Coleridge by S.L. Bensusan — Read

The author of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," in which the observation of natural phenomena is extraordinary, was never the child of his environment in the same degree as his friends William Wordsworth and Charles Lamb, though a great part of his life was passed in the surroundings they knew best. Wordsworth is the true offspring of the Lake Country; he carried to Racedown Lodge and Alfoxton House rich memories of the sterner north, and his genius matured at Dove Cottage. Lamb was a Londoner all the days of his life; the nearer to the metropolis, the higher were his spirits, the more brilliant his pen. Take London from Lamb and the Lakeside from Wordsworth and it is difficult to say what would remain. Coleridge, on the other hand, must have expressed himself anywhere, nor does it seem likely that the quality of his utterances would have suffered from their place of birth. While he was young and vigorous he found it hard to stay for any length of time in one district, but wherever he went he seems to have felt at home. Such complaints as Wordsworth could utter at Goslar, or Lamb at Enfield, find no place that I can trace in the poems, essays, or correspondence of Coleridge. He took no overwhelming delight in populous cities or in the open spaces of the country. If he sojourned at Keswick, it was to be near Wordsworth, and the only noticeable influence his work owes to the Lake Country is to be found in "Christabel. " If he came to London it was to be within touch of work that was immediately remunerative.

The one remaining force that could decide the question of a district's quality was proximity to a good library. His imagination, when the spirit moved him, annihilated distance and ignored immediate surroundings, his muse in its rare working hours knew no fetters of time or place. Friends were more necessary to him than either to Wordsworth or to Lamb, for these had a beloved sister for constant companion, and while Lamb, the most hospitable of men, could console himself for the absence of his friends with the aid of his folios, and a generous measure of beer, Wordsworth had the additional gift of loving wife and children. Then again Lamb worked for a great part of his life in the office of the East India Company, while Wordsworth was supremely conscious of the call of duty, and was anxious to read the lesson of the simple life to a generation given over to the unavailing pursuit of happiness. Of the three, only Coleridge was condemned to live in a condition of perennial anxiety for the future, an anxiety not a little due to his lack of capacity for steady work, the curse of a vagrant disposition, and a fatal surrender to self-indulgence of a peculiarly dangerous kind. The moods in which Coleridge could turn for relief to Nature and scenes of natural beauty were rare, and consequently the utterances thus directly inspired are few and far between. He had but a passing regard for flowers and birds, no marked preference for mountain, river, or plain, no very ready response to changing seasons. In a collected edition of his poetical works, the student will find less than thirty poems that seem to be suggested by Nature.