the native returns: and the dead whisper, and this is what they tell: William Dewy, Tranter Reuben, Farmer Ledlow late at plough, Robert's kin, and John's, and Ned's, And the Squire, and Lady Susan, lie in Mellstock churchyard now! 'Gone,' I call them, gone for good, that group of local hearts and heads; Yet at mothy curfew-tide, And at midnight when the noon-heat breathes it back from walls and leads, They've a way of whispering to me-fellow-wight who yet abide In the muted measured note Of a ripple under archways, or a lone cave's stillicide: 'We have triumphed: this achievement turns the bane to antidote, Unsuccesses to success, Many thought-worn eves and morrows to a morrow free of thought. 'No more need we corn and clothing, feel of old terrestrial stress; Chill detraction stirs no sigh; Fear of death has even bygone us: death gave all that we possess.' W.D. 'Ye mid burn the wold bass-viol that I set such vallie by.' Squire. 'You may hold the manse in fee, You may wed my spouse, my children's memory of me may decry.' Lady. 'You may have my rich brocades, my laces; take each household key; Ransack coffer, desk, bureau; Quiz the few poor treasures hid there, con the letters kept by me.' Far. 'Ye mid zell my favourite heifer, ye mid let the charlock Wife. 'If grow, Foul the grinterns, give up thrift.' ye break my best blue china, children, I shan't care or ho.' All. 'We've no wish to hear the tidings, how the people's fortunes shift; What your daily doings are; Who are wedded, born, divided; if your lives beat slow or swift. 'Curious not the least are we if our intents you make or mar, If you quire to our old tune, If the City stage still passes, if the weirs still roar afar.' -Thus, with very gods' composure, freed those crosses late and soon Which, in life, the Trine allow (Why, none witteth), and ignoring all that haps beneath the moon, William Dewy, Tranter Reuben, Farmer Ledlow late at plough, Robert's kin, and John's, and Ned's, And the Squire, and Lady Susan, murmur mildly to me now. COLERIDGE HE story of Coleridge's life is hard to write and, in a innumerable lapses, infirmities, defections of the will, all claiming as facts-to be chronicled, cannot but obscure that lovable living presence to which all his contemporaries bore witness and to which the biographer must hold fast or his portrait misses most that is true and essential; and hard to read because the reader, at the hundredth instance of Coleridge's taking the wrong coach, or forgetting to write to his wife and family, or accepting money and neglecting the conditions on which it was bestowed, is apt to let Christian charity go to the winds, and so on his part, too, to miss, nor care that he misses, the better Coleridge which is the real Coleridge, the affectionate forgiving Coleridge, so anxious to cure his faults, so eager to make people see, so childlike and yet condemned to sit obscure In the exceeding lustre and the pure The story not only exasperates the temper; it dodges the understanding, and leaves even the patient reader in such bewilderment as, no doubt, afflicted the much-enduring Odysseus after a third attempt to embrace his mother in the Shades. For Providence (as De Quincey put it) set 'perpetual relays' along Coleridge's path through life. We pursue the man and come up with group after group of his friends: and each, as we demand, 'What have you done with Coleridge?' answers, 'Coleridge? That wonderful fellow?...He was here just now, and we helped him forward a little way.' The late James Dykes Campbell (to whose Life of Coleridge the reader is referred) took up his task with enthusiasm and performed it with astonishing success. He honoured the poet's memory a little 'on this side idolatry.' Yet as we follow his condensed narrative we feel the growth of misgivings in the writer's mind, and at the close he has to make a clean breast of them. "If,' says he, 'my presentment of what I believe to be the truth be not found to tend, on the whole, to raise Coleridge in the eyes of men, I shall, I confess, feel both surprised and disappointed.' I am sure that the temple, with all the rubble which blended with its marble, must have been a grander whole than any we are able to reconstruct for ourselves from the stones which lie about the field. The living Coleridge was ever his own apology -men and women who neither shared nor ignored his shortcomings, not only loved him but honoured and followed him. This power of attraction, which might almost be called universal, so diverse were the minds and natures attracted, is itself conclusive proof of very rare qualities. We may read and reread his life, but we cannot know him as the Lambs, or the Wordsworths, or Poole, or Hookham Frere, or the Gillmans, or Green knew him. Hatred as well as love may be blind, but friendship has eyes, and their testimony may wisely be used in correcting our own impressions. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on October 21, 1772, at the vicarage of Ottery St Mary in Devonshire, the youngest of nine sons by a second marriage. His father, the Reverend John Coleridge, was an amiable, absentminded scholar, and apparently somewhat unpractical. We are told that he printed several books by subscription, and he tried to improve the Latin grammars in use by calling the ablative case the 'quale-quare-quidditive.' He died in 1781, and a few months later young Samuel obtained a presentation to Christ's Hospital. The school and the Coleridge of those days were afterwards depicted in imperishable colours by Charles Lamb, who, though Coleridge's junior by two years, had become a Blue-coat boy some months earlier. In Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago, by one of those tricks which were dear to him and endear him to us, Lamb professedly supplements his own Recollections of Christ's Hospital with the recollections of a lad not fortunate like him in having a home and parents near. I was a poor friendless boy. My parents, and those who should care for me, were far away. Those few acquaintances of theirs, which they could reckon upon being kind to me in the great city, after a little forced notice, which they had the grace to take of me on my first arrival in town, soon grew tired of my holiday visits. They seemed to them to recur too often, though I found them few enough; and, one after another, they all failed me, and I felt myself alone among six hundred play mates. O the cruelty of separating a poor lad from his early homestead! The yearnings which I used to have towards it in those unfledged years! How, in my dreams, would my native town (far in the west) come back, with its church, and trees, and faces! How I would wake weeping, and in the anguish of my heart exclaim upon sweet Calne in Wiltshire! The child is Coleridge, of course, and sweet Calne in Wiltshire is sweet Ottery in Devon, disguised. Of course Coleridge felt this loneliness: a nature so sensitive could not help feeling it; and sixteen years later in Frost at Midnight he feelingly recalled it, and promised his own child a |