was to me (in a manner) the cradle of a new existence: in the river that winds through it, my spirit was baptized in the waters of Helicon!6
I returned home, and soon after set out on my journey with unworn heart and untired feet. My way lay through Worcester and Gloucester, and by Upton, where I thought of Tom Jones and the adventure of the muff.71 remember getting completely wet through one day, and stopping at an inn (I think it was at Tewkesbury) where I sat up all night to read Paid and Virginia.8 Sweet
1. Paraphrasing Adam's praise for the teaching to Murray's Constitutional Association, founded to offered to him by the archangel Raphael (Paradise oppose 'the progress of disloyal and seditious prin- Lost 8.648-50). ciples,' as a 'junto,' i.e., a group formed for polit2. See Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, chap. 10. ical intrigue. 3. Byron's Vision of Judgment is a brilliant parody 4. In north Wales (about thirty-five miles from of Southey's poem. Charles Murray was solicitor Wem)?a standard destination for lovers of pic- to an association, located at New Bridge Street in turesque landscapes. London, that prosecuted John Hunt for publishing 5. 'With love,' fervently (Italian). Byron's poem in 1822 in the first number of the 6. A mountain sacred to Apollo and the Muses. journal The Liberal. Hazlitt's 'My First Acquain-7. Henry Fielding's Tom Jones 10.5ff. tance with Poets' would appear in the pages of The 8. A sentimental novel (1788) by the French Liberal the following year. Hazlitt derisively refers writer Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.
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MY FIRST ACQUAINTANCE WITH POETS / 549
were the showers in early youth that drenched my body, and sweet the drops of pity that fell upon the books I read! I recollect a remark of Coleridge's upon this very book that nothing could show the gross indelicacy of French manners and the entire corruption of their imagination more strongly than the behavior of the heroine in the last fatal scene, who turns away from a person on board the sinking vessel, that offers to save her life, because he has thrown off his clothes to assist him in swimming. Was this a time to think of such a circumstance? I once hinted to Wordsworth, as we were sailing in his boat on Gras- mere lake, that I thought he had borrowed the idea of his Poems on the Naming of Places from the local inscriptions of the same kind in Paul and Virginia. He did not own the obligation, and stated some distinction without a difference in defense to his claim to originality. Any the slightest variation would be sufficient for this purpose in his mind; for whatever he added or omitted would inevitably be worth all that any one else had done, and contain the marrow of the sentiment. I was still two days before the time fixed for my arrival, for I had taken care to set out early enough. I stopped these two days at Bridge- water, and when I was tired of sauntering on the banks of its muddy river, returned to the inn and read Camilla.9 So have I loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy; but wanting
that, have wanted everything!
I arrived, and was well received. The country about Nether Stowey is beautiful, green and hilly, and near the seashore. I saw it but the other day, after an interval of twenty years, from a hill near Taunton. How was the map of my life spread out before me, as the map of the country lay at my feet! In the afternoon, Coleridge took me over to Alfoxden, a romantic old family mansion of the St. Aubins, where Wordsworth lived. It was then in the possession of a friend of the poet's, who gave him the free use of it.1 Somehow, that period (the time just after the French Revolution) was not a time when nothing was given for nothing. The mind opened and a softness might be perceived coming over the heart of individuals, beneath 'the scales that fence' our self-interest. Wordsworth himself was from home, but his sister kept house, and set before us a frugal repast; and we had free access to her brother's poems, the LyricalBallads, which were still in manuscript, or in the form of Syhilline Leaves.2 I dipped into a few of these with great satisfaction, and with the faith of a novice. I slept that night in an old room with blue hangings, and covered with the round- faced family portraits of the age of George I and II and from the wooded declivity of the adjoining park that overlooked my window, at the dawn of day, could
hear the loud stag speak.3
In the outset of life (and particularly at this time I felt it so) our imagination has a body to it. We are in a state between sleeping and waking, and have indistinct but glorious glimpses of strange shapes, and there is always something to come better than what we see. As in our dreams the fullness of the blood gives warmth and reality to the coinage of the brain, so in youth our ideas are clothed, and fed, and pampered with our good spirits; we breathe thick with thoughtless happiness, the weight of future years presses on the
9. A 1796 novel by Frances Burney. lished poems in 1817. 1. A mistake; Wordsworth paid rent. 3. A pleasure of country life mentioned in Ben 2. I.e.. prophetic writings in a scattered state. The Jonson's 1616 poem 'To Sir Robert Wroth' (line phrase is used by Coleridge as the title for his pub-22).
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55 0 / WILLIAM HAZLITT
strong pulses of the heart, and we repose with undisturbed faith in truth and good. As we advance, we exhaust our fund of enjoyment and of hope. We are no longer wrapped in lamb's wool, lulled in Elysium. As we taste the pleasures of life, their spirit evaporates, the sense palls; and nothing is left but the phantoms, the lifeless shadows of what has been!
That morning, as soon as breakfast was over, we strolled out into the park, and seating ourselves on the trunk of an old ash tree that stretched along the ground, Coleridge read aloud with a sonorous and musical voice, the ballad of Betty Foy.4 I was not critically or skeptically inclined. I saw touches of truth and nature, and took the rest for granted. But in the Thorn, the Mad Mother, and the Complaint of a Poor Indian Woman, I felt that deeper power and pathos which have been since acknowledged,
In spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,5
as the characteristics of this author; and the sense of a new style and a new spirit in poetry came over me. It had to me something of the effect that arises from the turning up of the fresh soil, or of the first welcome breath of spring,
While yet the trembling year is unconfirmed.6
Coleridge and myself walked back to Stowey that evening, and his voice sounded high
Of Providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,7
as we passed through echoing grove, by fairy stream or waterfall, gleaming in the summer moonlight! He lamented that Wordsworth was not prone enough to believe in the traditional superstitions of the place, and that there was a something corporeal, a matter-of-fact-ness, a clinging to the palpable, or often to the petty, in his poetry, in consequence. His genius was not a spirit that descended to him through the air; it sprung out of the ground like a flower, or unfolded itself from a green spray, on which the goldfinch sang. He said, however (if I remember right), that this objection must be confined to his descriptive pieces, that his philosophic poetry had a grand and comprehensive spirit in it, so that his soul seemed to inhabit the universe like a palace, and to discover
