English Lands Letters and Kings Part 20

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CHAPTER VIII

We have still in our mind's eye, and very pleasantly, that quaint old clergyman of Hampshire, who wrote about the daws, and the swallows, and the fern-owl, in a way that has kept the name of Gilbert White alive, for a great many years. And who that has read them can ever forget the stories of that winning Hampshire lady, whose fame takes on new greenness with every spring-time? Following upon our talk of this charming auth.o.r.ess, we had a little discursive mention, in our last chapter, of certain books which at the close of the last century, or early in this, were written for boys and girls; chiefest among these we noted those written by that excellent woman, Miss Edgeworth. We spoke of Miss Roche, who gushed over in the loves of Amanda and Mortimer--those fond and sentimental _Children {301} of the Abbey_; and of Miss Porter, with her gorgeous heroics about Poland and Scotland, and of Mrs. Radcliffe's stunning _Mysteries of Udolpho_. We had a glimpse of the strange work and life of William Beckford--son of the rich Lord Mayor Beckford; and we closed our chapter over the grave of that brilliant poet and wrecked man Robert Burns.

That grewsome death of the great Scotch singer occurred in a miserable house of a disorderly street in Dumfries, within four years of the close of the last century; his children--without any mastership to control, and the love that should have guided dumb--wandering in and out; no home comforts about them; the very necessities of life uncertain and precarious; all hopes narrowed for them, and all memories of theirs full of wildest alternations of joyousness and fright.

_A Banker Poet._

[Sidenote: Samuel Rogers.]

You have perhaps read and enjoyed a poem called _The Pleasures of Memory_. It has tender pa.s.sages in it; it has an easy, melodious swing:--

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"Twilight's soft dews steal o'er the village green, With magic tints to harmonize the scene; Stilled is the hum that thro' the hamlet broke, When round the ruins of their ancient oak The peasants flocked to hear the minstrel play And games and carols closed the busy day.

Up springs, at every step--to claim a tear, Some little friendship formed and cherished here; And not the lightest leaf, but trembling teems With golden visions and romantic dreams.

This poem, with echoes of Goldsmith in it, with echoes of Dryden, with echoes of Cowper--all caught together by a hand that was most deft, and by a taste that was most fastidious--was written and published in London, four years before Burns died, by the poet-banker Samuel Rogers.[1] It is not a name that I feel inclined to glorify very much, or that should be honored with any large reverence; but it is brought specially to the reader's notice here, because the life, career, and accomplishment of the man offers so striking a contrast to that of the Scottish poet who was his contemporary. They were born within four years {303} of each other. One under the bare roof of an Ayrshire cottage, the other amid the luxuries of a banker's home in London; one caught inspiration amongst the hills and the woods; the other was taught melody in the drawing-rooms and libraries of London; one wrested his conquests in the kingdom of song, single-handed; and the other, his lesser and feebler ones, bolstered with all the appliances that wealth could give, or long culture suggest. The poetry of the one is rich, individual, and spirited, with sources in nature and in the pa.s.sions of the man; the poetry of the other has only those congruous and tamer harmonies, whose sources lie in the utterance of deeper and stronger singers before him. Yet the life of that Ayrshire poet was a miserable failure; and the life of this other, Samuel Rogers, was--as the world counts things--a complete success. No half-starved children pulled at his skirts for bread. All luxuries were about him, and from the beginning life flowed with him as calmly as a river.

Of his early history there is not much to be said. We know that he was born at Newington Green--an old suburb lying directly north of the city, {304} toward Stamford Hill--and now engulfed by the tide of London houses; we know he studied at good schools there, and under careful teachers at home; we know that he used to read and love Dr.

Beattie's minstrel; we know that once, in boyhood (he tells the story himself), craving a sight of the great Dr. Johnson, he went to his door, but scared by the first tap of the knocker, sidled away, and so never saw that literary magnate. It was a timidity that did not cling to Mr. Rogers; in all his later years no man in London was less afraid of the pounding of a knocker.

His first volume was printed in the very year on which the poor thin book of Burns's first poems saw the light at Kilmarnock. This, however, did not make his reputation; _that_ came six years later with the _Pleasures of Memory_, of which I cited a fragment; and thereafter, all down through the earlier half of the present century, there was hardly a better known man in London than Samuel Rogers, banker and poet. He voyaged widely and brought back many spoils of travel; he had luxurious tastes and fed them with the utmost discretion. He had social ambition, and rare sagacity in {305} selecting his companions, and in timing his courtesies; he flattered critics, and was obsequious to men with t.i.tles.

His house in St. James's--with its broad upper double window, looking out upon the Green Park--was known of all men. Before yet the days of bric-a-brac had come, it was filled with beautiful things and with trophies of art. It was not large nor pretentious; but on its walls were paintings, or sketches by Raphael, by Rubens, by t.i.tian, by Gainsborough, by Rembrandt, and by Reynolds; and in its ante-rooms, marbles by Thorwaldsen and Canova. There were no children of the house, nor was there ever a wife there to aid, or to lord the master.

Yet many a lady, ranking by t.i.tle, or by cleverness, has enjoyed the dinners and the breakfasts for which the house was famous. The cooking was always of the best; the wines the rarest; the meats and fruits the choicest, and the porcelain superb. Like most who have richly equipped houses, he loved to have his fine things admired; and he loved to have his fine words echoed. Few foreigners of any literary distinction visited London from 1815 to 1850, without coming to a taste {306} of the poet's hospitality, and to a taste too, very likely, of his pretty satire. His wit flashed more sharply in his talk than in his verse; and his dinner stories were fabulous in number, in piquancy, and in sting. Like all accomplished _raconteurs_, he must needs tell his good stories over and over, so that Rogers's butler, it was wittily said, was next best to Rogers.

He could hardly have been called a good-natured man, and was always, I think, keener for a good thing to say, than for a good thing to do. He gave, it is true, largely in charities; but in orderly, business-like ways and with none of the unction and kindly indirectness[2] which doubles the {307} warmth of the best giving. All London knew him as a diner out, as a connoisseur, as an opera-goer, as a patron of clever people, as a friend to those in place, as a _flaneur_ along Piccadilly.

He was cool, unimpa.s.sioned, blase in look, never doing openly discreditable things; and he carried his reputation for unmitigated respectability, for wealth, for sharp speeches, for cleverness, for sagacious charities, down to extreme age; dying as late as 1855, ninety-three years old.

[Sidenote: Rogers' poems.]

Though the poem ent.i.tled _The Pleasures of Memory_ made his fame, a later descriptive poem, embodying the gleanings from a trip in Italy, is perhaps better known; and it enjoys the distinction of having been ill.u.s.trated and printed at a cost of $70,000 of the banker's money.

Fragments of that poem you must know; the story of Ginevra, perhaps, best of all; so daintily told that it is likely to live and be cherished as long as any of the bric-a-brac which the banker poet gathered in his travels. 'Tis a story of a picture that he saw--a "lady in her earliest youth."

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"She sits inclining forward as to speak, Her lips half open, and her finger up As though she said--Beware! Her vest of gold Broidered with flowers, and clasped from head to foot, An emerald stone in every golden clasp, And on her brow, fairer than alabaster, A coronet of pearls.... Alone it hangs Over a mouldering heirloom, its companion, An oaken chest, half eaten by the worms.

Just as she looks there in her bridal dress She was all gentleness and gaiety.

And in the l.u.s.tre of her youth, she gave Her hand with her heart in it, to Francesco.

Great was the joy; but at the bridal feast When all sat down, the bride was wanting there, Nor was she to be found! Her father cried "'Tis but to make a trial of our love!"

And filled his gla.s.s to all; _but his hand shook_, And soon from guest to guest the panic spread.

'Twas but that instant she had left Francesco Laughing, and looking back and flying still, Her ivory tooth imprinted on his finger.

But now, alas, she was not to be found; Nor from that hour could anything be guessed But that she was not! Weary of his life Francesco flew to Venice, and forthwith Flung it away in battle with the Turk.

Orsini lived; and long mightest thou have seen An old man wandering as in quest of something-- Something he could not find--he knew not what

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When he was gone, the house remained awhile Silent and tenantless; then, went to strangers.

Full fifty years were past, and all forgot, When on an idle day--a day of search Mid the old lumber in the gallery-- That mouldering chest was noticed; and 'twas said By one as young, as thoughtless, as Ginevra, Why not remove it from its lurking-place?

'Twas done, as soon as said; but on the way It burst--it fell; and lo, a skeleton, With here and there a pearl, an emerald stone, A golden clasp--clasping a shred of gold.

All else had perished, save a nuptial ring And a small seal--her mother's legacy, Engraven with a name--the name of both-- "Ginevra."

A pretty delicacy certainly goes to the telling of that story; but in the tale of Christabel and of the Ancient Mariner there is something more than delicacy--more of brain and pa.s.sion and far-reaching poetic insight in the poet Coleridge, than in ten such men as Samuel Rogers.

_Coleridge._

[Sidenote: Coleridge.]

Yet what a sad life we have to tell you of now! A life without any repose in it;--a life haunted and goaded by its own ambitions--a life put to {310} wreck by lack of resolute governance--a life going out at last under the shadows of great clouds.

Coleridge[3] was the son of a humble, quiet, self-forgetting, earnest clergyman in the West of England; and the boy, having no other opportunity, came to be billeted upon that famous Christ Hospital school in London--whose boys in their ancient uniform of yellow stockings and blue coats, and bare heads, still provoke the curiosity of those western travellers who wander down Newgate Street, and gaze through the iron grill upon the paved approach-way.

He knew Lamb there--Charles Lamb, who in the Essays of Elia addresses to him that famous apostrophe: "Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the dayspring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee--the dark pillar not yet turned--Samuel Taylor Coleridge--Logician, Metaphysician, Bard!" Yet this pale-faced metaphysician and friend of Lamb gets {311} severe beatings at the hands of the Greek master, though his sweet intonations make the corridors resound with the verse of Homer. At Cambridge, where he goes afterward for a time, he is cheated and bullied; his far-off and dreamy look upon the symphonies of a poetic world not qualifying him for the every-day contests of the cloisters; in the haze in which he lives, he loses scent of the honors he had hoped to win; there is no prospective fellowship and no establishment for him there. Disappointed and despairing he goes up to London and enlists as private in the dragoons under a feigned name; but friends detect and prevent the military sacrifice.

A little later, we find him in his own West of England again, at Bristol--whither we have wandered so often in search of poets--and he encounters Southey thereabout, whom he had met for the first time on a visit to Oxford in 1794; this brother poet being as hazy, and dreamy, and theosophic, and hopeful in those days as Coleridge himself. The two form a sort of garret partnership--lecture to the savages of surrounding towns--are inoculated both with the {312} "fraternity and equality" fever which had grown out of the French Revolution--they believing that this French car of Juggernaut is to be dragged with its b.l.o.o.d.y wheels over the whole brotherhood of nations. In this faith they plot a settlement, in the new region--of which they know nothing, but the sweetly sounding name of Wyoming--upon the banks of the Susquehanna. There they would dig, and build cottages, and philosophize, and found Arcadia. With kindred poetic foresight, Coleridge marries in these days a bride as inexperienced and as poor as himself; and for a little time there is a one-volumed Arcadia on the banks of the Bristol Channel, with a lovely and pensive Sara for its presiding nymph. Only for those few early years does this nymph enter for much into the career of Coleridge. Domesticity[4] was never a {313} shining virtue in him; and wife, and cottage, and Arcadia somehow fade out from the story of his life--as pointless, unsaving, and ineffective for him, all these, as the blurred lines with which we begin a story, and cross them out. Southey, with a practical old aunt to look sharply after his youngness, is quickly driven from his Arcadian feeding ground and for the present disappears.

But Coleridge is still in the wallow of his wild vain hopes and wild discourse, when he encounters another poet--his elder by a few years and of a cooler temperament--William Wordsworth; who about that time had established himself, with his sister Dorothy, upon the borders of Somersetshire. These two men, so unlike, cleave together from the beginning; there is a flagging now in the Unitarian discourses of Coleridge in country chapels; and instead, wanderings with the brother poets over the fair country ways that border upon the Bristol straits--looking off upon the green flats of Somerset, the tufted banks of the Avon, the shining of the sea, with trafficking ships, to the west. Out of these, and of their meditations grow the first book--a joint one--of {314} _Lyrical Ballads_; its issue not making a ripple on the tide where Crabbe and Cowper were then afloat; and yet creating an epoch in the history of British verse. For in it was the story of the Ancient Mariner, and words therein that will never grow old:

"Farewell, farewell! but this I tell To thee, thou wedding guest!

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 G.o.d who loveth us He made and loveth all!"

Yet the poet does still--from time to time wandering into country chapels--hammer at strange, irregular sermons, with a mixed metaphysics and poetry; and theologies of a dim vague sort which beat on ear and hearts, like sleet on slated roofs, and bring never a beam of that warming sunshine which lies in the lines I have quoted from the Mariner.

One wonders how he lived in those times; with no moneys coming from books; only driblets from his preachments; and with not enough of {315} commercial apt.i.tude in him to audit a grocer's bill. The Wedgewoods--so well known by their pottery--who have a quick eye for fine wares of all sorts--recognize his rare brain, and send him over to Germany, bestowing upon him an annuity, which enables him to forego his travelling priesthood, and gives him the means of visiting various cities of the continent.

The Wordsworths make the trip with him; and after a stay of a twelve-month--mostly in Gottingen--Coleridge returns, with his translation of Wallenstein; but this counts for little. A year later, he finds his way to Keswick--to a beautiful, wooded bay, where Southey ultimately established his anchorage for life;[5] the Wordsworths were not far off, at Grasmere; and Coleridge plans that weekly paper--_The Friend_ (finding issue some years later) with wonderful things in it, which few people read then; and so fine-drawn, that few read them now.

The damps of Keswick give him {316} rheumatic pains, for which he uses protective stimulants; good Dorothy Wordsworth has fears thereanent, and regards hopefully his appointment to some civil station at Malta.

But his impracticabilities lose him the place after a very short inc.u.mbency; he crosses to Italy; sees Naples, Amain, and Vesuvius; sees, and knows well at Rome, our American painter, Washington Allston.

There are bonds of sympathy we might have looked for between the author of _Monaldi_ and the author of _Christabel_.

In England again, the fogs bring back old rheumatic pains; the alienation from his wife is declaring itself in more unmistakable ways; and then, or thereabout,[6] begins that terrible slavery to opium, whose chains he wore thenceforth, some twenty years, and was not entirely free until death broke his bonds. There is a dreary, yet touching pathos in this confession of his--"Alas, it is with a bitter smile, a laugh of gall and bitterness, that I recall that period of unsuspecting delusion, and how I first became aware of the {317} maelstrom, the fatal whirlpool to which I was drawing, just when the current was already beyond my strength to stem."

But against the circling terrors of that maelstrom he does make now and then gallant struggle--goes to the house of that kindly surgeon, Gillman, at Highgate, who is charged to guard him--does guard him with exceeding kindness; the servants have orders to watch him--to follow him in the street on his lecture days. But the cunning of a man crazed by his insatiate appet.i.te outwits them; and over and over the turbid roll of his speech--with flashing splendors in it, that give no light--betrays him. And yet it was in those very days of alternate heroic struggle and of devilish yielding that he re-vamps and extends and retouches that sweet, serene poem of Christabel, with the pure, innocent, loving, trustful, winning, blue-eyed daughter of Sir Leoline praying under the oaks, and contrasted with her that graceful, mocking, radiant Geraldine--with smiles that enchant, and alabaster front, and undying graces, and wiles of the serpent, and the damps of the pit in her breath--as if the demon that pursued and {318} pushed him to the wall had foreshadowed himself in that mocking and most beautiful Geraldine.