My father lived ten miles from Shrewsbury, and was in the habit of exchanging visits with Mr. Rowe, and with Mr. Jenkins of Whitechurch (nine miles farther on) according to the custom of Dissenting Ministers in each other's neighborhood. A line of communication is thus established, by which the flame of civil and religious liberty is kept alive, and nourishes its smoldering fire unquenchable, like the fires in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, placed at different stations, that waited for ten long years to announce with their blazing pyramids the destruction of Troy. Coleridge had agreed to come over to see my father, according to the courtesy of the country, as Mr. Rowe's probable successor; but in the meantime, I had gone to hear him preach the Sunday after his arrival. A poet and a philosopher getting up into a Unitarian pulpit to preach the Gospel was a romance in these degenerate days, a sort of revival of the primitive spirit of Christianity, which was not to be resisted.
It was in January of 1798, that I rose one morning before daylight, to walk ten miles in the mud, and went to hear this celebrated person preach. Never, the longest day I have to live, shall I have such another walk as this cold, raw, comfortless one, in the winter of the year 1798. II y a des impressions que ni le temps ni les circonstances peuvent ejfacer. Dusse-je vivre des siecles entiers,
le doux temps de ma jeunesse ne pent renaitre pour moi, ni s'ejfacer jamais dans ma memoire.6 When I got there, the organ was playing the 100th psalm, and when it was done, Mr. Coleridge rose and gave out his text, 'And he went up into the mountain to pray, himself, alone.'7 As he gave out this text, his voice 'rose like a steam of rich distilled perfume,'8 and when he came to the two last words, which he pronounced loud, deep, and distinct, it seemed to me, who was then young, as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence through the universe. The idea of St. John came into my mind, 'of one crying in the wilderness, who had his loins girt about, and whose food was locusts and wild honey.'9 The preacher then launched into his subject, like an eagle dallying with the wind. The sermon was upon peace and war; upon church and state?not their alliance but their separation?on the spirit of the world and the spirit of Christianity, not as the same, but as opposed to one another. He talked of those who had 'inscribed the cross of Christ on banners dripping with human gore.' He made a poetical and pastoral excursion?and to show the fatal effects of war, drew a striking contrast between the simple shepherd boy, driving his team afield, or sitting under the hawthorn, piping to his flock, 'as though he should never be old,'1 and the same poor country lad, crimped,2 kidnapped, brought into town, made drunk, at an alehouse, turned into a wretched drummer boy, with his hair sticking on end with powder and pomatum, a long cue3 at his back, and tricked out in the loathsome finery of the profession of blood.
6. There are some impressions that neither time describe how Christ withdraws into the mountains nor circumstances can efface. Even if I lived whole to prevent the people from making him king. centuries, the sweet time of my youth could not be 8. Milton's Comus, line 556. reborn for me, nor ever erased from my memory 9. See Matthew 3.3-4 and Mark 1.3-6. (French). Based on Rousseau's novel in letters La 1. Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia 1.2. Nouvelle Hiloise (1761), part 6, letter 7. 2. Tricked into enlisting in military sendee. 7. The text for Coleridge's sermon was perhaps 3. Pigtail. 'Pomatum': perfumed hair oil. Matthew 14.23 or John 6.15?both of which
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MY FIRST ACQUAINTANCE WITH POETS / 543
Such were the notes our once-loved poet sung.4
And for myself, I could not have been more delighted if I had heard the music of the spheres. Poetry and Philosophy had met together. Truth and Genius had embraced, under the eye and with the sanction of Religion. This was even beyond my hopes. I returned home well satisfied. The sun that was still laboring pale and wan through the sky, obscured by thick mists, seemed an emblem of the good cause;5 and the cold dank drops of dew, that hung half melted on the beard of the thistle, had something genial and refreshing in them; for there was a spirit of hope and youth in all nature, that turned everything into good. The face of nature had not then the brand of Jus Divinum6 on it:
Like to that sanguine flower inscribed with woe.7
On the Tuesday following, the half-inspired speaker came. I was called down into the room where he was, and went half-hoping, half-afraid. He received me very graciously, and I listened for a long time without uttering a word. I did not suffer in his opinion by my silence. 'For those two hours,' he afterwards was pleased to say, 'he was conversing with W. H.'s forehead!' His appearance was different from what I had anticipated from seeing him before. At a distance, and in the dim light of the chapel, there was to me a strange wildness in his aspect, a dusky obscurity, and I thought him pitted with the smallpox. His complexion was at that time clear, and even bright?
As are the children of yon azure sheen.8
His forehead was broad and high, light as if built of ivory, with large projecting eyebrows, and his eyes rolling beneath them, like a sea with darkened luster. 'A certain tender bloom his face o'erspread,'9 a purple tinge as we see it in the pale thoughtful complexions of the Spanish portrait painters, Murillo and Velasquez. His mouth was gross, voluptuous, open, eloquent; his chin good- humored and round; but his nose, the rudder of the face, the index of the will, was small, feeble, nothing?like what he has done. It might seem that the genius of his face as from a height surveyed and projected him (with sufficient capacity and huge aspiration) into the world unknown of thought and imagination, with nothing to support or guide his veering purpose, as if Columbus had launched his adventurous course for the New World in a scallop,1 without oars or compass. So at least I comment on it after the event. Coleridge in his person was rather above the common size, inclining to the corpulent, or like Lord Hamlet, 'somewhat fat and pursy.'2 His hair (now, alas! gray) was then black and glossy as the raven's, and fell in smooth masses over his forehead. This long pendulous hair is peculiar to enthusiasts, to those whose minds tend heavenward; and is traditionally inseparable (though of a different color) from the pictures of Christ. It ought to belong, as a character, to all who preach Christ crucified, and Coleridge was at that time one of those!
It was curious to observe the contrast between him and my father, who was a veteran in the cause, and then declining into the vale of years. He had been a poor Irish lad, carefully brought up by his parents, and sent to the University
4. The first line of Pope's 'Epistle to Robert, Earl quotes Milton's 'Lycidas,' line 106. of Oxford.' 8. Adapted from James Thomson's The Castle of 5. The cause of liberty, i.e., the French Revolu-bidolence 2.33. tion. 9. See Thomson's The Castle of Indolence 1.57. 6. The divine right (of kings). 1. Probably for shallop, a small boat. 7. I.e., the hyacinth, believed to be marked with 2. Cf. Shakespeare's Hamlet 3.4.144, 5.2.230. the Greek letters 'AI AI,' a cry of grief. Hazlitt
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54 4 / WILLIAM HAZLITT
of Glasgow (where he studied under Adam Smith3) to prepare him for his future destination. It was his mother's proudest wish to see her son a Dissenting Minister. So if we look back to past generations (as far as eye can reach) we see the same hopes, fears, wishes, followed by the same disappointments, throbbing in the human heart; and so we may see them (if we look forward) rising up forever, and disappearing, like vaporish bubbles, in the human breast! After being tossed about from congregation to congregation in the heats of the Unitarian controversy, and squabbles about the American war,4 he had been relegated to an obscure village, where he was
