LITMIR.BIZ

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gardener than a Milton, for I could not unite both. I mean to raise the vegetables for myself and wife, and feed a couple of snouted and grunting cousins from the refuse. My evenings I shall devote to literature."—"And what," enquired Charles Lamb after hearing of this desperate undertaking, "what does your worship know about farming?" But Coleridge was not to be discouraged. He allowed his natural unfitness for the task—"I am, and ever have been, a great reader, and have read almost everything.... I am deep in all out-of-the-way books, whether of the monkish times or of the Puritanical era. I have read and digested most of the historic writers, but I do not like history. Metaphysics and poetry and 'facts of the mind' (i.e., accounts of all the strange phantasms that ever possessed your philosophy-dreamers, from Thoth, the Egyptian, to Taylor, the English pagan) are my darling studies. In short, I seldom read except to amuse myself, and I am almost always reading. Of useful knowledge,—I am a so-so chemist, and I love chemistry—all else is blank—but I will be (please God) a horticulturist and farmer."

      What is to be done against such impregnable obstinacy? Coleridge's friends let him "gang his ain gait": and when mauvais quarts d'heure threatened to drive him to despair, they came to the rescue with timely cheques: meanwhile, Tom Poole strove hard to educate him in potato culture, and Charles Lloyd paid down his twenty-five shillings a week.

      But to-day Charles Lloyd was looking ill-at-ease and sulky. He threw out hints about the general discomfort of things,—vague allusions to other people being made much of and himself contemned. He was in a disagreeable mood, and evidently dying to pick a quarrel. Half through breakfast, he took umbrage at some inoffensive jest, and flung himself out of the room.

      "What can ail the lad?" asked Coleridge, in amazement.

      "I suppose he has another fit coming on," observed the practical Sara.

      "I don't like sour looks and bitter words in our peaceful home," said the poet, rumpling his heavy black locks with a distracted air.

      "God forbid that he should take it into his head to go away," said Sara: and she got up with a very grave face and proceeded to clear the breakfast table. Coleridge betook himself to the garden and called over the back hedge to the neighbour for whose companionship he had taken this inefficient little cottage. Thomas Poole, his friend and benefactor, was a well-to-do tanner, well-educated and a devout student of literature: he discerned the potentialities of great things in Coleridge, and felt honoured by his acquaintanceship. For the poet had something of that peculiar fascination for more prosaic men, that magnetic charm of personality, which atones for so many minor defects,—which obviates weakness and ill-balance of mind,—which even endears him who is "impossible" from a worldly standpoint, to those of saner and robuster calibre. Coleridge could never be without a friend, without a listener: and a listener was a desideratum to him. This "noticeable man with large grey eyes" undoubtedly attracted to himself all that was best in other people: his culture allured them, his eloquence held them spell-bound, and his voice—that wonderful voice which was to Hazlitt "as a stream of rich distilled perfumes"—sank into every fibre of their being.

      So you cannot be surprised that the faithful, kindly Thomas Poole, already busy in his tan-yard, hearing Coleridge calling at the hedge, instantly forsook his proper tasks and hurried to salute his comrade. When he heard of Charles Lloyd's tendency towards mutiny, "Oh," says Poole with a great laugh, "don't let that discompose you. The young man is consumed by a very common malady,—jealousy. And indeed I think he has some cause."

      "Jealousy!" repeated Coleridge, rolling his fine eyes wildly. It was a word which had little or no meaning for him. "Jealousy of whom? about whom?—I do not understand you in the least."

      "Why, your fine friends the Wordsworths, of course," Poole told him. "Here have you been gadding about with them the whole of this last twelve-month, trapesing the hills night and day and leaving your pupil, forsooth, to sit at home with Madam and Master Baby, a-twiddling his thumbs and scribbling schoolboy verse. You have taken precious little notice of him,—and as for your friends, they think him but a poor thing not worth mention. I say he is a lad of spirit to kick up his heels at last."

      "True, true,—I may have neglected him to some extent," murmured Coleridge with a pained air, "but indeed, my good Poole, if you knew what the Wordsworths have been to me! Manna in the desert—water in the wilderness—happiness like the alighting of a paradise-bird—"

      "Quite so, my dear fellow," interrupted the unemotional Poole, "but you are not now in the pulpit. Bring yourself down to earth for a moment, for I have but little time to spare this morning,—and let us see what are the most crying needs of to-day in your garden."

      There is enough to do in a May garden to occupy the most diligent: and as Coleridge raked and hoed and thinned out and weeded his vegetable beds, with blistered hands and a back that longed for a hinge in it, he was inclined to wish that Lloyd had come as an agricultural rather than a poetical pupil. From time to time he rested on his tool and assimilated with rapt eye the innumerable surrounding touches of simple beauty. He was a man who, like Wordsworth, interested himself in every little trifle. The delicate details of sight and sound were very dear to him; they had enabled him to "become one with Nature" in an almost literal sense, as he observed, with a calm but intense enjoyment, such side-issues as:

      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;

      or—

      The unripe flax,

       When through its half-transparent stalks, at eve,

       The level sunshine glitters with green light;

      or—

      The hornéd Moon, with one bright star

       Within the nether tip.

      And, indeed, Coleridge was aware himself of the extraordinary power which was exercised upon him by external and visible things,—especially by the magic of scenery. He wrote:

      THE CHASM IN XANADU.

      "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

       By woman wailing for her demon-lover!"

       (Kubla Khan).

      I never find myself alone within the embracement of rocks and hills ... but my spirit careers, drives and eddies like a leaf in autumn; a wild activity of thoughts, imaginations, feelings and impulses of motion rises up within me.... The further I ascend from animated nature ... the greater in me becomes the intensity of the feeling of life. Life seems to me then a universal spirit, that neither has nor can have an opposite. God is everywhere, and where is there room for death?

      And he determinedly developed in his theory of poetry, his sense of the depths that lie below nature's more superficial aspects. He had accorded to his sleeping babe, a few short months before, that tenderest of all benedictions, that gift of untarnishable joy:

      Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,

       Whether the summer clothe the general earth

       With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing

       Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch

       Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch

       Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall

       Heard only in the trances of the blast,

       Or if the secret ministry of frost

       Shall hang them up in silent icicles,

       Quietly shining to the quiet Moon:

      and he had conversed at great length and frequency with Wordsworth, on what he termed

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