And his house—it was there that he felt upon his forehead, in blessing, the hands of the now long dead; here, many a year ago, he knew man’s only peace except death, childhood—knew it for a little time, while his locks were sunny and the grave shadows yet tarried from his face—then vanished it away. Hither he led home his new-made wife; here, “into something rich and strange,” blossomed that mystic, intangible relation of delights when a child was born to the bosoms which are twain, yet one; here, with his children, in the firelight gambols he kindled the dampened torch of the younger time, and for one evening was a child again.
Here, too, is his library—that cave in the rock above the world’s high tide, set farther in than the surges beat or the winds blow. The tide has reached it now. There are waves and seaweed on the floor at flood—they do not all go out at ebb. Where can he read but at that window? Where can he write but on that desk and against that wall? How can the old familiar animus of the place be left behind, unless his own soul, which had grown its twin, stays with it? Yet how can the animus be transported? No, no, it can not. It knows no luggage trains; it is not a thing of drays.
Everywhere the tentacles of his root must give way with a wrench; the necessity being granted, the pain is inevitable; the only remedy, a manly patience under the irremediable—the
“Quicquid corrigere est nefas.”
Now if he were to tell Dives all this, taking him into his confidence, would he not laugh? “What is the sense,” would be the reply of that satisfied person, “in fashing your beard about one place or another? If you are going to town, you will probably take a far better house than this trumpery cottage—four stories high, freestone front, all the modern improvements, and eligible situation. Why, my dear sir, you must be mad! Think what an exchange—gas instead of spermaceti; bathing apparatus, with warm, cold, and shower cocks, instead of this portable concern you have here, or perhaps instead of a mere swim in your twopenny lake; the market within ten minutes’ staging; shopping conveniences for your wife; a daily laid, still wet, on your doorstep—everything imaginable, in place of this uncultivated, mountainous, windy, woody situation, out of call of express-wagons and solid respectability. Or, if you are going still farther into the woods (which, I own, is very foolish, since you might stay here and put up a sawmill on your own part of the brook, which would make you one of our first manufacturers), there is still no such cause as you seem to think for sorrow at moving. Probably, where you will settle, vegetables and all provisions are far cheaper—you can get your wood for almost nothing—and certainly those are advantages that a man need not pull a long face over. Be a man. Satisfy yourself with the world, as I do.”
Ah! unction not in Ariel’s pharmacopoeia! He is hurt where such salves will not heal him.
In many a way may the sources of his enjoyment be dried up or imbittered which the world knows not of. The ideal nature is indeed a harp of many wondrous strings, but the airs that play upon it in this life are seldom of the gentlest. The one-stringed Hawaiian guitar of the non-ideal man is easily thrummed, and never lacks tone save when its proper backbone of material well-being is temporarily lax.
If any of us, even the most tender and spiritually appreciative, could understand the various intensity with which this law works out its office in other men of the same nature, we would be much kinder in our judgment of the man who runs to narcotics and other stimulants for relief, while we regarded the habit as no less grievous. Could we, for example, enter thoroughly into the constitution of such a one as Coleridge; could we realize his temptations to the full extent; understand his struggles, and weigh all the forces of the mind which gave him, from his very birth, a perilous tendency, how much oftener with tears than with denunciations of his indolence, his neglect of duties, would we read such memorials of him as have been published, much as the most of those seem directed to bias us in the contrary way.
For it seems as if there has never been a real “Life” of Coleridge. We have had, in abundance, sketches of what he himself might have called his “phenomenal existence.” We have the changes of place which he made; the towns in which he lectured; the letters from home which he did not open, and the correspondences for aid in starvation which he did open; the worth, in pounds sterling, of the laudanum which he drank per week; the number of bottles of brandy which he emptied in the same time; the extravagances of his expenditure; his repentings, his concessions to Southey and Cottle. All these are phenomenal—yea, even the last three. We have external events—movements of which we do not see the motor. Perhaps it would be impossible to see it from anything but an autobiography so full, so ab intra, that pain and humiliation would deter him from writing it, were he living. This would be a “Life” of Coleridge; the others are mere results of that life.
Perhaps the best substitute for such a work is to be found in his brief and fragmentary prose works; for, although they
