life parted from his wife ; Byron's wife deserted him. The desertion of a husband by his wife has by no means so bad a look as the desertion of a wife by her husband, man, by his resources and position, being better able to take care of himself, and enjoying the honora- ble privilege of being protector to woman. Documents are said to exist which relieve Shelley from the burden of blame for quitting Harriet. Probably by mutual agreement they separated. But forty days after parting with Harriet, Shelley, on the 28th of August, 18 14, set out from London for Switzerland with Mary. Shelley had somewhat revolutionary theories together with a will and courage to put them into action, — theories which he partly outgrew even before the end of his short life. He was infatuated with the God- wins, he had never loved Harriet with his whole soul, he did so love Mary, who loved him deeply, and was capable of sympathizing with his highest moods, was a pure-minded, high-souled girl, who, as the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, felt no SHELLEY. 187 need of priestly consecration to sanctify her union with the man she loved. She proved herself a good hearty wife to Shelley, worthy of so great a husband ; and he valued and cherished her to the end. Another mismat- ing might have destroyed him. As to Shel- ley's eccentric proceedings with these two young beauties (Mary was only seventeen), it should be borne in mind that he was young, very young, and that to youth certain indul- gences are allowed. Shelley had no carnal wild oats to sow ; he was now sowing his spiritual wild oats. Their bridal tour was as eccentric as their wedding. Unlike similar excursions, it was planned and carried out with severe economy. They started to walk through France, with a mule to carry their luggage, but Shelley hav- ing sprained his ankle, 'they had to provide themselves with a cheap open vehicle. In Switzerland tbey passed some weeks, and then coming down the Rhine to Cologne in a boat, they returned to England in September, 18 14, spending their last guinea to pay the passage from Holland. It was after this trip that Shelley wrote Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude. Alastor 1 88 SHELLEY. is the first poem of any length published by- Shelley ; for Queen Mab was not published, but only printed for private circulation. Alas- tor shows sure advance in literary skill, being written in rapid, musical blank verse. Nor does it attempt to solve problems insoluble by a young man, or even by ripest age. Alastor is entirely subjective. Shelley delighted in wandering; he never set up household gods fixedly anywhere. Alastor is a young poet, " a lovely youth," who early left his " alienated home " to seek strange truths in undiscovered lands, " Gentle, and brave, and generous, — no lorn bard Breathed o'er his dark fate one melodious sigh : He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude. Strangers have wept to hear his passionate notes, And virgins, as unknown he past, have pined And wasted for fond love of his wild eyes. The fire of those soft orbs has ceased to burn, And Silence, too enamored of that voice, Locks its mute music in her rugged cell." He starts on his travel, scattering pearls of poetry along his path. Shelley makes him pass through Greece, and Egypt, and Pales- tine, and Arabia, and Persia, and India ; he " In joy and exultation held his way ; Till in the vale of Cashmire, far within Its loneliest dell, where odorous plants entwine SHELLEY. 189 Beneath the hollow rocks a natural bower, Beside a sparkling rivulet he stretched His languid limbs. A vision on his sleep There came, a dream of hopes that never yet Had flushed his cheek. He dreamed a veiled maid Sate near him, talking in low, solemn tones." To tell dreams is proverbially a bore, and that the relation of this one is the opposite of that proves again how in Art everything is in execution. The sleeping poet has his first love in a dream, and (the old dream-story) just as he is about to clasp in his arms the incompara- ble maiden, she dissolves and the shock wakes him. All the beautiful sights and sounds of the visionary scene suddenly non-existent, on what his waking eyes behold he gazes as va- cantly "As Ocean's moon looks on the moon in Heaven," that lovely form forever lost " In the wide, pathless desert of dim sleep." And now, frantic with anguish, driven by the memory of that dream, he ranges again through vast spaces, the poet depicting with poetic vivacity mountain and gorge and river and lake and forest and cavern. Take this as a sample of the jewels wherewith the narrative is brightened ; he is describing the parasites 190 SHELLEY. " starred with ten thousand blossoms," that clasp the gray bark of a double-trunked tree : " And, as gamesome infants' eyes, With gentle meanings, and most innocent wiles, Fold their beams round the hearts of those that love, These twine their tendrils with the wedded boughs Uniting their close union." At last, weak and worn, he reaches a green recess where human foot had never pressed. There he lies down, and, faintly smiling, breathes his last. The moral to be drawn from A las tor — a moral not then designed by Shelley — is, that it is idle to hope to realize on earth a poet's ideal. Shelley's passion was for the beautiful, his fervent desire was for the perfect good, his de- light was in nature, his rapture in nature's truth and simplicity. He was ever pouring forth admiration, laden with longing for the better, ever " panting for the music which is divine." Hence his lyrical splendor and his lyrical abundance. His brain was an ever heaving ode to beauty and freedom and love. Any event or person or object could become the vent for drawing from this deep, general spring an individual stream of felicitous verse. Like other of his early poems, and some of SHELLEY. igi the later, Alastor is haunted by the shadow of death. One is reminded of that great passage in the Phcedo where Socrates declares that we can only reach that which is the aim of philos- ophy, namely, wisdom, through death. Shelley had a craving to know, to get at the essence of being. Truth, wisdom, were wants of his soul. He had an instinct that death would solve mysteries that are insoluble on earth. He read Plato at Oxford, but before that he longed for intelligence from the world of spirits, as though he felt that they could teach him profound truths. Those sentences of Socrates would arrest Shelley more intently than other read- ers. When in the winter and spring of 181 5 he was writing Alastor he believed that death was hovering about him, and that his days here be- low were numbered. He suffered sharp inter- nal pains. An eminent London physician pro- nounced him to be in a rapid consumption. This was a mistake ; in a year or two these pulmonary symptoms disappeared. He was, moreover, pecuniarily embarrassed, and more than ever isolated. All this deepened the tone of melancholy which would be natural to Shel- ley writing on the Spirit of Solitude. Since 192 SHELLEY. his elopement with Mary the Godwins had ceased to recognize him, and some other friends fell off. But Shelley was a pure great spirit, and therefore not to be bowed by cir- cumstances. No amount of outward pressure could crush or bend that strong soul, with its consciousness of rectitude, its lofty indepen- dence, its masterly force of will. Early in the year 181 5 occurred an event which cannot but gladden the pulse of Shel- ley's biographer, — the decease of a very aged man, grandfather and godfather to the poet. By the death of Sir Bysshe Shelley, his son Timothy succeeded to the estates and title, and Percy Bysshe Shelley became heir-at-law to a rich baronetcy. An arrangement was made whereby the poet received one thousand pounds a year. We venture to surmise that had he been a little more skilled in worldly management, and a little more self-seeking, he could have secured a larger income. Still, an annual sum of one thousand pounds sterling was to a poet in that day comparative wealth. A portion was immediately set apart for Har- riet. Much, no doubt, of his first year's income was preengaged by incumbrances, some of SHELLEY. I93 them incurred to help other people. As to that, however, much of this comfortable pro- vision was preengaged for every year he lived ; for with Shelley life was not life without giv- ing. He lived frugally because it is the part of a sound manly man so to live, and this wis- dom enabled him more freely to practice a still higher wisdom, the wisdom of giving. Shel- ley wanted to keep nothing for himself but the inmost of himself — that, to be sure, was enough to keep. In the spring of 18 16 the Shelleys went again to the Continent, reaching Geneva in May. It happened that a few days after them Lord Byron arrived at the same hotel. Shel- ley and Byron, who now met for the first time, hired villas not far apart, sailed on the lake together, and became as intimate as two young men could be who were so different, so oppo- site, in personal and even in poetic qualities, but who each admired the genius of the other. Goethe said of Byron's Don Juan, that it is too empirical, that is, too much drawn from experience; a just criticism which applies to most of what he wrote. In vain did Byron protest, after the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold, against the inference 13 194 SHELLEY. of the critics that Childe Harold was Byron. But Goethe does not mean merely that Byron drew from personal experience, but that, be- sides, he depended too much upon all kinds of facts and incidents. There was too much of the actual and not enough ideality. In Beppo, Lara, Conrad, Childe Harold, Don Juan, Byron embodied what was easiest to him, himself. It was difficult for him to get away from the self. Self played too domineering a part in his thoughts and life, and therefore in his poetry, and not a high self. In the creative process Byron had not enough of what might be called spiritual and moral momentum to project him much beyond the personal sphere. In poetry no poet can create a character ex- cept out of his own being ; but that character need not be colored by his own peculiar per- sonality, and it will not be so colored if he has a large elevated nature and prodigal mental resources. Imogen and Falstaff, Iago and Cordelia, came out of Shakespeare's being, but they are not tainted with the individuality and the peculiarities and vices of the daily man, William Shakespeare. In the man Shake- speare there was no virus of egotism so per- vasive and irrepressible as to cloud the whole SHELLEY. I95 material the poet handles, so that there gets to be a fatally visible likeness^among his per- sonages, all running into one another like the differently-colored stripes of a badly dyed tis- sue. The whole tissue of Byrpn's poetic char- acterization is thus discolored and clouded. A poet's ideals may ascend beyond himself, but, of course, not beyond his capabilities. Sterne did not draw himself in My Uncle Toby, nor Cervantes himself in Don Quixote, but in these creations they showed their genius for high human ideals, and that- their personal- ity was not so egotistically predominant and obtrusive as to frustrate their attempts to em- body such ideals. Byron belongs to that nu- merous class of men, some of them able men, whose egoism withholds them from the cult- ure and happiness and refreshment of admi- ration. His admirations, such as they were, were by no means directed towards the highest and purest, and his egoism was predominant. Intimacy with Shelley was here of service to him, for Shelley was not only in mind and character superior to any of his previous asso- ciates, but he was a living reality superior to any ideal Byron had ever harbored. If Byron's poetic defect is to fly too near I96 SHELLEY. the earth, too close often to its low places, the defect of Shelley is too much aptitude to soar away from the earth to wooded mountain-tops, and through the clouds towards the stars. As the blood in Byron's personages is of a too dark animal red, that in some of Shelley's lacks the ruddiness of earthly arteries, being too transparent with celestial ichor to suit the best artistic purposes. His imagery is at times too unsubstantial for the grasp of or- dinary perception. He delighted to float away into regions of ever shifting elemental vicissi- tudes and there launch visionary beings on their ethereal careers. Out of his brain he peopled the air. Or, is the air, invisible to grosser senses, alive with sparkling embryos, which his spiritual eye seized and quickened into beautiful shapes ? Shelley is sidereal. His poetry is a superearthly canopy overhang- ing us, glittering with the clear, pure twinkle of stars, and having the beauty and signifi- cance of stars, and sometimes their remoteness. Nevertheless, however distant and aerial is his range, humanity is ever present to his heart. In his verse we catch glimpses of a better, happier future. For a mind to busy itself lov- ingly with the future of man is of itself a high SHELLEY. I97 distinction. Deep within Shelley's being lay a humanity so rich that in following the abun- dant outflow of his hopes and aspirations one is swept towards luminous horizons, glowing vistas as of recovered Paradises. Shelley's im- aginations were fed by the divine influences that unceasingly replenish the pure soul's at- mosphere. V. This summer of 1816 at Geneva was one of the happiest and fullest periods of Shelley's life. Near him, within view, was the sublim- est of Swiss scenery, which he explored, and his dwelling was on the shore of the beauti- ful variegated lake, which he circumnavigated. And he circumnavigated it with Byron. The tour in their boat lasted more than a week. Shelley craved sympathy and congenial companionship, and seldom got either. This was the first time that in his companion he had an equal. The company of Byron was a delight to him. He probably somewhat over- rated Byron's performance in poetry. The difference between Byron's poetry and his own at first led him to see in it more than there was. Among Shelley's blessings was an incapability of envy and jealousy. He ad- mired Byron's verse and enjoyed exchanging thoughts with him. In their talk together, Shelley gave more than he received, for his mind took in principles more readily than By- SHELLEY. I99 ron's, and principles of a higher sweep. Shel- ley, though now only in his twenty-fourth year, had been already drawn to and had en- joyed Plato. Byron, four years older, could at no age have enjoyed Plato. But he enjoyed Shelley, and after an intimacy of six years, of which this was the beginning, he admired and esteemed him more than any man he had ever known. The purity and disinterestedness of Shel- ley's nature made him peculiarly accessible to growth through enjoyment. During these three or four months his splendid faculties ripened rapidly. On the other hand, his im- pulsiveness and boldness (and the boldness came largely from the purity) projected him into positions where, in a community ruled by custom and inherited law (as all enduring com- munities must in large measure be), he was much exposed to calamitous repulses. His warm, enthusiastic temper demanded more than the ordinary course of discipline through trouble. A very large share of such disci- pline fell to him between his fifteenth and his twenty-fifth years. Shortly after his return to England, in 18 16, came the news that Harriet had drowned her- 200 SHELLEY. self in the Serpentine. From Bath, where they were temporarily staying, he hurried up to London. His agony was intense. This event cast on him a shadow, from the gloom of which he never entirely recovered. It could not but be so. Harriet had loved him, had given herself to him unreservedly. At the first shock of such a blow a man of Shelley's sensibility would blame himself unduly. Aft- erwards self-reproach would be overshadowed by a darker feeling, as of a mysterious enmity of fate. With all this would mingle tears of pity for poor Harriet. If, a little later, as was reported, he could say of her suicide that it was the act of a "frantic idiot," this was to hide, even from himself, the depth of his an- guish. A few weeks after the death of Harriet, Shelley and Mary were married. They were two years older than when they joined hands. They were of a quality to grow wiser in that lapse of time. They were living in England, not on a far island which they had all to them- selves. They had had enough of island life ; for the eccentricity of their wedded union had insulated them uncomfortably. A single pair, however pure, cannot contend against the SHELLEY. 201 whole married world. To spit against a strong steady wind is to spit in one's own face. That they should decide to live in Rome somewhat as Romans do, was no sacrifice of principle to expediency. Principle has higher tests than self-gratification through pet theories. Close upon the stunning blow of Harriet's death came another which was the sequent of that. Mr. Westbrook refused to give up to Shelley his and Harriet's two children, and Lord Chancellor Eldon upheld him by a de- cree which took the children out of Shelley's hands on the ground of opinions in Queen Mab and his conduct to Harriet. A stretch of judicial power over individual rights was this, which no tory Lord Chancellor would venture upon to-day. Very hard was it to bear. It wounded Shelley as a parent, it angered him as a citizen ; he felt it as a two- fold outrage, — as a wrong and an indignity. A house at Great Marlow was taken on a long lease by Shelley. There Leigh Hunt visited him, and gives of Shelley's daily life the following account : " He rose early in the morning, walked and read before breakfast, took that meal sparingly, wrote and studied the greater part of the morning, walked and 202 SHELLEY. read again, dined on vegetables (for he took neither meat nor wine), conversed with his friends (to whom his house was ever open), again walked out, and usually finished with reading to his wife till ten o'clock, when he went to bed. This was his daily existence. His book was generally Plato, or Homer, or one of the Greek tragedians, or the Bible, in which last he took a great, though peculiar, and often admiring interest. One of his favor- ite parts was the book of Job." On Shelley's remarkable Essay on Christian- ity Mr. Symonds makes this sound comment : " We have only to read Shelley's Essay on Christianity in order to perceive what rever- ent admiration he felt for Jesus, and how pro- foundly he understood the true character of his teaching. That work, brief as it is, forms one of the most valuable extant contributions to a sound theology, and is morally far in ad- vance of the opinions expressed by many who regard themselves as specially qualified to speak on the subject. It is certain that, as Christianity passes beyond its mediaeval phase, and casts aside the husk of out-worn dogmas, it will more and more approximate to Shel ley's exposition. Here and here only is a vital SHELLEY. 203 faith, adapted to the conditions of modern thought, indestructible because essential, and fitted to unite instead of separating minds of divers quality. It may sound paradoxical to claim for Shelley of all men a clear insight into the enduring element of the Christian creed ; but it was precisely his detachment from all its accidents which enabled him to discern its spiritual purity, and placed him in a true relation to its Founder. For those who would neither on the one hand relinquish what is permanent in religion, nor yet on the other deny the inevitable conclusions of modern thought, his teaching is indubitably valuable. His fierce tirades against historic Christianity must be taken as directed against an ecclesi- astical system of spiritual tyranny, hypocrisy, and superstition, which in his opinion had re- tarded the growth of free institutions, and fet- tered the human intellect. Like Campanella, he distinguished between Christ, who sealed the gospel of charity with his blood, and those Christians who would be the first to crucify their Lord if he returned to earth." That was a model life for a cultivated coun- try gentleman. But there was in it a feature which made it a shining model for a Christian 204 SHELLEY. gentleman. He assiduously helped the needy in Great Marlow ; the sick poor he comforted at their bedsides. In London he had walked the hospitals that he might administer to them. And his charities were not unconsidered ; he inquired personally into the circumstances of those who sought his aid. At the same time his house was hospitably open to friends. Miss Clairmont and her brother were permanent guests with him. At different times he re- lieved Godwin and Hunt and Peacock with loans, or rather, with gifts, in two cases gifts of more than a thousand pounds. At Great Marlow, in his twenty-fifth year, working daily for six months, sometimes in his boat, sometimes on a wooded promontory over- looking the Thames, Shelley wrote The Revolt of Islam. Would a painter represent Shelley in the fervor of poetic activity, he should be able to put on canvas a young man with a countenance of singular beauty, intelligence sparkling through benignity, seated out of doors, in a boat or under ancient oaks, about him from the earth a transparent golden haze, above him a glow of light whence the angels of purity, freedom, beauty, and truth beam upon him celestial influence. Under their SHELLEY. 205 high guardianship and inspiration Shelley ever wrote. In the first period of his brilliant lit- erary career, until his twenty-sixth year, he wrote his longer poems with a distinct moral aim. In the first paragraph of the Preface to The Revolt of Islam he avows : " I have sought ' to enlist the harmony of metrical language, the ethereal combinations of the fancy, the rapid and sudden transitions of human passion, all those elements which essentially compose a poem, in the cause of a liberal and compre- hensive morality ; and in the view of kindling within the bosoms of my readers a virtuous enthusiasm for those doctrines of liberty and justice, that faith and hope in something good, which neither violence nor misrepresentation nor prejudice can ever totally extinguish among mankind." The Revolt of Islam is an historical Epic in twelve Cantos, written in Spenserian stanzas, and making over four thousand five hundred lines. Great though it be as a literary achieve- ment, The Revolt of Islam may be looked upon as a preparatory exercitation. Shelley was here straining his poetic bow to test its elastic strength, running the beautiful Spenserian stanza through the whole gamut of its sweet- 206 SHELLEY. ness and its power. He was whetting his finely-tempered weapons, polishing his brilliant armor, practicing his exuberant fancy, strength- ening the pinions of his ardent imagination, inflaming its boldness, feeding its power, cul- tivating its visionariness, steeping it in the moist rainbow of choice diction, girding his young thoughts with young experience. With his hero he might say : " With the heart's warfare did I gather food To feed my many thoughts, a tameless multitude." The abundance of thoughts is marvelous, not less so is the poetic buoyancy with which they are winged. There is no want of life, passion, movement, rapidity. But there is a want of density in the materials, and in the handling of them some want of organization. The material is not enough historical and at the same time too much so. The -poet wields millions of massed men as though ""hey were single individuals. No human mind can create history ; only God can do that. The Poet's counterpart will lack bone ; there will be no gritty skeleton behind the flesh, giving to the whole and to each limb firmness, expression. The hero of this noble poem hopes by elo* SHELLEY. 207 quent words to inspire a whole semi-barbarous people with the high resolves of his own great soul, and so to lift them into freedom, — a pro- cedure counter to the possibilities of nature as man and politics are constituted. Freedom is a gradual achievement, a very gradual inch by inch conquest, — an achievement which implies ages upon ages of persevering, intelligent en- deavor, of unquenchable aspiration. Growth, and slow growth, is a deep beneficent law. Individual moral freedom is the only stable foundation for general political freedom. All human good must be earned, or it will not be a good. To be sure, in The Revolt of Islam the enterprise fails, and the hero and heroine end in being martyrs. But the story and the inci- dents do not take strong hold of the reader's sympathies. There is not body enough be- hind the splendid vesture. The whole struct- ure is too aerial. Beautiful pictures and scenes, lovely re- cesses, spirit-stirring sentences, fresh figures of speech, poetic glimpses, abound. The flow of high thought, of noble sentiment, is unin- termitted, and is astonishing by its ease, its limpidity, its liveliness, its unbroken music, — music most rhythmical, and so laden with the 208 SHELLEY. breath of wholesome feeling, of manliness, of aspiration, that the reader feels himself, one might almost say, thrilled as by angelic cho- ruses. The twelve Cantos, all palpitating and lustrous with sympathy, with enthusiasm, crowded with felicities of diction, with tune- ful reduplications, are a luminous labyrinth, wherein the admiring reader can wander at will with ever freshened delight. Here the imitative, assimilative poet, who has not the originating soul of Shelley, can feather his own poetic nest, while wondering at the countless gems of spontaneous thought, the ceaseless upspringing of new flowers of poetry. In March, 1818, Shelley, then in his twenty- sixth year, left England for Italy. His health was bad ; the seeming pulmonary symptoms were still present. Over Mary and him there came at times a shudder at the thought that the ruthless Lord Chancellor might with ra- pacious claws pounce upon their two little chicks, as he had upon the other two. (To know how Shelley felt that outrage, read his terrific curse on Lord Eldon, a rhythmic curse of sixteen short stanzas ; also some bitter lines in the Mask of Anarchy) Tyrants and knaves, beware, for your own sakes, how you wound a great poet ! SHELLEY. 209 Shelley's income would go much further in Italy. Generosity and charity kept him always pinched. Then he longed to be in Italy for its glorious self, as well as for its milder cli- mate. Italy told at once favorably upon his health and spirits. Now began his most richly pro- ductive period ; and such a man's chief joy is in literary production. In midsummer he went to Venice to have some more talks with Byron. Of course Shelley could not approve of Byron's life at Venice. He was himself unsullied sex- ually. In his practice he did not break the healthy wholeness of love, dividing the animal from the spiritual, — a wholeness upon which so largely depends the enjoyment, the comfort, the refinement, the morality, the improvement, the elevation, of human life. But it was not for him to be the moral censor of Byron's acts any more than it was to rebuke his cynical talk. Of the difference between their views the reader gets a glimpse in Julian and Mad- dalo, a fruit of this visit. Julian and Maddalo is one of the most char- acteristic of Shelley's poems, one of the most fluent and melodious, and musical fluency is an eminent excellence of Shelley's verse. Shelley 14 2IO SHELLEY. was stimulated by Byron. It is pleasant to think of these two together in a gondola, or galloping on the Lido. Byron never met with a man whose company he enjoyed so much as that of Shelley. It was the highest company he had ever kept, and it is to his honor that he valued so fully the man and the gentleman. Shelley, on his part, felt that he was here ap- preciated, and by a brother poet, whom he then regarded as greater than himself ; and to be thus appreciated was for him a rare happiness. To both this meeting was a joyous holiday : it raised both to their highest spirits and to their best talk. How clear an insight Shelley had into the very core of Byron a few lines will show : " We descanted, and I (forever still Is it not wise to make the best of ill ? ) Argued against despondency, but pride Made my companion take the darker side. The sense that he was greater than his kind Had struck, methinks, his eagle spirit blind By gazing on its own exceeding light." A little further on, alluding to their talk the evening before, Julian (Shelley) tells Maddalo (Byron) that the words he spoke about man being a passive thing might well have cast "a SHELLEY. 211 darkness on my spirit," and then, looking at Byron's little Allegra, he continues : " See This lovely child, blithe, innocent, and free, She spends a happy time with little care, While we to such sick thoughts subjected are As came on you last night — it is our will That thus enchains us to permitted ill — We might be otherwise — we might be all We dream of happy, high, majestical. Where is the love, beauty, and truth we seek But in our mind ? and if we were not weak % Should we be less in deed than in desire ? " This is Shelley's noble belief, that in the soul of man there is a divine power, whereby he can cut his way upward towards light and freedom, — a belief which, had he lived, would have vivified and elevated whatever he wrote, and of which his actual work gives beaming intimations. The loaded lines I have italicized tell of the spiritual potency of Shelley's mind. This spirituality, seconded by his keen intelli- gence, his manly independence, his rare gifts of utterance, made him speak out against the tyrannous abuses which, in the name of relig-, ion and of government, have perverted and weighed down the will of man. What Shel- ley now for the first time personally beheld in Italy, the lowering, emasculating, depressive 212 SHELLEY. action, upon the human spirit, of a domineer- ing priesthood, confirmed him in his previous opinions, — opinions nourished by history and by sure intuitions. Bearing on Byron's view of life here is a striking passage from a lecture on poetry by that eloquent, large-souled English clergyman, F. W. Robertson of Brighton : " Among the former divisions of the egoistic class of first-rate poets, severe justice compels me with pain to place Lord Byron. Brought up under the baleful influences of Calvinism, which makes sovereign Will the measure of Right, instead of Right the cause and law of Will, a system which he all his life hated and believed, — fancying himself the mark of an inexorable decree, and bidding a terrible defi- ance to the unjust One who had fixed his doom, — no wonder that, as in that strange phenomenon the spectre of the Brocken, the traveler sees a gigantic form cast upon the mists, which he discovers at last to be but his own shadow ; so, the noble poet went through life haunted, turn which way he would, with the gigantic shadow of himself, which obscured the heavens and turned the light into thick darkness." SHELLEY. 213 The celestial light Shelley carried within him was ever getting shadowed by earthly clouds. The opinions of Byron and the life he led at Venice, and the life that all Venice was leading, might have darkened the faith of a less spiritually-minded man, but by his in- grown wings of love and rectitude Shelley was empowered to maintain his exaltation above the platitudes and grossnesses about him, holding easily to his belief of a possible bet- ter, and keeping his pure ideals ever lively in his soul. Of the all - transcending might of mind Shelley is a two-fold exemplification, through his rhythmic, splendidly original poetry, and through his tenacity of faith in good and the final triumph of truth. This faith led him back into the dim abysm of Greek mythology to the profound significant fable of Prome- theus. Out of chaos Prometheus emerges, lifted by the fire which is to be the means of subduing chaos and of final emancipation from the law of brute force. This fire is a noble, divine soul. The preface to his Prometheus Shelley opens by stating that the Greek tragic poets, in treating mythological and historical sub- 214 SHELLEY. jects, exercised "a certain arbitrary discre- tion" in the interpretation of a subject. This high precedent he follows ; and it may be added, that had he not found the precedent, his moral boldness, inspiring his intellectual force, would have moved him to originate it. iEschylus makes Prometheus purchase recon- ciliation with Jupiter and his own release by revealing a danger that threatened Jupiter. Here the higher spirituality of Shelley dis- closed to him a deeper motive, prompting him not to permit any compromise of principle. This interpretation, while adding to the moral grandeur of the Titan rebel, deepens the aes- thetic resources. Shelley makes Prometheus "the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest motives to the best and noblest ends." From the end of the preface I copy the following important passage : " My purpose hitherto has been simply to familiarize the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence ; aware that, until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life, which SHELLEY. 215 the unconscious passenger tramples into dust although they would bear the harvest of his happiness." This passage is more important biographically than critically. The great Greek mind, adventurous, meta- physical, poetical, insatiable, strove to get down to the root of being, to seize the princi- ples that rule in the creative process, the con- ditions that prevail in the formation of man, and in his sphere of action. Out of this grew the myth of Prometheus, a poetic effort to em- body the conflict, and yet the necessary coop- eration, between mind and matter, between substance and form. Around us we daily see this conflict and necessary union between in- stitutions and the needs and principles that produce them. The principles, which are the generative constituent, through the ambitious seeking of those that wield them, are liable to get merged and forgotten in the institutions they have created, and thence to resist change and improvement. Thus they grow oppress- ive, tyrannizing over, those for whose sake was made the incarnation of the spirit in institu- tions. This is the position and part of Jupiter in the old myth. Prometheus represents the unincarnated spirit that resists the usurpation of Jupiter. 2l6 SHELLEY. Prometheus being fired by the divine spark in man that will not submit to passive unpro- gressive conditions, and Jupiter being pos- sessed by the will that would enforce these conditions, their quarrel symbolizes the con- tention between aspiration and stagnancy, — between free thought and arbitrary coercion, between the light which leads to high condi- tions and the darkness that grovels in low. Brilliant and powerful is the poetic embodi- ment by Shelley of this high theme. He gives full swing to his supreme lyrical genius. He calls it A Lyrical Drama, but it is the grandest of lyrics in dramatic form. The figures, beam- ing with poetry, are riot pulse-thridded bodies, but shining incarnations of principles and es- sences in the semblance of bodies. Prome- theus himself is not a personage, but the re- splendent embodiment of a prolific idea, an idea by no means ancient, but supremely modern and spiritual, that man as a soul is not only indestructible, but, through high will inspired by love, is creative. Intellectual strength, power of resolve and endurance, lofty aims, are in Shelley's Prometheus, but the might that empowers him finally to tri- umph over Jupiter is Love. Love is the re- SHELLEY. 217 deemer of mankind. About the chained mar- tyr gather, to comfort him, from all quarters, spirits and shapes. Listen to the music one of these sings to him : " On a poet's lips I slept, Dreaming like a love-adept In the sound his breathing kept. Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses But feeds on the aerial kisses Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses. He will watch from dawn to gloom The lake-reflected sun illume The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom, Nor heed nor see what things they be ; But from these create he can Forms more real than living man, Nurslings of immortality. One of these awakened me, And I sped to succour thee." Shelley's brain is an exhaustless spring of likenesses which his poetic faculty illuminates into beauty and significance. What freshness and grandeur there is in this : " A howl Of cataracts from their thaw-cloven ravines Satiates the listening wind, continuous, vast, Awful as silence. Hark ! the rushing snow ! The sun-awakened avalanche ! whose mass, Thrice sifted by the storm, had gathered there Flake after flake, — in heaven-defying minds As thought by thought is piled, till some great truth 2l8 SHELLEY. Is loosened, and the nations echo round Shaken to their roots, as do the mountains now." It would not be right to say, that in Prome- theus we miss the solidity of Shakespeare, the incorporation of poetry into firm-limbed men and women. Prometheus deals in elemental forces, in ideal forms, in voices more than in speakers, in humanized beams of light. One of the Fauns in the second Act asks : " Canst thou imagine where those spirits live Which make such delicate music in the woods ? " They live in the poet's brain, and so vividly that through his flashing, golden words they are made to live in ours. The choral pages in Prometheus are as Shakespearean as the Puck- passages in Midsummer-Night 's Dream, only created with a high, holy purpose. And Pro- metheus himself is a transfigured Lear, suffer- ing, not for his own willfulness, but suffering through power of soulful will for the emanci- pation of oppressed humanity. Before Prometheus was quite finished, Shel- ley set to work, in May, i8i9> upon The Cenci. Dante wrote his Hell first, long before the Heaven. Shelley wrote his Heaven first, and plunged right out of it into Hell, and into the lowest abyss. In Dante's Hell there is no pit SHELLEY. 219 deep enough and damning enough for Shelley's Francesco Cenci. That a poet, aglow with the love, winged with the splendors, of Shelley's Prometheus, should have been able to make himself at home in all the subtlest imaginations of hate and lust and extreme villainy, creating and depicting such a hell as the heart of his Cenci, proves the immense imaginative range of this poet, together with his boundless re- sources of feeling. Shakespeare created a Caliban, and Shelley created a Cenci, who is a prosperous Caliban. But is not, in a populous, civilized community, a prosperous Caliban an impossibility ? Is it not an extravagant satire, even upon the reek- ing rottenness of Rome at the 'end of the six- teenth century, to suppose that one like Shel- ley's Cenci could have so thriven there, that he could collect around him in his own palace the chief cardinals and princes and dignitaries of the then capital of the world ? Cenci is a fiend, a demon, a blazi demon, not a man. The lurid glare from his core effaces by its hideousness all poetic light. We cannot even pity him, he is beyond our fellow-feeling, we can hardly wish him redeemed, so far is he below the zero of the human scale in moral 220 SHELLEY. deformity. So lickened and darkened by his presence is the whole atmosphere, it is im- penetrable to any streak of poetic light. The Cenci is a wonderful creation, but is it a poetic tragedy ? Is not its all-absorbing chief figure too unhuman for the sympathy that poetic tragedy should awaken ? We will not dis- honor lions and tigers by calling him a wild beast ; they obey natural instincts, he is an unnatural monster ; they are terrible, he is horrible. VI. The growth of a great poet, when con scious of his vocation and his powers, is some- thing to fill the Gods with their sunniest glad- ness. When, as in the case of Shelley, the poet is ennobled by the man, earth presents no more promising, animating process than such a poet's unfolding. In Italy Shelley's outward senses were daily cultivated' in the beautiful presence of that chosen land, while his inward senses, luxuriating at a feast of memories, were fed by records of the words and deeds of the lofty men whose lives have woven an unfading halo, that draws to Italy, from generation to generation, many of the choice spirits of other lands. These, like Shel- ley and Goethe, climb and revel in a conge- nial mental atmosphere. The imaginations of Shelley were here enriched and chastened. What a crescent fermentation in the brain that could, within a twelve-month, throw off both Prometheus and The Cenci. On the partially popular success of The 222 SHELLEY. Cenci Mrs. Shelley seized to build a hope that hereby her husband might be moved to make further trials in this new field. Instead of yielding to her persuasions he wrote The Witch of Atlas, the most ethereal and fanciful of his poems. The dedication to his wife opens with this stanza : " How, my dear Mary, are you critic-bitten (For vipers kill though dead) by some review, — That you condemn these verses I have written, Because they tell no story false or true ? What though no mice are caught by a young kitten ? May it not leap or play as grown cats do, Till its claws come ? Prithee, for this one time, Content thee with a visionary rhyme." Conceive of an eagle chained in a close, shady, back-yard, fed on cooked meat from the kitchen ; then conceive of him broken loose and soaring through the sunlit air to rejoin his wild mate and eaglets in their mountain eyrie. Like his was the cry of exultation of Shelley when, instead of being constrained to breathe the seething, stifling atmosphere of diabolically perverted passion in The Cenci, he found himself careering on unchained imagi- nations with The Witch of Atlas. But it were a mistake to conclude that, be- cause The Witch of Atlas is a "visionary SHELLEY. 223 rhyme," it is outside of humanity, or that be- cause the Witch hath the privilege of making the wind, and lightning, and shooting stars her playmates, and of summoning spirits out of "the hollow turrets of those high clouds," she is above sympathy with human beings. She is exquisitely human ; for, freed from the gross- nesses of earthly feeling, a creature woven out of beauty, she is possessed with love and cheerfulness, her mission being to show that all things can profitably intermingle, " through which the harmony of love can pass." To be in all ways beautiful, and make the beautiful sparkle about her glance, like diamonds just bared to the sun, and to shed wherever she passes the fragrance of unselfish love, this is the essence of her being, this is her raison d'etre. In Victor Hugo's brilliant volume on Shake- speare, in one of its most brilliant chapters, entitled The Beautiful, the Servant of the Good, — a chapter especially dedicated to combating the tenet Art for Art's sake, — there is this very sound passage : " You say, the Muse is made to sing, to love, to believe, to pray. I answer Yes and No. Let us understand one another. To sing what ? The void. To love what ? 224 SHELLEY. One's self. To believe what ? Dogma. To pray to what ? The Idol. No, here is the truth ; to sing the ideal, to love humanity, to believe in progress, to pray towards the Infi- nite." And the following paragraph ends with these words : " Show me, Genius, thy foot, and let us see if thou hast, as I have, the dust of the earth on thy heel." Now Shelley, fond and capable as he was of soaring, carried on his heel so much of earth's dust he always brought some back when . he redescended. However high his flight, never was broken the cord that bound his heart to humanity ; and so strong was the beat of that heart and so warm its blood, that the closer he comes to his fellows the more musical is the ring of his verse, the more poetical its tissue. Thus, when in the latter part of the poem the Witch " Past through the peopled haunts of human kind, Scattering sweet visions from her presence sweet," the reader's pulse rises to the intenser throb in the verse. . For example : " A pleasure sweet doubtless it was to see Mortals subdued in all the shapes of sleep. Here lay two sister twins in infancy ; There, a lone youth who in his dreams did weep ; SHELLEY. 225 Within, two lovers linked innocently In their loose locks which over both did creep Like ivy from one stem ; — and there lay calm Old age with snow-bright hair and folded palm." Through his exquisite sensibility to the beautiful in its manifold display, in quick alli- ance with a keen intellect, Shelley was an un- surpassed master of artistic presentation. But for him the most necessary beauty in a poem is moral beauty. As artist Shelley knew the futility of making poems the direct teachers of morals or of anything. The virtue of poetry is in its indirect effect, that is, in awakening higher moods through the beautiful ; and to produce its best effect, it should be vitalized by a moral breath breathed into it uncon- sciously from the poet's soul. In a letter to Mary in 18 18, Shelley writes : "I have been reading the ' Noble Kinsmen,' in which, with the exception of that lovely scene, to which you added so much grace in reading it to me, I have been disappointed. ' The Jailer's Daugh- ter' is a poor imitation, and deformed. The whole story wants moral discrimination and modesty. I do not believe Shakespeare wrote a word of it." From that want of "moral discrimination and modesty" Shelley saga- 15 226 SHELLEY. ciously inferred that this play was not written by Shakespeare. He discerned the spiritual depth there is in Shakespeare, and that to this is largely due his poetic supremacy. The voluminous stream of truth that runs through his plays gets its clearness from its moral fidelity. Hence chiefly it is that in studying Shakespeare we are purified and enlarged. After reading Homer, Michael Angelo felt so exalted that he would examine himself to see whether he was not many feet higher. The profit of poetry is in the expansion, the exalta- tion, imparted to the reader by the poet, who, through clearer vision, sees and thus depicts objects, events, persons, transfigured, glori- fied, by the beautiful. As the moral beautiful is the highest beautiful, our expansion, other things being equal, is in proportion to its presence. Of chastening by tribulation Shelley had more than one man's share. We have seen how troubles thickened about him in his open- ing manhood. At this moment he was abused, calumniated in journals and reviews, frowned upon by " Society," under a ban in his own family. Peacock, in one of his letters, had ex- pressed a hope to see him soon in England. SHELLEY. 227 Rep]ying to his friend's letter, he writes from Rome in April, 1819: " I believe, my dear P., that you wish us to come back to England. How is it possible ? Health, competence, tran- quillity, — all these Italy permits and England takes away. I am regarded by all who know or hear of me, except, I think, on the whole, five individuals, as a rare prodigy of crime and pollution, whose look even might infect. Such is the spirit of the English abroad as well as at home." And he thus scowled upon was the most un- selfish, the most generous, the most sympa- thetic of men, the purest, the truest, the kind- est, the bravest, this rare pyramid of excellence being crowned by poetic genius and intellectual splendor. Truly in the first quarter of the present century the upper zone of civilizees was still crude and insusceptible and bigoted and self-sufficient in their ignorance. A fel- low-man so supremely god-gifted that he should be a radiance on the earth is invisible to most, and to many who do see him his light is dark- ness, because not lighted at their feeble, un- savory taper. In the insolence of their blind egoism they would scourge and crucify this divine man, and that chiefly because he does 228 SHELLEY. not go to their church, — and he does not go to their church because his religion is vital, of the soul, instead of being formal, of the tongue. From the warmth of his yearnings and the acuteness of his sensibilities, Shelley's troubles depressed him the more ; but they could not sour the sweetness of his nature, they could not harden his heart, — they deepened him. Turn him into a cynic or a scoffer, or a hater, they could not, nor drive him to sound the ocean of human hopes and capabilities with the broken cord of his own crosses and disap- pointments. In Italy, amid the joyful stimulus of his rare faculties, came two of the heaviest blows that ever fell upon him. Mary and he lost their two children, — Clara, the youngest, dying at Venice, and William a few months later at Rome. For a time they were child- less, until the 12th of November, 18 19, when another son was born to them at Florence, the present baronet, Sir Percy Florence Shelley. To whoever would get a full view of Shel- ley, his letters, especially those written in his more mature years from Italy, are an invalua- ble repository. Every man's letters are auto- biographical, but in the case of Shelley, from SHELLEY. 229 the richness and variety of his mental re- sources, they are a chapter of biography which serves to check the most vivid of autobiograph- ical chapters, — that written in his poems, — and also to rectify or modify impressions made by the reports of some who were nearest and dearest to him, — of Hogg, of Trelawney, of Mary. By no means do his letters make him appear less lofty in moral stature, less glow- ing in nature than these devoted, appreciative friends represent him to be. They bring him before us even more distinctly than his per- sonal associates do, in his cordiality and unre- serve, in his affectionateness and unselfish- ness ; and they show him heartily interested in what is going on in the world, ever ready to lend a helping hand. How refined and self- forgetful his tone towards Hunt and Peacock when asking them to do him some small favor in London, — they who were under such deep obligations to him, and who seem t6 have been worthy of his generosity ; and then his munif- icence to Godwin. On these precious letters is stamped the seal of Shelley's high and lov- able being, his cordiality, his tenderness, his sweetness, his disinterestedness, and the un- flagging vivacity of his intellect. We come 23O SHELLEY. upon unstudied passages of criticism, upon sentences that give winning insights into him- self. In a long letter to Peacock from Fer- rara, in 1818, — a letter abounding in genial comments on the people, the agriculture, the climate, the architecture, — after describing the Manuscripts of Tasso and Ariosto, finding in their handwriting an index of their minds, he adds : " You know I always seek in what I see the manifestation of something beyond the present and tangible object." In another letter to the same, a few months later, from Naples, he exclaims : " Oh, if I had health and strength, and equal spirits, what boundless in- tellectual improvement might I not gather in this wonderful country ! At present I write little else but poetry, and little of that. My first act of Prometheus is complete, and I think you would like it. I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political sci- ence, and if I were well, certainly I would as- pire to the latter, for I can conceive a great work, embodying the discoveries of all ages, and harmonizing the contending creeds by which mankind have been ruled." Shelley could not be idle, being in this like all men of full mind. The first need and law SHELLEY. 231 of life is motion. The mighty, controlling, cre- ative Spirit works unintermittingly. From this supreme Light Shelley is one of the brightest emanations ever cast upon mankind. When he could not write poetry he betook him to prose. His Defence of Poetry is a masterpiece, a broad, eloquent, subtle essay on the great- est of themes. Shelley was ever a zealous servant of the beautiful, the good, the true. The subjects of his prose essays — thought- ful fragments — are among the most vital and highest that the mind can grasp, — specula- tions on morals, on metaphysics, on a future state, on the punishment of death, on life, on love, — this last an exquisite, penetrating, spir- itual fragment. In the preface to his trans- lation of The Banquet one learns how great is his admiration of Plato, and why it is so great. Besides The Banquet he translated the • Ion and passages from The Republic. Shelley ' was among the first to put into English verse several scenes from Goethe's Faust, notably the magnificent Prologue in Heaven, — a task which would likewise have been poetically congenial to Coleridge, had he not been with- held by what he imagined to be religious rev- erence. This recalls that rare stroke of wit 232 SHELLEY. on dear Coleridge by Swinburne, who says of some of the religious pieces of Coleridge that they leave an unpleasant taste, as of "a rancid unction of piety." From Homer Shelley translated the long Hymn to Mercury of eight hundred lines ; from Euripides the whole of The Cyclops, a satyric drama of eight or nine hundred lines ; from Dante several passages ; from Calderon's Ma- gico Prodigioso scenes to the amount of seven or eight hundred lines. When speaking of the mental activity and affluence of Shelley his Fragments must not be forgotten. The entire poetic product of Gray, including translations and Latin poems, does not exceed two thousand lines ; and if were dropped all the lines that owe their beauty to their borrow- ings, this number would be much reduced. And Gray lived to be fifty-five, and, as he him- self informs us, was fond of writing. The number of poems he published during his life was sixteen, making about one thousand lines. Now, the Fragments of Shelley, poems begun and unfinished, some of them, like Charles I., The Triumph of Life, and Prince Athanese, running each to several hundred lines, and • SHELLEY. 233 many making but one or more stanzas, some of these unpolished torsos, and many waiting for the poet's last touch, — these Fragments alone are ninety-seven in number, and cover about four thousand lines, many of these lines loaded with meaning and poetry. This mass of fragments, shining fragments, is a unique feature in the poetic product of Shelley. None of his contemporaneous peers has it, neither Coleridge, nor Wordsworth, nor Byron, nor Keats. As cause of this something may be attributed to his life being a fragment. It may be believed that had he lived to three score, or even to two score, some of these be- ginnings would have been carried to their ends, many of the shorter bits would have been worked up ; but even then the pile would have remained large, leaving out of account the additions that would surely have been made to it through Shelley's remarkable verbal facility, whereby was seized and secured any fresh thought that darted to the surface from inte- rior depths, or flashed from without, and thus suddenest fancies, abruptest suggestions, were instantly embodied, and, by virtue of poetic demands, rhythmically embodied. Coupled 234 SHELLEY. with this facility, which all his rivals, except Wordsworth, shared with him, there was in Shelley an individual eagerness, a fiery precip- itance, combined with keenest intellectual vig- ilance, that pounced upon all poetic prey with the passionateness of the tiger's spring. One can hardly recall a poet of the first class who did not write profusely. Even Mil- ton, who gave eighteen of his prime years wholly to politics and the cause of civic free- dom, left between fifteen and twenty thousand lines. Of course we do not hereby mean to im- ply that the quantity of verse a poet produces is the measure of his genius, or to hint that, because Shelley, before he was thirty, wrote twenty thousand lines, and Gray, before he was fifty-five, only two thousand, Shelley was ten times as good a poet as Gray. The con- trast in quantity is marked only for the pur- pose of exhibiting the mental prodigality of Shelley, — a prodigality which may be called unparalleled, when is taken into account the high quality of nearly every page that he wrote. Nevertheless, Shelley and Gray do stand in expressive aesthetic contrast to each other, — Gray representing the class of writers who SHELLEY. 235 laboriously compose poetry, drawing their ma- terial chiefly from without ; Shelley represent- ing the class of spontaneous poets, who draw their material chiefly from within, their souls being fresh, deep fountains of thought and poetry. VII. Since their arrival in Italy Shelley and his wife had moved about, dwelling only for a few months in one place, — at the baths of Lucca, at Este near Venice, at Florence, at Naples, at Rome, leading in each place a secluded life. This continued isolation did not suit Shelley, fond as he was of solitude, and it was oppress- ive to Mary, who had a healthy liking for so- cial company. In the beginning of 1820 they established themselves at Pisa. Here they had around them a limited but congenial cir- cle. Medwin, a cousin of Shelley, was for a time a guest in their house. With Williams and Jane, his wife, there grew up an intimacy. Shelley and Williams boated together, and to Jane were addressed several sweet poems, among them the one beginning "Ariel to Mi- randa." Trelawney, manly, clear-headed Tre- lawney, became a valuable friend to Shelley. Byron, partly to be near Shelley, hired the finest palace in Pisa. The noted Italian sur- geon, Vacca, was an acquaintance. The fa- SHELLEY. 237 mous Greek chief, Mavrocordato, visited Shel- ley and inspired him to write Hellas. But the Pisan acquaintance of whom the poet has left the deepest record was a young Italian girl. To her the world owes one of Shelley's most beautiful, most passionate poems, Epipsychi- dion. Emilia Viviani was shut up in a convent by her father until he should have chosen for her a husband. Shelley, whose noble heart was ever open to sympathy for any form of oppression, was taken to see Emilia, and was fascinated by a loveliness so extraordinary that she seemed to be the realization of even his ideal of feminine beauty. He took Mary to see her. They got permission for her to come to them at times. They sent her flowers and books, for she had more culture than most Italian girls. In his imaginative ecstasy Emilia became to Shelley the embodiment of that heavenly dream in Alastor. Her position as a victim of domestic tyranny heightened to Shelley's eyes the glow of the almost unearthly beauty of Emilia. Epipsychidion is the subtlest picture of ideal, uncarnal love. There is pointed sig- nificance in the name of the poem : it means 238 SHELLEY. of the soul. The poem has nothing about the body. In Emilia the poet loves the sudden dazzling revelation of purest poetic imaginings. A creative mind revels and triumphs in the discovery of a preconceived radiance. He calls her "spouse, sister, angel." In the rela- tion between Emilia and Shelley there was not a shadow of evil ; nay, there was substantial good, for it gave birth to an immortal poem. As for the " Angel " herself, she was soon taken from the convent to be given to a sposo of her father's choice. In a few years she sepa- rated from her husband, with her father's ap- proval, and died shortly afterwards, in her real marriage presenting a sad contrast to the ideal union in the Eden-island so wonderfully de- scribed in Epipsychidion : " The winged storms, chaunting their thunder-psalm To other lands, leave azure chasms of calm Over this isle, or weep themselves in dew From which its fields and woods ever renew Their green and golden immortality." Although the love of the poet for Emilia was poetical and innocent, and his wife shared his interest in and admiration of her, it is nevertheless not surprising that Epipsychidion is the only one of the longer poems of Shelley SHELLEY. 239 to which Mary has not written an explanatory note. To Trelawney the world owes a picture of Shelley in the last year of his life drawn by a masterly hand. A man of rare insight into his fellow-men, Trelawney was at the same time an artist with his pen, an artist the more faithful for his unconsciousness. Both of Shelley and Byron he has left a memorial which is priceless. His own manliness and intelligence captivated both. He became in- timate with both, saw them almost daily for several months. One day, a few weeks only after his arrival in Pisa, talking with Shelley of Byron, Shelley cried out to his wife : " Mary, Trelawney has found out Byron already. How stupid we were — how long it took us." On the 23d of February, 1821, died at Rome, in his twenty-fifth year, John Keats. In the previous autumn, Shelley, hearing of his pur- posed journey to Italy, had invited Keats to stay with him. In May, 1821, Shelley wrote his great elegy on Keats, Adonais. In another volume {Brief Essays and Brev- ities} I have ventured to Call Adonais the finest elegy in literature. The subject of Adonais is far higher and richer than that of Lycidas. 240 SHELLEY. Young King, the subject of Milton's monody, owes his immortality entirely to Milton. Keats is the peer of the immortal Shelley. The men- tal power of Keats, his wrongs, the resplendent group of poets about him, all these demand a wider range of thought, a deeper movement, more tearful griefs, and these demands are all met with the sweep and glow of intellectual and poetic mastership. In comparison with the heights and deeps of Adonais, Lycidas is superficial, with an air of elegant convention- ality. Every one of the fifty-five Spenserian stanzas, making four hundred and ninety-five lines, quivers with fervor : Lycidas, with its one hundred and ninety-three lines is com- paratively cold. A curious coincidence it is, that at the time of writing Lycidas and Adon- ais Milton and Shelley were each in his twenty-ninth year, while King and Keats were each in his twenty-fifth. The sustained splendor of Adonais is aston- ishing. Fifty-five Spenserian stanzas, each a new bar of musical thought, each resting, to the eye on, and to the ear supported by, the rhythmic strength of the final Alexandrine ; each as fresh and original as a succession of May mornings, every one of which seems to SHELLEY. 241 surpass the preceding in the glittering beauty of its- auroral . dewiness ; all glorified by the mysterious creative life out of which spring the earth and the stars. The soul of Shelley was an exhaustless cfeep of beautiful thought. His imaginations are as poetic as they are abundant. Here is the fourteenth stanza, not more poetical and melodious than others, only, from its subject, more condensed : " All he had loved, and moulded into thought, From shape, and hue, and odour, and sweet sound, Lamented Adonais. Morning sought Her eastern watch-tower, and her hair unbound, Wet with the tears which should adorn the ground, Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day ; Afar the melancholy thunder moaned, Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay, And the wild winds flew round, sobbing in their dismay." The fineness and freshness of Shelley's poetic invention is nowhere more effectively exhibited than where he represents " the quick Dreams " mourning round the body of Keats. No one knew better than Shelley what a gift to the poet — it might be called his capital outfit — is the power of day-dreaming. Take these two stanzas ; they are typical of Shelley, so new, so springy, so laden with musical mind, so inwardly lucent : 16 242 SHELLEY. " O, weep for Adonais ! — The quick Dreams, The passion-winged Ministers of thought, Who were his flocks, whom near the living streams Of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught The love which was its music, wander not, — Wander no more, from kindling brain to brain, But droop there, whence they sprung ; and mourn their lot Round the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain, They ne'er will gather strength, or find a home again. " And one with trembling hands clasps his cold head, And fans him with her moonlight wings, and cries : ' Our love, our hope, our sorrow, is not dead ; See, on the silken fringe of his faint eyes, Like dew upon a sleeping flower, there lies A tear some Dream has loosened from his brain.' Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise ! She knew not 't was her own ; as with no stain She faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain." A poet is great in proportion as out of in- ward resources he throws light on nature and man, — a new light, because kindled at a new poetic flame. By this recreative illumination man and nature are transfigured, and thence are seen more vividly, because seen more in their reality, that is, in their spiritual being. Hence, the poet's pictures and expositions are true and distinct and beautiful and significant, SHELLEY. 243 not according to the grandeur and variety of. men and scenery his outward eyes have rested on, but according to the variety and fullness of his interior wealth of sensibility. A great poet is a new man, — a new radiant man. Such is Shelley, and nowhere is his radiance more new and warming than in Adonais. Here are three more stanzas, ever abloom with poetic soul. Sixty years ago it was a high, imagina- tive leap, a prophetic cry, to - exclaim, "'T is Death is dead, not he." " Peace, peace ! he is not dead, he doth not sleep — He hath awakened from the dream of life — 'T is we, who, lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife, And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife Invulnerable nothings. — We decay Like corpses in a charnel ; fear and grief Convulse us and consume us day by day, And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay. " He has outsoared the shadow of our night ; Envy and calumny and hate and pain, And that unrest which men miscall delight, Can touch him not and torture not again ; From the contagion of the world's slow stain He is secure, and now can never mourn A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain ; 244 SHELLEY. Nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn, With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn. " He lives, he wakes — 't is Death is dead, not he ; Mourn not for Adonais. — Thou young Dawn Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee The spirit thou lamentest is not gone ; Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moan ! Cease ye faint flowers and fountains, and thou Air, Which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown O'er the abandoned Earth, now leave it bare Even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair ! " Whoever has enough poetic susceptibility to read and study Adonais will be able, through its stanzas, — so alight are they with spiritual imaginativeness, — better than through almost any other pages, to get down to the founda- tions of poetry, to inhale its aromatic essence, to finger, as it were, its very roots. Four stanzas of Adonais are given by Shel- ley to himself. Nor are the wonderful stanzas thus dedicated in the least stained with vanity or egoism. Appropriate, inevitable, imperative was it that these iew stanzas should be given to him " Who in another's fate now wept his own." That he did so, deepens the pathos of this great poem. These autobiographical thirty- SHELLEY. 245 six lines are a peerless Elegy on himself by the great poet, a self-portraiture touching and powerful. This is the last of the four stanzas : "AH stood aloof, and at his partial moan Smiled through their tears ; well knew that gentle band Who in another's fate now wept his own ; As in the accents of an unknown land, He sung new sorrow ; sad Urania scanned The Stranger's mien, and murmured : ' Who art thou ? ' He answered not, but with a sudden hand Made bare his branded and ensanguined brow, Which was like Cain's or Christ's — Oh ! that it should be so ! " It were easy to go on for pages in this strain of eulogy, for each stanza vibrates with feeling embalmed in the fragrance of the beautiful. The last stanzas are laden with the weird monitions of the seer. Deep sympathy with man makes the thoughtful poet prophetic. Shelley loved to dally with Death : he was fond of peering over the fence that separates man from the angels. He could not swim. One day, bathing with Trelawney in the Arno, he got into deep water. Trelawney plunged after him and found him lying on the bottom, making no effort to save himself. When he 246 SHELLEY. recovered his breath, he said : " I always find the bottom of the well, and they say Truth lies there. In another minute I should have found it, and you would have found an empty shell. It is an easy way of getting rid of the body." Trelawney narrates with great vividness what on another occasion occurred in a frail little boat with Jane (Mrs. Williams) and her two children, when a woman's tact and presence of mind turned Shelley away from the thought of "solving the great mystery." The whole narrative — too long for this page — is strik- ingly illustrative of Shelley in one of his fear- fully inquisitive moods. In the fifty-second stanza of Adonais he' ex- claims, " Die, If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek ! Follow where all is fled ! " The next three stanzas conclude the poem : " Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart ? Thy hopes are gone before : from all things here They have departed ; thou shouldst now depart ! A light is past from the revolving year, And man, and woman ; and what still is dear Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither. The soft sky smiles, — the low wind whispers near ; SHELLEY. 247 ' T is Adonais calls ! oh, hasten thither, No more let Life divide what Death can join together. LIV. "That Light whose smile kindles the Universe, That Beauty in which all things work and move, That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love Which through the web of being blindly wove By man and beast and earth and air and sea, Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of The fire for which all thirst ; now beams on me, Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality. LV. " The breath whose might I have invoked in song Descends on me ; my spirit's bark is driven, Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng Whose sails were never to the tempest given ; The massy earth and sphered skies are riven ! I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar ; Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven, The soul of Adonais, like a star, Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are." And now it is time to conclude this Study, so unsatisfactory in its incompleteness, and yet attractive through its loving fullness of Shelley. Is he idealized in these insufficient pages ? Who can write faithfully about Shel- ley without giving into idealization ? Happy if he can reach up to him even then, for he was an ideality, a great ideal reality. In 248 SHELLEY. studying and getting intimate with Shelley, while one's mind is delightfully exercised, one's idea of humanity is elevated and deep- ened. He was a man from whose soul sweet- est emanations, loftiest aspirings, were as pro- fusely thrown out as are the spring's blossoms that fail not to issue in savory fruit. To build his core the true, the good, the beautiful, were fragrantly interlinked, the bond among them kept ever willing and flexible by the warmth of love. In Genevra, a poem of about two hundred lines, written in 1821, the year before Shelley passed from the earth, there seems to me to be more, than in any other of his works, of what is a characteristic of Shelley, — at once a mark and source of his greatness, — a rich plenitude of mind, pointing to an infinitude of power. Feeling evokes feeling, thought awakens thought, and they leap forth nimbly as if rejoicing to get out of an overcrowded brain. Out of this copiousness are great poems born, such as are many of Shelley's. Among them all, preeminent in pathos, in po- etic lightning, in moral might, is Genevra. Were not the ocean so wide and deep, re- freshing, fructifying rains would fail us. Only SHELLEY. 249 deep, full sensibilities beget poelic deeps, of which, therefore, there are far more in Shelley than in Byron. Byron, talking one day with Shelley and Trelawney, told them that Murray (the publisher) advised him to go back to his " Corsair style to please the ladies." Shelley repelled the advice indignantly, and added : "Write nothing but what your conviction of its truth inspires you to write ; you should give counsel to the wise, not take it from the foolish. ~ Time will reverse the judgment of the vulgar. Contemporary criticism only, rep- resents the amount of ignorance genius has to contend with." Besides Hellas, a lyrical drama of thirteen or fourteen hundred lines, Shelley wrote in 1821, including Adonais and Genevra, about twelve hundred lines in minor poems. All of these, like the poems of all his years, are written from within, — this is the source of their power; and nearly all were inspired by love, and this gives warmth to their beauty. The Hymn to Intellectual Beauty ends with these lines : " Thus let thy power, which like the truth Of nature on my passive youth Descended, to my onward life supply Its calm — to one who worships thee, And every form containing thee, 250 SHELLEY.' Whom, Spirit fair, thy spells did bind To fear-himself, and love all human kind." Between this great Hymn, written in his twenty-fourth year, and Genevra, written in his twenty-ninth, lie inclosed Mont Blanc, Lines written among the Euganian Hills, Julian and Maddalo, Stanzas written in Dejection near Naples, Ode to the West Wind, The Sen- sitive Plant, To a Skylark, Ode to Liberty, Epipsychidion, The Witch of Atlas, Hymn of Apollo, Ode to Naples, Adonais, and others hardly less good, but shorter, besides such great fragments as The Triumph of Life and Prince Athanese. Add to these The Cenci and his other long poems already noticed, and it may be asked, Do the poems of any one of his illustrious contemporaries attain to such uniformity of excellence ? Nay, when are re- called the five or six best of the above-named poems, and how in them the finest poetic essence is breathed through most musically rhythmic forms, the intense life of fresh sub- stance rounded into blooming gracefulness, and how, above all, is notable the glowing fu- sion of all the parts into rapid continuity, — an especial token this of creative life in the soul that feeds the flow of lustrous words, — SHELLEY. 251 when all this is before us, may we not ask, not whether Wordsworth or Coleridge or Byron or Keats has surpassed Shelley in the degree of poetic excellence reached, but has any one of them quite equalled him ? Spontaneity, fervor, sincerity, close clinging together of thought, feeling, and diction, give to each stanza of Adonais, of the Ode to the West Wind, the Skylark, Hymn of Apollo, and to every sentence of Epipsychidion and of Ge- nevra, a buoyancy like that of his own mount- ing lark, " As from thy presence showers a rain of melody," while the united stanzas or paragraphs of each poem build a whole as compact and surely or- ganized as a swift joyous flight of wild-fowl high up towards heaven, held together in wedge-like symmetry by the invisible cords of divine love kindled in each of them by the cre- ative fire which warms the Universe into one- ness, each poem, by this vital concord with consecrated nature, exhibiting a consumma- tion of winged Art. The richer and deeper the nature the more time is needed for its full earthly unfolding. Shelley, on the day of his drowning, wanted 252 SHELLEY. twenty-seven days to have reached the end of his thirtieth year. The poetic product of even Shakespeare, before his thirty-first year, was not so vast and valuable as that of Shelley, certainly not so various and matured. Such maturity may be a sign of rapid development, as it was with Byron, who at thirty-four had done his best in poetry. It may be thought that at thirty Shelley had scaled the summit of his poetic elevation. But that he was in the full swing of growth is proved by the closer tissue, the firmer handling, in Adonais, in The Cenci, in Epipsychidion, in Genevra. When we consider his temperate habits (he was a water-drinker and vegetarian), and that his health was stronger in his latest year than in several years before ; that he was ever as- piring, never vulgarly ambitious ; that he was quickened by a divine sense of the beautiful which the purity of his nature and his life kept ever acute ; that all this was conspicuous in his latter verse ; that his chief love — he was a man of many loves — was the love of truth, truth the resistless leader, the self-renewing spring of life and new power, — when we con- sider all this, we can but believe that, had Shelley lived a score of years longer, his rich, SHELLEY. 253 chaste mind would have gained a more nervous grasp of human life, a tighter hold of the act- ual, through the warmth of experience, and that many more of his sentences would have become marrowy with that wisdom which is the fruit of marriage between illuminated ide- alism and heartiest realism. This was not to be. On the 8th of July, 1822, he and his friend Williams went down in the beautiful Bay of Spezzia, whether by the foundering of their boat in the night- storm, or by her being run into by a felucca, is not certainly ascertained. When Shelley's body was found his hand still clutched a vol- ume of .(Eschylus, and in his coat pocket was a volume of Keats just lent him by Leigh Hunt, who had arrived at Leghorn a few days before. In a small band of rare distinction was made a chasm, the width and depth of which the warmest friend of Shelley could not have foreseen, much as he was valued and loved. Retiring, undemonstrative, never self-seeking, he was yet the soul of the circle. His coming was always the awakener of bright expecta- tion, even more on account of the sweetness and unselfishness of his nature and manners, 254 SHELLEY. than of the brilliancy of his talk. Byron said of Shelley : " A more perfect gentleman never crossed a drawing-room." When the tall, thin figure of this gentleman, — scholar, poet, thinker, friend, with his mobile, boy-like coun- tenance, his abundant wavy hair, and large blue eyes agleam with the latent lightnings of poetry, a benediction to all mankind behind his expressive features, — whenever he glided in among his friends, his presence was a joyful animation. When assurance of their loss came home to all hearts there was wild desolation. Leigh Hunt wept and could not be comforted ; he felt like a lone one from whose side had just been snatched a whole family of brothers. The pallid countenance of Byron grew paler, and his cynical lips quivered. Even the stout- hearted Trelawney trembled. The suddenly widowed mothers, Mary and Jane, sobbed con- vulsively in one another's arms, and threw themselves in agony upon their orphan chil- dren. Mary was left suddenly in the dark : the light of her life had been quenched. All about her, where there had been bright illu- mination, was thick gloom. And yet for her, as for every human being in utmost extremity,. SHELLEY. 255 there was a possible consolation. When there should come a lull in the storm of her grief, it might have been whispered to her : Oh, wherefore weep for Percy ! he is not dead ! The thunder-cloud and wind he loved, and sea, Have borne his body to its earthen bed Of elemental life, while thankful, he Springing agaze into the immensity Where his creative thought aye joyed to roam, His being aglow with livelier life, and free From fleshly bonds and bars and fretted foam, A raptured angel is he in his heavenly home. TO GOETHE. Teutonic leader, — in the foremost file Of that picked corps, whose rapture 't is to feel With subtler closer sense all woe and weal, And forge the feeling into rhythmic pile Of words, so tuned they sing the sigh and smile Of all humanity, — meek did'st thou kneel At Nature's pious altars, midst the peal Of prophet-organs, thy great self the while All ear and eye, thou greatest of the band, Whose voices waked their brooding Luther-land, • At last left lone in Weimar, famed through thee, Wearing with stately grace thy triple crown Of science, statesmanship, and poesy, Enrobed in age and love and rare renown. GOETHE. 1 Germany, in her- twenty centuries of vigor- ous life, has been rich in men, many of them men in whom fermented^ so much of the finer marrow of humanity, that their individual being and doing was the flaming of a light, strong enough to be a new illumination, not to Ger- many ^ merely, but to Christendom. Of this effulgent class of Germans there is but one man whose life-work exercised, and exercises, a wider and more liberating influence on the thought of the civilized world than John Wolf- gang Goethe. That sublime single one is Martin Luther. And the chief glory of Luther is, that he created the conditions, moral and intellectual, that made a Goethe possible. . Goethe was a great poet. This is why we are assembled here to-day to do him honor. 1 Address delivered before the Goethe Club of the city of New York, January 10, 1877. 262 GOETHE. A great poet is a great power among men ; he is — what no other great man is, however val- ued — the personal friend, the intimate, the bosom friend, of every man. In our hearts he makes himself a place, and from that place he warms us, he expands and refines our being : this is his heavenly privilege. And Goethe is much else. Wordsworth is a great poet, so is Shelley, and this is surely enough ; but they are nothing besides. Shakespeare is the greatest of poets ; but from him we have only poems. Save what we can infer from his po- etry we know hardly anything of him. These poems, to be sure, are the richest literary be- quest ever left to mankind, a legacy which can- not be wasted, a possession which cannot be alienated, through all the ages a grant to every one who chooses to accept it, a gain of light for guidance, an intellectually spiritual gift to every one who will reach out to take it, to the world an inextinguishable illumination, an un- ceasing beneficence, a force in every soul, a divine presence' whose blessing is ever upon us, especially upon us this evening when we are met to talk together of his mighty com- peer, second only to him. Goethe was a chief favorite of fortune. This GOETHE. 263 form of speech we use because it is not given to us to delve into mysterious sources and be- hold the interior workings of the immeasura- ble, invisible, supervisive power, whose action is the order and law of our earthly world. Fortunate was Goethe in the time of his birth, the very middle of the eighteenth century, when Europe, agitated as never before by mental movement, was beginning to heave with the throes that were soon to burst forth in fearful revolution. Fortunate in his par- ents, each a strongly marked individuality ; the father, devoted to acquirement, — intellectual, methodical, orderly, precise, a little stern in the enforcement of rules; the mother, cheerful, practical, genial, mobile, with the intuitions of the best womanhood. Fortunate was he in meeting with the young Duke of Weimar, and most fortunate in the character and capacity of the Duke, and equally fortunate in the character and capacity of the noble Duchess, Louise of Darmstadt, his consort. But the chief favoritism was the gift to him of the fire of genius, which enlivened and made produc- tive a potent intellect and a rich sensibility. This union of genius with mental solidity and versatility, this inward fire warming great 264 GOETHE. inward resources, would have made Goethe a distinguished man anywhere at any period. Still his own principle holds good, that the Artist, for his unfolding, requires favorable conditions. A Statesman, a military chief, is necessarily dependent on outward events ; much more the Artist, who is an Artist partly through his openness to impressions from with- out. To be an artist a man must be of more than common sensibility, of quick impressibil- ity ; he must be one who, through the poetic, the supreme gift, projects out of himself, in forms of beauty, conceptions and visions, the material for these forms being supplied by a keen perception of and warm susceptibility to what is present, what is around him, what is before his senses. The young Goethe, palpi- tating with this susceptibility, was a many- sided mirror in the midst of an insurrection- ary world, a beautifying mirror, on which struck, to be poetically reflected, its scenes and passions. His was a large, soul, yearning in its depths with all the . mysterious feeling of a prolific epoch, — a fresh clear mind, a vast mind, passionate, reflective, creative, with the power, and the unconscious impulse, to give voice to the wants and feelings of an impas- sioned age. ■ GOETHE. 265 Time and place were propitious; and so, in Goethe's twenty-third year, Goetz von Ber- lichingen burst into life, Goetz with the iron hand, a protesting shout against the tyranny of custom, a defiant assertion of individual in- dependence, a revolutionary shock to litera- ture, a tearing up of worn dramatic highways, a startling new phenomenon. Right upon Goetz came Werther, which may be called a musical shriek of despair, a shriek that sent a thrill through the heart of Germany, of Eu- rope. Suddenly, with two bounds, the young giant leapt into a great renown. This renown brought him into contact with Karl August, Duke of Weimar. Goethe was twenty-six when he went to Weimar. On the invitation of the Duke he came to spend a few weeks : he staid fifty-seven years. He began by leading the gay, wild court life of fun and frolic, led by a young sovereign full of force and animal spirits, and not yet out of his teens : he remained to teach the Duke how to work and how to govern. He began, the centre of an admiring circle of waltzers : he ended by being the head of a band of workers, scientific, artistic, political workers, who wrought the Duchy of Weimar into the brighest domain of 266 GOETHE. Germany. He came as a temporary, spark- ling guest : he remained as a permanent, solid benefactor. The opening season, the first decade, of Goethe's living and doing in Weimar presents a unique picture of what a young man can perform, — a performance, in this case, which if not so imposing as that of the young Napo- leon in the first ten adult years of his wonder- ful career, is more spiritually instructive as an example, and more valuable in its practical bearings. The Duke, fascinated by the talk and demeanor of him whom Wieland called " the godlike splendid youth," as others were fascinated, as Wieland himself was, and the dowager-Duchess and Duchess Louise, and all the Court, the Duke soon began to feel the deeper -attraction of Goethe's mind and char- acter, and to perceive how . useful Goethe might be to him, — a perception sharpened, if not originated, by growing attachment to his young friend, who, so young, was seven years older than himself. Karl August was a pro- gressive man, one not afraid of new ideas, new discoveries, new principles. Men of aspiration and of culture, and of confident readiness to grasp fresh thought and to recognize its ex- GOETHE. 267 pansive potency, such men are stamped by nature with superiority ; they are the dlite among their fellows. The Duke and Goethe began by playing to- gether : very soon they took to working to- gether, and the Duke, with that rare insight and judgment which quickly discern and ap- preciate greatness, and which are the most legitimate titles to sovereignty, raised Goethe, six months after his arrival, to a seat in the Privy Council, with corresponding title and salary. Goethe was twenty-seven, Karl Au- gust twenty. With a deep groan groaned the official world, and red tape turned pale. A young, un- known stranger, and a plebeian, without drudg- ing through the subordinate grades, lifted sud- denly over the heads of faithful old servants of routine ! All Weimar howled ! So brist- ling was the discontent it took the form of a written protest from the Duke's ministers. The boy-Duke held firm. He was a genuine Duke, a leader. He felt that by his side he had a man worth more than scores of ordinary privy councillors and ministers. In this young stranger he had got possession of a powerful genius, that is, a man whose brain is full of 268 GOETHE. light. And soon — as is the way with a power- ful genius, when furthered and not obstructed — Goethe began to penetrate, to guide all de- partments. Among his superiorities Goethe had the organizing capacity, and to make things bet- ter was a need of his nature. He improved the public-school system of the Duchy ; he put new life into the University of Jena ; he brought order into the finances, and made the generous Duke a wiser economist. He re- opened the neglected mines of Ilmenau, having taken hold of Science, — for which he had a natural aptitude, — in order that he might do more thorough service in several administra- tive departments ; he established a fire-brigade ; in the middle of the night he would leap out of bed at a cry of fire, and hurry to a neighbor- ing village, coming back in the morning with feet blistered and hair singed. He rode from town to town to superintend the drafting of men for the war contingent ; with the master of the forests he would ride through the public domain, teaching and learning. He reformed and directed the theatre, and created the beau- tiful park at Weimar. When the President of the Chambers died, the Duke insisted that he GOETHE. 269 should fill that place too. He was the soul of the government, the good genius of the com- munity, throwing the light of a piercing intel- ligence upon all public interests, seeing to everything, teaching everybody, helping every- body, uplifting everybody : the most efficient of practical workers, openly beneficent, secretly charitable. The case related by Lewes, in his admirable Life of Goethe, of his having upheld and supported for years, by sympathy and money, a desolate man whom he had never seen, is one of the most touching and beautiful exemplifications ever brought to light of the refined and generous spirit of the Christian gentleman. During this early period Merk, the cynic, wrote from Weimar : " Who can withstand the disinterestedness of this man ? " It was Goethe's happiness to lend a helping hand to artists and other men of worth. He induced the Duke to call Herder to Weimar as court-chaplain. His influence it was that had Schiller appointed to a professorship in Jena, and afterwards obtained a pension for him, which enabled Schiller to domesticate himself in Weimar. He helped to get some of Wie- land's numerous children provided for. In the midst of this various work, as the 270 GOETHE. chief steward of the Duke and Duchy, Goethe found time, nay, he gave his best time, his brightest moments, to poetry, working at Faust, or Wilhelm Meister, or Iphigcnia, according to the mood, or throwing off some of those match- less lyrics that bloom perennially in their sim- plicity and significance, ever as fresh and fra- grant as the newest, sweetest flowers of a June morning. When one takes into view what Goethe wrought in those first ten years of his young manhood, how he shone in all places upon all men, how he grew so deeply into the thoughts of men that while he was in Italy Weimar suf- fered as in eclipse, her sunlight withdrawn from .her, we can, without much extravagance, figure him to ourselves, in his beaming cre- ativeness and magnetic beauty, as akin to the Apollo of Greek imagination, a very God of poetry, honored too as the healer, and the har- monizer of discords. And now, at the end of ten such well- worked years, he had earned a holiday. In the beginning of the autumn of 1786, his pur- pose made known to no one but the Duke, he slipped away, and under an assumed name, — that he might not be obstructed by his re- GOETHE. 271 nown, — crossing the Alps, he found himself in Italy. His feeling towards Italy had come to be a yearning. In one of those original sagacious sentences that abound in him Goethe says, you cannot enter a room where hangs an engraving and go out the same as you came in. Active in him was the liability to be transformed by im- pressions from without ; and this liability is a primary qualification of the poet, for it comes from the warmth and readiness of the man's feelings. The image of an object without, falling upon rich emotional capabilities within, a flame is enkindled which, purified by sensi- bility to the beautiful; is the very substance of poetry. During the eighteen months that Goethe passed in Italy his susceptive, hungry mind was in a glow. Of this light he made the most, working in his best moments, at Rome and Naples, at unfinished manuscripts he had brought with him. From Italy he came back refreshed, strengthened, calmed ; his horizon enlarged, his appetite for knowl- edge allayed, his thoughts on Art harmonized, compacted. He returned, not to resume his former manifold functions, but to dedicate him- self to his inborn vocation, poetry and litera- 272 GOETHE. ture, retaining control only over the artistic and scientific institutions of Weimar. Upon them he brought to bear his vast acquired knowledge, his ripened thoughtfulness, and while serving them, through such service deepening, refining his own culture. Goethe was an incessant worker, an unceas- ing learner. Simply by supplying the needs of his own nature, his life was the> putting in practice of a broad counsel of Voltaire : " Give to the soul all possible forms : it is a fire which God has confided to us : we should feed it with whatever is most precious. Our being should be made to partake of all imaginable condi- tions : the doors of the mind should be opened to all knowledge, all feeling. Provided tbey don't enter pell-mell, there is room for all." And this counsel Goethe could follow, because, having an omnivorous appetite for whatever can be known and whatever can be felt, he had within his intellect that high logical method — an indispensable requirement for all large per- formance — which could so class and coordi- nate his vast stores as to have them all readily available, and make room for an endless sup- ply. No man ever held closer, wiser watch over his knowledge and his feelings, in order GOETHE. 273 to keep his stores sweet and incorruptible. In all efforts, practical and theoretical, for found- ing or bettering institutions, for combating or diffusing ideas, he strove to obey — and for obeying had clearer insights, deeper intui- tions, than most men — the mandate conveyed in the simple words of Jesus : " Every plant which my Heavenly Father has not planted shall be rooted up." Seeking always, unremit- tingly, through four score years, his personal improvement, — improvement moral, assthet- ical, intellectual, — intently did he aim to make these profound words the touchstone of his own inward motions. After middle life Goethe wrote : " I, who have known and suffered from the perpetual agitation of feelings and opinions in myself and in others, delight in the sublime repose which is produced by contact with the great and eloquent silence of nature." The man who " suffers from the perpetual agitation of feelings in himself and others " is endowed with richest material for poetry : he suffers because he feels so keenly. Sympathy is the poet's capital ; and when to this wealth of sensibility he adds the decisive poetic gift, sense of the beautiful, the refining transfigur- 18 274 GOETHE. ing power, he is a poet in posse, for he pos- sesses "the vision and the faculty divine." To be a poet in esse, he must have in fur- ther addition the " accomplishment of verse." Wordsworth says : " Oh, many are the poets that are sown By nature ; men endowed with highest gifts, The vision and the faculty divine, Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse." So, too, with poetic painters : some, with fine gifts, cannot acquire manipulating dexter- ity. This seems to have been the case with Hazlitt, and somewhat with Haydon, who thence failed as Artists ; for it is the power adequately to embody poetic conceptions and feelings that makes the Artist. When Cole- ridge says of Shakespeare that his judgment is equal to his genius, he proclaims him a great Artist. Shakespeare's intellectual re- sources for turning to best account his deep glowing sensibilities were of the highest. To his great conceptions he knew how to give dramatic form with a nicety of adaptation, with an accuracy of adjustment, which show them to the best advantage. He has the art to incarnate his ideas and feelings in firm, brilliant, transparent forms, and he has a sure eye for proportion. GOETHE. 275 Never did man more fully than Goethe earn the high title of Artist. I call it a high title, because genuine Art, really Fine Art, im- plies the power of giving expression to poetic thought and sentiment, and, in its highest range, to broadest and deepest poetic thought and sentiment. There can be no Fine Art without " the vision and the faculty divine." Facility in clothing thought with words, rare definiteness of perception, delight in, the con- crete, — the combination of aptitudes that em- power the poetic mind to give clean, clear ex- pression to its workings, and with these the instinct and judgment to choose the most fit- ting form, — in all this Goethe is unsurpassed. Thence in his performance there is the grace and buoyancy which are the charm of the best Art. From his brief epigrams and distichs to songs and ballads, and thence to his . longer poems, Iphigenia, and Tasso, and Herman, and Dorothea, and Faust, in all there is, I had al- most said, artistic perfection, resulting from the harmonious marriage between sentiment and diction, between thought and word, be- tween substance and form. His best work — and much of it is best — is truly classical; 276 GOETHE. that is, it embodies healthy sentiment, just thought, in choice language the most fitting to express them. A high characteristic of Goethe is his simplicity of diction, — a quality by no means common to all good poets, — which in him comes from the clearness of his mind and his sincerity. All Goethe's works are the offspring of his interior self. His pen took no bribes from vanity or ambition, or from poverty. Especially were his works the offspring of his love. What he wrote he wrote from sympathy with his subject, — the only pure source of literary work ; and how wide were his sympathies may be learned from the unprecedented range of his subjects. More trustfully and deeply than any one else, Nature let him into her confidence, so vari- ous and delicate and so piercing were his per- ceptions. And, with all his rich command of individualities, he was a far-reaching general- izer, a sure thinker ; and thus his multifarious work, both as Artist and Naturalist, has a clean fidelity as well as rare vividness. Goethe lived in constant intimacy with Nat- ure ; he delighted to consort with her in all her moods. A year or two after his arrival in Weimar, while rebuilding his " garden-house," GOETHE. 277 he slept out-of-doors wrapt in his cloak. On the 19th of May, 1777, he writes to Frau von Stein : " Last night I slept on the terrace under my blue cloak, awoke three times, at twelve, two, and four, and at each time there was a new glory around me in the sky." Here is another passage which shows the spirit in which he worked. It occurs in a note to Her- der in 1784: " I hasten to tell you of the for- tune that has befallen me ; I have found nei- ther gold nor silver, but that which gives me inexpressible joy, the os intermaxillare (inter- maxillary bone) in man ! I compared the skulls of men and beasts in company with Loder, came on the trace of it, and lo ! there it is." Sympathy with Nature, delight in her as- pects, her phenomena, her procedure, is the most solid foundation for competence in Art. Nature ever dominates Art ; as Shakespeare says, " Nature is made better by no mean, But Nature makes that mean ; so, o'er that art Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art That nature makes." A chief source of Goethe's preeminence is the union in him, each in such high degree, of the poetic and the scientific, the two cardinal 278 GOETHE. tendencies of human faculty. All men have some capacity for classification and for appre- hension of law, which is the initiatory move- ment toward science ; and science is simply knowledge methodized ; and all men have some feeling for the beautiful, which is the primary element of poetry. But to have both these tendencies combined, each with liveliest im- pulsion, and opportunities for their play, to- gether with length of years, has been given only to the preeminent German poet-sage. Shelley is the only other great poet who, to the love of nature native to all poets, added a love for investigating her phenomena ; but Shelley died before even the summer of life had sunned his faculties into ripe productive- ness. Coleridge was metaphysical rather than scientific, and Wordsworth's intense love of nature was sentimental, not intellectual. In the age of Shakespeare and Milton Science had not unfolded itself into organic form. Goethe was a great, I had almost said a sublime, naturalist, so high were his gifts for enjoying, for apprehending, for interpreting nature. He was at once a poetic and an in- tellectual lover of nature, — nature, that vast mysterious presence, in which and by which GOETHE. 279 we live, whose outward aspect is for us an hourly wonder, an unfading charm, and whose inward movement is a deeper wonder, reveal- ing forever fresh power and beauty to man, — man, a spiritual, intellectual, conscious creat- ure, and yet a child of Nature, his being so closely interwoven with hers that he is partly her vassal, partly her lord. Of this mighty, mysterious, myriad-organed power Goethe was a favorite, but not a spoilt, child (there are no spoilt children of Nature, only of fortune), a favorite from his docility to her teachings, his disinterested love of her, his delight in her profusion, his openness to her manifold attrac- tion, his cheerful recognition of her multiplex, kindly, inexorable law. Through his love and obedience, from vassal he came to hold much of the privilege of lord. Goethe was too genuine a naturalist to be fond of metaphysics or of ecclesiastical theol- ogy. As a master-mind he apprehended them, and discerned their unavoidable subjectivity, and thence their one-sidedness and insuffi- ciency. He was not, as Coleridge says of him- self, " early bewildered in metaphysics and in theological controversy." In after years Cole- ridge deplored the having in his youth given 280 GOETHE. so much time to what in his Biographia Liter- aria he calls "this preposterous pursuit," from which he had been, he says, happily with- drawn by awakened interest in poetry ; and he reiterates his condemnation in the follow- ing emphatic passage : " Well would it have been for me, perhaps, had I never relapsed into the same mental disease; if I had con- tinued to pluck the flowers and reap the har- vest from the cultivated surface, instead of delving in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic lore. And if in after time I have sought a refuge from bodily pain and misman- aged sensibility in abstruse researches, which exercise the strength and subtlety of the un- derstanding 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 ten- dencies to develop themselves, — my fancy, and the love of nature, and the sense of beauty in forms and sounds." As in Coleridge it was the poet who de- tected the defect of abstract research, when uncheered and unguided by the maternal voices of nature, in Goethe it was both the poet and the naturalist ; for the sound natu- GOETHE. 28l ralist refuses to build with imaginings or as- sumptions, which are the chief resource of the theologian and the metaphysician. At the same time Goethe, being a large thinker, a man of ideas, with an originating mind, a mind in such close contact with nature that, as was said of Kepler he " could think the thoughts of God," he would have curtailed his high privilege, maimed his mental action, had he refused to let his thought have its full sweep in surmising, in conceiving, in imagin- ing the procedure of nature. The capacity to discover a law of nature involves a power of somewhat preconceiving it. Without this power — a very high, uncommon one — of originating ideas within the mind, the mind could not put itself upon the track to discover a law of nature. With profound insight Kant lays down the position : " What truth soever is necessary and of universal extent is derived to the mind by its own operation, and does not rest on observation and experience." The inductive method supposes, of course, a capac- ity in the mind to class and coordinate facts, and the power to coordinate facts involves necessarily the power to preconceive, before making the induction, the law that rules them. 282 GOETHE. To congenial, piercing minds nature gives hints, and such minds delight in taking such hints, in seizing at a glance, by a flashing im- aginative process, a law, or the elements of a law. These rich guesses, these prolific imag- inations, before they can be used as safe build- ing material, are to be subjected to strictest tests. This union of theorizing creative med- itation with scrupulous and efficient verifica- tion by induction of facts, this it is that con- stitutes Goethe's claim to the title of great naturalist. Reason, which is the arbiter in all investigations conducted by man, in whatever sphere, — reason is an interior, invisible might. They who seek the reason of all things from without preclude reason, is the import of the motto to one of Coleridge's philosophical es- says in The Friend. Never was a man more susceptible than Goethe to impressions from without, more eager for facts ; and, at the same time, never one carried within himself a stronger, clearer light to sift and class facts and to detect their governing law. The natu- ralist, to be great, must have, like Goethe, a philosophic mind, that is, a mind which loves to search for, and can reach, first principles. But to this part of Goethe's greatness must GOETHE. 283 not be given too much of our limited time. His best moods he gave to poetry. Fresh poetry can only be written in the best moods that a man is capable of. When Goethe could write poetry, he wrote that and nothing else. When inspiration folds the faculties in its glowing embrace, they become insensible to all save its breathings. That Goethe devoted so much thought to science proves the rich fullness of his mental endowment, and that when he could not write poetry he had the spring and strength and means for centring his attention on the next highest work, — into which, too, he brought some of his creative power. He had easy command over the dif- fering mental instrumentalities which science and poetry work with. When producing po- etry he was obeying subjectively and irresisti- bly the most emphatic will of God as to him- self; when intent on discovering the laws of nature, he was finding out objectively what is the will of God. The creative gift constitutes the poet: to make, to create, is the meaning of the Greek word from which the term poet is derived. By virtue it is of his livelier sympathy with being - that the poet is empowered to, humanly, ere- 284 GOETHE. ate, to reproduce, being. He has a keener apprehension of, a warmer feeling for, life. Through the intensity of this feeling he can imaginatively re-live another's life, and thus represent it from within, — re-live another life, as he re-lives his own daily life through inward motion. Only what is thus brought forth, by help of light from the beautiful, is poetry, is creation. Fresh poetry must come from the inmost self, and that self must be so deep and true as to hold more humanity than one man's share, and is thus able, is im- pelled, to throw off fragments of humanity that shall be as veritable as those we meet on the market-place. From this teeming fullness comes the inward urgency, the spontaneous flood. Like all the most abundant and vital and honest minds, Goethe was eminently spontane- ous. He wrote, not only from within out- wardly, but from an inward pressure. He did not take up promising subjects from without and adorn them ; but a feeling shaped itself within him, thus weaving for itself a fresh body, — the true creative process, whereby the generative spirit makes the material in which to embody itself. At other times he adopted GOETHE. 285 a form already known, and reanimated it, re- baptized it ; thus, by means of his inward fire, putting a new soul into an old story, and by re- generative power giving fascination to an un- promising subject, causing it to sparkle with fresh movement, through the quickening life of genius, working with clean, warm human sympathies. Much verse is written in the opposite way. Acceptable, attractive subjects are deftly, gracefully treated with more or less poetic spirit. Old popular themes are taken in hand, to be reembodied, a new face is given to them, — but no new soul is breathed into them. Even the great friend of Goethe, Schil- ler, worked much in this fashion. He was ever casting about for subjects. In one of his letters to Goethe he complains of a dearth of them. Goethe never felt this dearth : in him subjects bubbled up abundantly from the spring within. He could afford to give up subjects to his friend, as he did William Tell. To this exuberance of feeling, this readiness of sympathy, Goethe added largeness and fine- ness of intellectual faculty, which, assiduously cultivated, gave him command of strong, flex- ible, intellectual implements, so that he pos- sessed a rarely complete equipment for the 286 GOETHE. high function of poet and artist, and could bring within the range of his Art an unusually full circle of human interests. Goethe was one of the wisest of men. This implies a rich humanity of nature. To be very wise a man must enjoy that penetrating, easy vision into the most subtle, as well as the most necessary, human relations, which is only en- joyed when keenest intellectual arrows are tempered in a flood of disinterested feeling. Goethe's wisdom makes the permanent attrac- tion of his writings, verse as well as prose ; for the best poetry, to be the best, must issue from the warm depths where tenderness is by intellect ingeniously wrought into adamantine chains of meaning. Along the lines of Goethe's pen wisdom sparkled like verdure along the path of a spring-swollen brook. To his larger works it gives their weighty import and their inward- ness of beauty, interlacing their fibre with golden threads of significancy. On distich and quatrain and other short poems wisdom glistens like solitary diamond on a white, sup- ple finger. Take this as a sample : " Do thou what 's right in thy affairs : The rest 's done for thee unawares." GOETHE. 287 Or this : " Nothing could make me deeper moan, Than being in Paradise alone." Or this : " To sweetly remember and finely to think, Is tasting of life at its deep inmost brink." Or this " When in thy head and heart it stirs, How bettered could thy doom be ? Who no more loves and no more errs Had better in his tomb be." Or this : " For what is greatest no one strives, But each one envies others' lives : The worst of enviers is the elf Who thinks that all are like himself." Many pages might be filled with similar brill- iants. Goethe said of Heine that he wants love. From its abundance in himself he knew the value and high import of this element in liter- ary production. To his own pages this su- preme attribute of mankind gives mellowness, imparts to his plots and characters a higher specific gravity. This controlling humanity of feeling turns the Pagan Princess Iphigenia into a Christian heroine ; gives arterial color 288 GOETHE. and rounded fullness to all the personages of that beautiful idyllic epic, Hermann and Doro- thea, — ideal personages who, thiough the po- etic potency of their maker, seem more real than their living counterparts in a small Ger- man town ; makes of The God and the Baya- dere the most significant, the most profound, and the most exquisite of ballads ; pervades the wise pages of Wilhelm Meister, and is the very soul of the mastership that presided over the birth and growth of that marvelous crea- tion Mignon. This perfusive fellow-feeling steeps all Goethe's writings in its life-strength- ening current. And this man has been called cold ! So has been that controlled volcano, Washington. Goethe once said : " The most important thing is to learn to rule one's self. If I gave way to my impulses, I have such as might ruin me and all about me." The love of man was in Goethe accompanied, I may say surmounted, by what may be termed the uplifting, the transfiguring element in the poetic organization, — vivid consciousness of a transearthly spiritual world, enfolding our earth world, — living belief in a hereafter, where the spirit, man, divested of his clay-clothes, shall continue to live and to advance. This GOETHE. 289 soaring element is as active in Dante as in Homer, working the evolution of one of the richest products of human genius, the Di- vina Commedia. This belief inspired Milton with our great English Epic, is an awful pres- ence in Hamlet, and the animating principle of Wordsworth's immortal ode. It hallows the conclusion of both parts of Faust. At the end of the last sublime scene of the First Part, when Margaret, about to be executed, ex- claims : " Thine am I, Father ! save me ! Ye Angels, ye holy ones, guard me, Camp ye around here to ward me. Henry, I shudder for thee ! " and Mephistopheles, like the consummate worldling that he is, pronounces : " She is judged ! " comes a voice from above : " She is saved ! " The moral grandeur of this utterance is con- current with its aesthetic beauty. The terrible gloom needed a flash of redeeming light ; the agonizing sympathy with Margaret longed for a solace. To draw this voice from Heaven Goethe's tenderness of nature was backed by his faith. 19 29O GOETHE. Towards the end of the Second Part, at the moment of the death of Faust, his soul is snatched away from Mephistopheles by An- gels, one of them singing : " Who bestirs him, striving ever, Him can we surely deliver." As they bear Faust upward, he is met by Mar- garet attended by bands of Angels, singing : "Almighty Love upbuildeth all, And saves them even when they fall." Goethe sends Margaret and Faust to Heav- en, because he believed in it for himself. Be- ing a good as well as a great man, and having absolute faith in the "Almighty Love," his was not at all a religion of fear. " At the age of seventy-five " he once said to his secretary, Eckerman, " one must, of course, think fre- quently of death. But this thought never gives me the least uneasiness, I am so fully convinced that the soul is indestructible, and that its activity will continue through eternity. It is like the sun, which seems to our earthly eyes to set in night, but is in reality gone to diffuse its light elsewhere." And again, on another occasion : " I could in nowise dis- pense with the happiness of believing in our GOETHE. 29I future existence, and, indeed, could say, with Lorenzo dei Medici, that those are dead for this life even who have no hope for another." Goethe's belief was not notional, it did not come from the mere understanding partially illuminated by the finer emotions, as does so much of what is called religious belief ; a kind of belief which is not truly religious is, indeed, only formal and dogmatic, and is apt to be accompanied by intolerance, and especially by Pharisaism. Goethe agreed with the devout Joubert, who says : " We know God easily, provided we do not constrain ourselves to de- fine him." The God of sectarians is a subjec- tive God, made after the image of the secta- rian, in whose organization are predominant, not the nobler disinterested emotions, but the understanding and the self-seeking impulses. The religious faith of an emotional man with large reasoning range, like Goethe, is objec- tive. Goethe believed in the immanence (to use a technical term) of the creative spirit in all nature ; but he, at the same time, believed in a transcending Mind,, that sustains and rules the whole. Sensuous as was his nature, it was so large and fully furnished that, while never seeking to know intellectually the un- 292 GOETHE. knowable, and especially not drawing impera- tive dogmas out of assumptions and imagina- tions, he had within, in his higher conscious- ness, a deep, strong feeling for the invisible spiritual, the far and yet near supernal, the vast, celestial, inscrutable Might. And thus in Faust, in the great ballads of the Bayadere and the Unfaithful Boy, he delights to round off with a limitless atmosphere, sending the reader's imagination into the Infinite. For Goethe as for Joubert it was not diffi- cult to "know God," because their aim, and at times their struggle, to live obediently to his will brought them nearer to him, and their glowing gifts clarified their vision for the di- vine perfections. There is but one way to. know God, and that is to live his law. This Goethe was ever striv- ing to do, ever aiming to better himself mor- ally, spiritually, intellectually. Living under the momentum of a never-remitted aspiration, he lived the highest life that the individual can live. And Goethe, a man of genius and superior mental powers, having lived this high life more busily, for a longer stretch of years than almost any other man, his writings, in which the best and brightest of him is skill- GOETHE. 293 fully embodied with purest art, are, to any competent reader, a most profitable and en- riching study. Filling more than fifty vol- umes, in their manifoldness and their extent they almost form a literature of themselves. And to these are to be added thousands of let- ters, happily preserved, and given to the world in six volumes of correspondence, during ten years, between him and Schiller ; six volumes of that with Zelter, during thirty years ; three volumes, running through half a century, of notes and letters to the Frau vqn Stein ; two volumes between him and his noble friend and Sovereign Karl August, for fifty-two years ; two with Knebel, covering the long space of fifty-seven years ; besides a series of single volumes to Lavater, to Jacobi, to Merk, to the Countess Stolberg, to Voight and others ; and three, lately published, of letters written be- tween his fifteenth and twenty-sixth years to his youthful friends and companions, — the whole forming a collection of the most valua- ble letters from one man ever published or penned, the most intellectual, fluent, lively, wise, honest, — a vast varied correspondence, disclosing the affectionateness and dutifulness of his nature, the breadth and depth of his knowledge and culture. 294 GOETHE. Thus lived this illustrious man his long life, ever seeking truth ; by love of it moved to send forth his rare capacities on many paths in the search. A gentle nature, though so ener- getic : no bitterness in his being. Hardly was he capable of hatred : this was almost a de- fect in him. And his other defects? Have you nothing to say of his faults ? Nothing. A man's faults — save in people of one-sided selfishness — are mostly perversions of useful qualities, perversions which, under healthiest conditions, could not be. Especially is this the case with one of so compact and complete a mental organism as Goethe. Such a man's faults are temporary misdirections of sound impulses and appetites. In a full, rounded, active nature, defects are interwoven with ex- cellences, — are not to be divided from these without laceration ; they make part of the motion and exceptional glow of the individual being. From those perversions which sometimes disfigure the characters even of good and great men, Goethe was singularly free. He was not vain, he was not proud, he was not envious ; he was aspiring, but not ambitious, nor avaricious, nor covetous of others' goods ; GOETHE. 295 nor was he narrow or prejudiced. He was a just man and a generous ; charitable he was and genuinely religious, dutiful, forbearing, more exacting towards himself than towards others. Within his best being Goethe carried an ideal, to which he strove to conform his daily doings, — an ideal so clean and high that those who have taken on themselves to sit in adverse judgment on him could not conceive of, could hardly understand. That the possessor of such varied, brilliant, and solid gifts strove ever, in the exercise of them, to approach a lofty standard, which only a poet who was a good man could erect and keep before him, to this it is owing that to ponder and endeavor studiously to fathom his life and life-work is an enjoyment, a disci- pline, a progress. He charms and instructs us, as he charmed and instructed his contem- porary acquaintance. In his opening career at Weimar he so captivated all by his sympa- thizing ways, his playfulness, his genius, that Knebel wrote of him : " He rose like a star ; every body worshiped him." And that star has had, will have, no setting. Niebuhr, the historian, well versed in the characteristics of great men, said of him : " He towers above all 296 GOETHE. whom Germany has produced." Burger, the poet, called him " The astonishing magician." The greatest and the least who came into close contact with him loved, admired, trusted him. The brothers Humboldt, and other statesmen and philosophers and highest teachers, all ac- knowledged their obligations to him. Some of them sought his company to refresh and strengthen their minds. The noble, enlight- ened ducal family of Weimar, through three generations, have continued the worship of ad- miring love towards the friend and benefactor of their house. Wieland and Herder, his il- lustrious contemporaries and neighbors, were comforted by his friendship, elevated by his genius. Schiller said of him : " If he were not as a man more admirable than any I have ever known, I should only marvel at his genius from the distance. But I can truly say that in the six years I have lived with him, I have never for one moment been deceived in his character. He has a high truth and integrity, and is thoroughly in earnest for the Right and the Good." Earnestly, indefatigably, faithfully, resplen- dently, did John Wolfgang Goethe work through fourscore years, cultivating his com- GOETHE. 297 prehensive, many-sided, musical mind ; his soul so high-strung, that to him the singing of the spheres, the divine rhythm of creation, was more audible than to most men ; and so su- perbly gifted that he could echo it in the choicest tones of wisdom and poetry. Born in Frankfort-on-the-Main the 28th of August, 1749, he breathed his last in Weimar on the 22d of March, 1832, tranquilly, without pain, seated in an arm-chair beside his bed. In full possession of his great faculties, he went up to higher spheres, where Dante and Shake- speare awaited him. The last words from his lips, just before he expired, were, "more light."