Halleck's New English Literature Part 49

"The sweetest thing that ever grew Beside a human door."

In the poem, _Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower_, Nature seems to have chosen Wordsworth as her spokesman to describe the part that she would play in educating a child. Nature says:--

"This child I to myself will take; She shall be mine, and I will make A lady of my own.

...She shall lean her ear In many a secret place Where rivulets dance their wayward round, And beauty born of murmuring sound Shall pa.s.s into her face."

One of the finest similes in all the poetry of nature may be found in the stanza which likens the charms of a little girl to those of:--

"A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye!

Fair as a star when only one Is shining in the sky."

Finally, in his _Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood_, he glorifies universal childhood, that "eye among the blind," capable of seeing this common earth--

"Appareled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream."

General Characteristics.--Four of Wordsworth's characteristics go hand in hand,--sincerity, feeling, depth of thought, and simplicity of style. The union of these four qualities causes his great poems to continue to yield pleasure after an indefinite number of readings. In his garden of poetry, the daffodil blossoms all the year for the "inward eye," and the "wandering voice of the cuckoo" never ceases to awaken springtime in the heart.

His own age greeted with so much ridicule the excessive simplicity of the presentation of ordinary childish grief in _Alice Fell_, that he excluded it from many editions of his poems. We now recognize the special charm of his simplicity in expressing those feelings and thoughts that "do often lie too deep for tears."

Wordsworth was most truly great when he seemed to write as naturally as he breathed, when he appeared unconscious of the power that he wielded. When he attempted to command it at will, he failed, as in the dull, lifeless lines of _The Excursion_. Sometimes even his labored simplicity is no better than prose; but such simple and natural poems as _Michael, The Solitary Reaper, To My Sister, Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower_, and the majority of the poems showing the new att.i.tude toward childhood, are priceless treasures of English literature. Of most of these, we may say with Matthew Arnold, "It might seem that Nature not only gave him the matter for his poem, but wrote his poem for him."

[Ill.u.s.tration: WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. _From a life sketch in Fraser's Magazine_.]

Wordsworth lacks humor and his compa.s.s is limited; but within that compa.s.s he is surpa.s.sed by no poet since Milton. On the other hand, no great poet ever wrote more that is almost worthless. Matthew Arnold did much for Wordsworth's renown by collecting his priceless poems and publishing them apart from the mediocre work. Among the fine productions, his sonnets occupy a high place. Only Shakespeare and Milton in our language excel him in this form of verse.

Wordsworth is greatest as a poet of nature. To him nature seemed to possess a conscious soul, which expressed itself in the primrose, the rippling lake, or the cuckoo's song, with as much intelligence as human lips ever displayed in whispering a secret to the ear of love.

This interpretation of nature gives him a unique position among English poets. Neither Shakespeare nor Milton had any such general conception of nature.

[Ill.u.s.tration: RYDAL MOUNT NEAR AMBLESIDE, THE HOME OF WORDSWORTH'S OLD AGE.]

The bereaved, the downcast, and those in need of companionship turn naturally to Wordsworth. He said that it was his aim "to console the afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight." His critics often say that he does not recognize the indifference, even the cruelty of nature; but that he chooses, instead, to present the world as a manifestation of love and care for all creatures. When he was shown where a cruel huntsman and his dogs had chased a poor hart to its death, Wordsworth wrote:--

"This beast not un.o.bserved by nature fell; His death was mourned by sympathy divine.

"The Being that is in the clouds and air, That is in the green leaves among the groves, Maintains a deep and reverential care For the unoffending creatures whom he loves."[15]

Whatever view we take of the indifference of nature or of the suffering in existence, it is necessary for us, in order to live hopeful and kindly lives, to feel with Wordsworth that the great powers of the universe are not devoid of sympathy, and that they encourage in us the development of "a spirit of love" for all earth's creatures. It was Wordsworth's deepest conviction that any one alive to the presence of nature's conscious spiritual force, that "rolls through all things"--

"Shall feel an overseeing power To kindle or restrain."

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, 1722-1834

[Ill.u.s.tration: SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. _From a pencil sketch by C.R. Leslie_.]

Life.--The troubled career of Coleridge is in striking contrast to the peaceful life of Wordsworth. Coleridge, the thirteenth child of a clergyman, was born in 1772 at Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire. Early in his life, the future poet became a confirmed dreamer, refusing to partic.i.p.ate in the play common to boys of his age. Before he was five years old, he had read the _Arabian Nights_. Only a few years later, the boy's appet.i.te for books became so voracious that he devoured an average of two volumes a day.

One evening, when he was about nine years old, he had a violent quarrel with his brother and ran away, sleeping out of doors all night. A cold October rain fell; but he was not found until morning, when he was carried home more dead than alive. "I was certainly injured;" he says of this adventure, "for I was weakly and subject to ague for many years after." Facts like these help to explain why physical pain finally led him to use opium.

After his father's death, young Coleridge became, at the age of ten, a pupil in Christ's Hospital, London, where he remained eight years.

During the first half of his stay here, his health was still further injured by continuing as he was in earlier childhood, "a playless daydreamer," and by a habit of almost constant reading. He says that the food "was cruelly insufficient for those who had no friends to supply them." He writes:--

"Conceive what I must have been at fourteen; I was in a continual low fever. My whole being was, with eyes closed to every object of present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny corner, and read, read, read--fancy myself on Robinson Crusoe's island, finding a mountain of plumcake, and eating a room for myself, and then eating it into the shapes of tables and chairs--hunger and fancy!"

A few months after leaving Christ's Hospital, Coleridge went to Cambridge, but he did not remain to graduate. From this time he seldom completed anything that he undertook. It was characteristic of him, stimulated by the spirit of the French Revolution, to dream of founding with Southey a Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna.

In this ideal village across the sea, the dreamers were to work only two hours a day and were to have all goods in common. The demand for poetry was at this time sufficiently great for a bookseller to offer Coleridge, although he was as yet comparatively unknown, thirty guineas for a volume of poems and a guinea and a half for each hundred lines after finishing that volume. With such wealth in view, Coleridge married a Miss Fricker of Bristol, because no single people could join the new ideal commonwealth. Southey married her sister; but the young enthusiasts were forced to abandon their project because they did not have sufficient money to procure pa.s.sage across the ocean.

The tendency to dream, however, never forsook Coleridge. One of his favorite poems begins with this line:--

"My eyes make pictures when they are shut."[16]

He recognized his disinclination to remain long at work on prearranged lines, when he said, "I think that my soul must have preexisted in the body of a chamois chaser."

In 1797-1798 Coleridge lived with his young wife at Nether-Stowey in Somerset. Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy moved to a house in the neighborhood in order to be near Coleridge. The two young men and Dorothy Wordsworth seemed to be exactly fitted to stimulate one another. Together they roamed over the Quantock Hills, gazed upon the sea, and planned _The Rime of the Ancient Mariner_, which is one of the few things that Coleridge ever finished. In little more than a year he wrote nearly all the the poetry that has made him famous.

Had he, like Keats, died when he was twenty-five, the world would probably be wondering what heights of poetic fame Coleridge might have reached; but he became addicted to the use of opium and pa.s.sed a wretched existence of thirty-six years longer, partly in the Lake District, but chiefly in a suburb of London, without adding to his poetic fame. During his later years he did hack work for papers, gave occasional lectures, wrote critical and philosophical prose, and became a talker almost as noted as Dr. Johnson. It is only just to Coleridge to recognize the fact that even if he had never written a line of poetry, his prose would ent.i.tle him to be ranked among England's greatest critics.

[Ill.u.s.tration: COLERIDGE'S COTTAGE AT NETHER-STOWEY.]

Coleridge's wide reading, continued from boyhood, made his contemporaries feel that he had the best intellectual equipment of any man in England since Francis Bacon's time. Once Coleridge, having forgotten the subject of his lecture, was startled by the announcement that he would speak on a difficult topic, entirely different from the one he had in mind; but he was equal to the emergency and delivered an unusually good address.

Young men used to flock to him in his old age to draw on his copious stores of knowledge and especially to hear him talk about German philosophy. Carlyle visited him for this purpose and speaks of the "glorious, balmy, sunny islets, islets of the blest and the intelligible," which occasionally emerged from the mist of German metaphysics. He spent the last eighteen years of his life in Highgate with his kind friend, Dr. Gillman, who succeeded in regulating and decreasing the amount of opium which Coleridge took. He died there in 1834 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery. Westminster Abbey does not have the honor of the grave of a single one of the great poets of this romantic age.

Poetry.--_The Ancient Mariner_ (1798) is Coleridge's poetical masterpiece. It is also one of the world's masterpieces. The supernatural sphere into which it introduces the reader is a remarkable creation, with its curse, its polar spirit, the phantom ship, the seraph band, and the magic breeze. The mechanism of the poem is a triumph of romantic genius. The meter, the rhythm, and the music have well-nigh magical effect. Almost every stanza shows not only exquisite harmony, but also the easy mastery of genius in dealing with those weird scenes which romanticists love.

The moral interest of the poem is not inferior to its other charms.

The Mariner killed the innocent Albatross, and we listen to the same kind of lesson as Wordsworth teaches in his _Hart-Leap Well_:--

"The spirit who bideth by himself In the land of mist and snow, He loved the bird that loved the man Who shat him with his bow.'"

The n.o.ble conclusion of the poem has for more than a hundred years continued to influence human conduct:--

"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."

His next greatest poem is the unfinished _Christabel_ (1816). A lovely maiden falls under the enchantments of a mysterious Lady Geraldine; but the fragment closes while this malevolent influence continues. We miss the interest of a finished story, which draws so many readers to _The Ancient Mariner_, although _Christabel_ is thickly sown with gems. Lines like these are filled with the airiness of nature:--

"There is not wind enough to twirl The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can, Hanging so light, and hanging so high, On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky."

In all literature there has been no finer pa.s.sage written on the wounds caused by broken friendship than the lines in _Christabel_ relating to the estrangement of Roland and Sir Leoline. After reading this poem and _Kubla Khan_, an unfinished dream fragment of fifty-four lines, we feel that the closing lines of _Kubla Khan_ are peculiarly applicable to Coleridge:--

"For he on honey dew hath fed And drunk the milk of Paradise."

Swinburne says of _Christabel_ and _Kubla Khan_: "When it has been said that such melodies were never heard, such dreams never dreamed, such speech never spoken, the chief things remain unsaid, unspeakable.

There is a charm upon these poems which can only be felt in silent submission and wonder."

General Characteristics of his Poetry.--Unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge is not the poet of the earth and the common things of life. He is the poet of air, of the regions beyond the earth, and of dreams. By no poet has the supernatural been invested with more charm.

He has rare feeling for the beautiful, whether in the world of morals; of nature, or of the harmonies of sound. The motherless Christabel in her time of danger dreams a beautiful truth of this divinely governed world:--