wonder that his own nearest and dearest found him something of a mystery. An unrequited passion for a cousin was the one romance of his life; and when that was seen to be hopeless, he simply transferred the love and tenderness of which he was capable to all who needed pity, counsel, or substantial help; and when he died they found in his desk a tiny packet on which was inscribed, "The hair of my poor shepherd, who served me faithfully for twenty-three years." Coleridge, in his later years, enjoying after life's fitful fever the quiet shelter of Mr. Gillman's roof at Highgate, drew a portrait of his old friend. It was in the form of a note to the second edition of his treatise on Church and State. A man whom I have seen now in his harvest-field or the market; now in a committee-room with the Rickmans and Ricardos of the age; at another time with Davy, Woolaston, and the Wedgwoods; now with Wordsworth, Southey, and other friends not unheard of in the republic of letters; now in the drawing-rooms of the rich and the noble; and now presiding at the annual dinner of a village benefit society; and in each seeming to be in the very place he was intended for, and taking the part to which his tastes, talents, and attainments gave him an admitted right. And yet this is not the most remarkable, not the most individualising trait of our friend's character. It is almost overlooked in the originality and raciness of his intellect; in the life, freshness, and practical value of his remarks and notices, truths plucked as they are growing, and delivered to you with the dew on them, the fair earnings of an observing eye, armed and kept on the watch by thought and meditation; and above all in the integrity, i.e., entireness of his being (integrum et sine cerâ vas), the steadiness of his attachments, the activity and persistence of a benevolence which so graciously presses a warm temper into the service of a yet warmer heart, and so lights up the little flaws and imperfections incident to humanity in its choicest specimens, that were their removal at the option of his friends (and few have, or deserve to have, so many!) not a man among them but would vote for leaving him as he is. [ii. 321.] Henry Nelson Coleridge thought that this might “in substance be worthily converted into an epitaph." Mrs. Sandford agrees, and asks, "who so fit to pen Tom Poole's epitaph as the friend whom he loved above all others, and whose friendship was the chief treasure, as it was also the most remarkable experience of his life?" Poole died somewhat suddenly in 1837, and sleeps as unobtrusively as he had lived, his flat gravestone almost concealed beneath an overhanging thorn, in the beautiful churchyard of Stowey. He has been dead more than fifty years, but the older villagers remember and speak with reverence of "Justice" Poole, and the place is full of traditions of his goodness and his oddities. The "Tartarean tan-pits," that Coleridge joked about, are mouldering into ruin, and overgrown with grass and flowers-Nature "ever busy with her hand in healing." But the "dear Stowey gutter" still rushes impetuously throughout the year before Tom Poole's house, brimming with the stream that comes direct from the peaceful bosom of the Quantock Hills. The stream, an emblem of his bounty flows, and an emblem, too, of the pure and cheering influence that during a long life made all men happier and better in his native town. COLERIDGE'S ODE TO WORDSWORTH THERE are few lines in the loftier walks of English poetry better known than these following: O Lady! we receive but what we give, Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud ! But, as is the case with many another familiar quotation, they are better known than is the splendid poem " Dejection, an Ode," in which they are to be found. The history of this poem is interesting. It was written, as the poet's daughter tells us in her edition of the Biographia Literaria, on April 4, 1802. Coleridge had then been living since the summer of 1800 at Greta Hall, near Keswick, the house to be afterwards honourably distinguished as the long residence of the admirable Southey. The house, when Coleridge took it, was partitioned off into two dwelling-places, one of which was occupied by the owner and landlord. Coleridge was attracted to the Lake country, we may be sure, by the circumstance that Wordsworth was only twelve miles off, at Grasmere. Coleridge had been writing more or less regularly for the Morning Post before he went to reside at Greta Hall, and he continued to do so for several years. The poem on Dejection, written in April of the year 1802, remained unprinted for just six months, when it appeared in the Morning Post of October 4, 1802, and then remained uncollected and unacknowledged by its author until the publication of the Sibylline Leaves in 1817. The lines just cited are certainly the best known in the whole poem, though it abounds in passages of rare eloquence and beauty. Hence the Lady there addressed is closely associated in our minds with the poem and its author. And it is therefore the more interesting to note that in the version of the ode as first printed the Lady does not appear, her place being filled throughout by a certain "Edmund," to whom the poem is virtually addressed. Those who will refer to the four-volumed edition of Coleridge's poems1 will find a record of the fact, and in the notes certain other variations between the first text of the poem and that afterwards given in the Sibylline Leaves. The principal variations may be supplied without reference if the reader remembers to substitute "Edmund" for "Lady" where the latter word occurs, and to alter the personal and other pro"he" for "she," and so forth-in due nouns accord 1 1 Published by Pickering in 1877, but now the property of Messrs. Macmillan. |