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July, proceeded at once to Stowey, and remained at home. with his wife and children until the end of August. Then he made a tour into Westmoreland with Wordsworth, who was beginning to think of settling there; and in November he came up to London, took lodgings in Buckingham Street, Strand, and set himself to translate. Schiller's "Wallenstein" from a manuscript which had been lent him. In the short space of six weeks the translation was complete. "It is a specimen of my happiest attempt," says Coleridge, "during the prime manhood of my intellect, before I had been buffeted by adversity or crossed by fatality." The translation is unquestionably a noble production-perhaps the finest example extant of poetry translated into poetry. It is an amusing fact that one of the best passages in the translation had no counterpart in the original. Under the impulse of strong feeling the translator had interpolated the passage where the poet's ardour seemed to wane, and so strongly did Schiller feel its beauty and its fitness, that when he came to print his trilogy in Germany, he translated Coleridge's passage into German. Neither poet nor translator made any note of the liberties taken with each other. Longmans published Coleridge's "Wallenstein " in 1800, but the book fell quite dead in the market. Schiller had no vogue in England then, and Coleridge was only beginning to be known.

The guinea a week which represented Coleridge's only reliable income in the summer of 1798 came from Daniel Stuart, proprietor of The Morning Post, with whom he had agreed to supply occasional verses for that small fixed sum. The poetry which Coleridge published in

The Morning Chronicle in the days of the "Salutation and Cat," had attracted attention, and even more success of its kind attached to the poetry printed in The Watchman. These were days when serious literature was a factor to be counted with in the columns of a daily newspaper, and when occasional poetry had a vocation which even the leaders of public opinion could not ignore. Long afterwards Stuart tried to pass it off that he took Coleridge at the request of Mackintosh out of charity, merely to keep him from starvation. This statement is of a piece with certain other statements from the same dubious quarter. Coleridge contributed anonymously to The Morning Post a number of light pieces and some serious efforts, and certain of them created nothing short of a furore. Before going to Germany he had printed his "Fire, Famine, and Slaughter." After returning home he resumed his journalistic poetizing, and printed "The Devil's Walk." The former piece provoked a good deal of hostile feeling. It represented the deities of the title meeting in conference to describe their triumphs, and answering to the question of who unchained them, with a mysterious allusion to the name of Pitt. Its sentiment was said by some critics to be no less than diabolical. The question, "Could the writer have been other than a devil?" was discussed at a London dinner-table in the presence of the author.

Coleridge's connection with The Morning Post soon became a matter of consequence. Towards the end of 1799 he undertook the literary and political departments of the paper, had Wordsworth, Lamb, and Southey among his contributors, and effected such changes in its

policy and in its popularity, that in a short time it more than doubled its circulation. Such at least was his own, if not Stuart's, account. Here at last was his first real chance in life. How did he deal with it? He developed into a journalist of extraordinary fecundity and resource. Stuart tried to prove the contrary, but the clear facts were all against him. Coleridge had, in a remarkable degree, the assimilative faculty which every successful journalist must possess. He wrote on a great variety of subjects with infinite allusiveness, as well as thoroughness of research. There is no reason to think that he exaggerated the effects of his labours. We have the material evidence of his employer's satisfaction. In March, 1800, after Coleridge had been four months at work, Stuart, according to Coleridge's account, offered him half-shares in his two papers, the Post and the Courier. In a letter to Poole of Stowey, Coleridge says, that if he had the least love of money he "could make sure of £2,000 a year," if he would devote himself to the two papers in conjunction with the proprietor. But Coleridge's heart was already set on a different kind of life. "I told him," he says, "that I could not give up the country and the lazy reading of old folios for two thousand times two thousand pounds-in short, that beyond £350 a year, I considered money as a real evil.” In the summer of 1800 Coleridge quitted London and went up to the Lake Country. Wordsworth was already settled there, having rented and furnished a tiny cottage at Town End, Grasmere. Coleridge took half of Greta Hall, near Keswick, at twenty-five pounds a year. Like the Ancient Mariner, the old folios had their will.

Coleridge continued for two years more to write for The Morning Post, but his one great chance of material advantage had been permitted to go by without producing the temptation of a moment. It is easy to see that such an offer might have changed the whole current of his life. He might have become a man of substance as we say, but he deliberately elected to run his risk of being "buffeted by adversity." Does this show a deficiency in worldly wisdom? It is not for us to say so, who know what Coleridge's powers were, how much they might have put forth under favourable conditions, and how surely they must have been paralysed by the daily demands of journalism. If in the sequel those powers disappointed his own hopes, his judgment at this juncture is not chargeable with a fatality which he could not foresee. Literature has lost little by the circumstance that Coleridge did not continue to write leaders to the day of his death. The only serious loss was the material one, and that was his own, and, if any one shall say that it was his children's loss also, the answer must be that in denying himself £2,000 a year by leaving London for Keswick, Coleridge did not cut off the possibility of the £350 a year, beyond which all money was considered an evil.

CHAPTER VII.

RETA HALL stands on the banks of the beautiful

G Greta, over against Latrigg, a hill at the foot of

Skiddaw. In 1800 it was divided into two tenements, separated by a wall. Coleridge occupied one tenement, and the owner, Mr. Jackson, a waggoner, occupied the other. The house is on a site which for picturesqueness has few equals in England. Below lies a valley about as large as the basin of Windermere. In this valley there are two lakes, Derwentwater to the south, Bassenthwaite to the north, connected by a winding river, the Derwent. Between these sheets cf water, the little town of Keswick stands. From Greta Hall the range of view is infinite in its variety of colour and form. To the right, you look past Castle Head and Lodore to the mouth of Borrowdale, with Scaw Fell over the tops of many peaks. In front, you look into Newlands; beyond Cat Bells to the Eel Crags and Hindsgarth. Behind you is Skiddaw with its great chasms and bald crown. "A fairer scene," said Coleridge, "you have not seen in all your wanderings." It was natural that the poet's romantic work should grow amid such surroundings. Soon after settling there in

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