married her cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge, and removed from Keswick to Hampstead, taking her mother with her. Thus Coleridge and his wife were near neighbours during the last years of his life, but it is not stated that they ever met again. After living apart for nineteen years it was hardly likely that they could ever come together on terms of amity, or meet on terms equivalent to armed neutrality.

Coleridge continued to work amid many indications of breaking health. His constant assurance that he possessed a vast harvest ready for the sheaving did not prove to be fallacious. Four large volumes were but a part of the work which he had been doing in the dark throughout many silent years. In 1831 his health continued to fail. A year later Wordsworth wrote that Coleridge and his sister Dorothy were "going, pari passu, along the path of sickness, towards a blessed immortality." In that year Coleridge printed the last part of his beautiful "Youth and Age"

"Dew-drops are the gems of morning,

But the tears of mournful eve!
Where no hope is, life's a warning
That only serves to make us grieve,
When we are old;

That only serves to make us grieve
With oft and tedious taking-leave,
Like some poor nigh-related guest,
That may not rudely be dismisst ;
Yet hath outstay'd his welcome while,
And tells the jest without the smile."

This great man was dying with the clear consciousness

that the world denied him his due. Long ago life had lost its charm of hope for him, and where no hope was, life was no better than the stern lamp of a ship that lights only the path that is past. The time had been when he had fretted under the sense of work without hope, and talents that he was compelled to waste. But that time was now gone by. The fiery column that rose before his youth was the dark pillar that stood behind his age. He was reconciled to his dismissal; he had told the jest without the smile. Towards the end of 1833 he wrote his epitaph—

"Stop, Christian passer-by :—Stop, child of God,
And read, with gentle breast. Beneath this sod
A poet lies, or that which once seemed he-
O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C. -
That he who many a year with toil of breath
Found death in life may here find life in death!
Mercy for praise,-to be forgiven for fame,—

He asked, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same."

Towards the end he grew anxious as to not having seen much of Charles Lamb latterly, and he wrote a touching letter hinting at his faults as a friend. But Lamb had never ceased to love him. "Not an unkind thought has passed in my brain about you," Lamb writes; "if ever you thought an offence, much less wrote it against me, it must have been in the times of Noah, and the great waters swept it away. Mary's most kind love, . . . here she is crying for mere love over your letter." The beautiful friendship was to end as it had begun. Early in 1834, Coleridge, in memory of the days of that visit of the "gentle Charles" to Stowey in 1797,

...

wrote these words under the poem beginning, "This Lime-tree Bower my Prison:" "Charles and Mary Lamb, dear to my heart, yea, as it were my heart." In a copy of Beaumont and Fletcher he wrote

"Midnight.

"God bless you, dear Charles Lamb; I am dying: I feel I have not many weeks left.

"Mr. Gillman's, Highgate."

Death came suddenly to Coleridge as to every man. No matter how long it may be waited for, when it comes it comes as a surprise. He died on Friday, the 25th of July, 1834.

Coleridge's son-in-law sent the tidings to Wordsworth in Westmoreland, and when the old poet read the news aloud to his family his voice faltered and broke. "He has long been dead to me," said Southey," but his decease has naturally wakened up old recollections." "Coleridge is dead," Lamb muttered to himself continually. "Coleridge is dead, Coleridge is dead!" To the woman who had nursed his friend, Lamb gave five guineas when he went to Highgate for the first time after the funeral. "His great and dear spirit haunts me," Lamb wrote a little later. "He was my fifty-year-old friend without a dissension. Never saw I his likeness,

nor probably the world can see it again." Lamb himself died before the end of the year.

They buried Coleridge in Highgate churchyard, and now under the crypt of the new school chapel

"The rapt one of the godlike forehead,

The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth.”

154 LIFE OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

The grave had hardly closed on him when the world echoed with his praise. "Coleridge," said Blackwood (1834) "alone perhaps of all men that ever lived was always a poet-in all his moods, and they were many, inspired."

THE END.