342 



COLERIDGE 



he began a course of miscellaneous lecturing on 

 literary and political subjects. It was now that 

 he made the acquaintance of Joseph Cottle, the 

 Bristol bookseller, who became so kind a friend. 

 Cottle offered to publish a volume of poems for 

 him, giving him thirty guineas for the copyright ; 

 and, vexed at his delay in completing the volume, 

 subsequently offered him a guinea for every hundred 

 lines of verse he would write, after this first volume 

 was printed. With this promise, and what -he 

 thouglit provision for life, he ventured to marry ; 

 and in October 1795 Sara Flicker became Mrs 

 Coleridge. They went at once to a small cottage, 

 which is still to be seen at Clevedon in Somerset. 

 Here, however, Coleridge did not long remain. 

 We find him in Bristol in December getting his 

 first volume of poems ready for the press ( it was 

 published in April 1796), and at the same time 

 attempting to start a weekly journal to be called 

 the Watchman, which was to contain general 

 news, parliamentary reports, literary intelligence, 

 and reviews. In his efforts to float this journal 

 he went north to Birmingham, Manchester, Shef- 

 field, &c. , to procure subscribers. He succeeded 

 in starting it, Cottle being the publisher ; but it 

 only reached its tenth number, and failed the 

 generous publisher bearing all the loss. Coleridge 

 next tried the experiment of preaching in the 

 Unitarian chapels around Bristol. Cottle gives 

 an account of his appearance in one of these at 

 Bath on a Sunday, ' in blue coat and white waist- 

 coat,' to discourse on the corn laws and the powder 

 tax. This eccentricity did not last. Another 

 friend, and a somewhat remarkable man Thomas 

 Poole of Nether Stowey provided him with a 

 small house and garden in the village of Stowey ; 

 and there Coleridge went to live, in January 1797, 

 with his wife and child (whom he had named 

 Hartley, from his admiration for the philosophy of 

 David Hartley ). Poole also very generously raised 

 a sum of money to provide an annuity for his 

 friend. 



Before this date Coleridge had made the acquaint- 

 ance of Wordsworth. In the early spring of 1796 

 Wordsworth went up to Bristol from Racedown in 

 Dorsetshire, to see both Coleridge and Southey ; 

 and, in a list of authors with whom he was 

 acquainted, drawn up by Coleridge in March of 

 that year, Wordsworth's name occurs. In the 

 following year Coleridge went down from Stowey 

 to Racedown to return the visit. As late as 1845 

 Mrs Wordsworth gave a graphic account to Sara 

 Coleridge of her father's ' leaping over a gate, and 

 bounding down a pathless field ' on this first visit 

 to Racedown. In July 1797 the Wordsworths 

 moved from Racedown to Alfoxden, partly to be 

 nearer Coleridge ; and during that winter which 

 William and Dorothy Wordsworth spent in Somer- 

 set Coleridge was their almost daily companion, 

 roaming the woods and coombs of the Quantocks 

 with them, or spending the night at Alfoxden. 

 Wordsworth and he discussed together the prin- 

 ciples of poetry, and planned a joint volume of 

 verse to illustrate these principles ; Wordsworth 

 undertaking to invest commonplace themes with 

 an imaginative interest, by disclosing what under- 

 lay them ; and Coleridge taking supernatural or 

 romantic incidents, humanising the stories so as to 

 give new life to them. This was the origin of the 

 Lyrical Ballads, the little volume which more than 

 any other marked a new departure in poetical 

 literature at the beginning of the 19th century. 

 To it Coleridge contributed the Ancient Mariner. 

 The book was published in 1798. 



This meeting of Coleridge and Wordsworth was 

 one of the most remarkable conjunctions of genius 

 in the literary history of England, and the days 

 they spent together in Somerset were perhaps the 



most joyous in their lives. While living at Nether 

 Stowey, Coleridge kept up the practice of occasional 

 preaching ; and ' to prevent the necessity of his 

 going into the ministry,' another admiring friend, 

 Josiah Wedgwood, sent him a draft for 100. He 

 returned it to the donor ; but, soon afterwards, 

 Coleridge accepted an annuity of 150 from the 

 brothers Wedgwood, given to him on the condition 

 that he would devote his life wholly to poetry 

 and philosophy. In 1798 he started with the 

 Wordsworths for Germany, crossing from Yar- 

 mouth to Hamburg ; and while Wordsworth went 

 to Goslar, Coleridge proceeded to Ratzeburg, to 

 study the language and literature of the country. 

 He moved on to Gottingen in January 1799. An 

 interesting picture of his life in Germany is given 

 in Satyrane's Letters. He returned to England in 

 June ; in August we find him at Stowey ; and in 

 September in Yorkshire with the Wordsworths. 

 They had some idea of settling together, to renew 

 the fellowship of the Quantock days. On the 

 approach of winter, however, Coleridge went up to 

 London, and there translated Wallenstein, one of 

 the best bits of work he ever did. He now made 

 fresh attempts at journalism, and wrote both prose 

 and verse for the Morning Post ; but, while some 

 of his articles were admirable, he was such an 

 irregular contributor, that his connection with the 

 Post lasted only for a few months. In July he 

 went north to Keswick, and took up his residence 

 at Greta Hall, which Southey also made his home 

 in 1803. At Keswick he continued his poetic work, 

 and wrote the second part of Christabel. The 

 W r ordsworths had now been settled for some time 

 at Dove Cottage, Grasmere, and there Coleridge was 

 their frequent guest. Dorothy Wordsworth's Gras- 

 mere journal (ed. Knight, 1897) is full of allusions 

 to his visits, and to the wonderful friendship of these 

 days a friendship immortalised in her brother's 

 Stanzas written in a pocket copy of Thomson's 

 Castle of Indolence. But during the years he spent 

 at Keswick, Coleridge came under the influence of 

 what was henceforward to be the very curse of his 

 life. His health had never been robust ; rheuma- 

 tism and neuralgia had tortured him ; and, becom- 

 ing his own doctor, he had recourse to the anodyne 

 of opium. Little by little the habit grew, and the 

 ' Kendal black drop ' at length enslaved him. It 

 injured his constitution and killed his imagination; 

 it enfeebled his will and destroyed his sense of 

 truth and honour. Few things in literature are so 

 pathetic as his own lament over the deterioration 

 of his nature, in his Dejection, an Ode. The details 

 of this malady; and what it led to, have not yet 

 been fully told. 



Charles Lamb came to visit him at Keswick in 

 1802. In 1803 he started with the Wordsworths, on 

 their memorable Scottish tour ; but left them in a 

 fortnight, and did wonderful feats of walking alone. 

 He now thought of many plans for the recovery of 

 health, which were really but plans to flee from 

 Ids own shadow. The frugal Wordsworth forced 

 him to accept a loan of 100. He was befriended 

 by others, and he sailed for Malta in April 1804. 

 There he became secretary to the governor, Sir 

 Alexander Ball, an office for which he was entirely 

 unsuited. His letters from abroad were hypochon- 

 driacal, valetudinarian, and sad in many ways. 

 From Malta he went to Sicily, to Naples, and to 

 Rome ; but he had to leave Italy with some abrupt- 

 ness, an order, it is said, having been issued oy 

 Napoleon for his arrest, on the ground of some 

 republican utterances years before ; and the vessel 

 in which he sailed being chased by a French cruiser, 

 he threw all his papers (which included many of 

 Wordsworth's poems) overboard. In August 1806 

 he returned to England. It is unnecessary to 

 trace his subsequent wanderings to and fro, from 



