world was just like you!" "Oh, oh," said Coleridge, "I did meet a person answering such a description, who told me that he had dropped his goose, that if I rode a little farther I should find it; and I guess by the archfellow's looks, he must have meant you!" "Caught a tartar," said the long-nosed sportsman, and he rode off smartly. So Coleridge jogged on again, like Parson Adams on a donkey, until he came to the racecourse, and there he drew up by a barouche and four, containing a baronet (a member of Parliament), and several smart ladies, and sundry gorgeous flunkeys. "A pretty piece of blood, sir, you have there," said the baronet, with a curl of the upper lip. "Yes," said Coleridge. "Rare paces, I have no doubt." "Yes, he brought me here a matter of four miles an hour." "Will you sell him?" "Yes." "Name your price-rider and all." The ladies began to titter. "My price for the horse, sir, is one hundred guineas—as to the rider, never having been in parliament, his price is not yet fixed." The baronet had enough.

Coleridge at this period was a man of great animal spirits, and (strange as it may sound) of extraordinary physical energy. Writing to Wedgewood, January 9, 1803, he gives a most interesting and surprising picture of his vigour as a mountaineer. "I write," he says, "with difficulty, with all the fingers but one of my right hand very much swollen. Before I was half up the Kirkstone mountain, the storm had wetted me through and through, and before I reached the top it was so wild and outrageous, that it would have been unmanly to have suffered the poor woman (guide) to continue pushing on, up

against such a torrent of wind and rain: so I dismounted and sent her home with the storm in her back. I am no novice in mountain mischiefs, but such a storm as this was, I never witnessed, combining the intensity of the cold with the violence of the wind and rain. The rain drops were pelted or slung against my face by the gusts, just like splinters of flint, and I felt as if every drop cut my flesh. My hands were all shrivelled up like a washerwoman's, and so benumbed that I was obliged to carry my stick under my arm. O, it was a wild business! Such hurry skurry of clouds, such volleys of sound! In spite of the wet and the cold, I should have had some pleasure in it, but for two vexations; first, an almost intolerable pain came into my right eye, a smarting and burning pain; and secondly, in consequence of riding with such cold water under my seat, extremely uneasy and burthensome feelings attacked my groin, so that, what with the pain from the one and the alarm from the other, I had no enjoyment at all! Just at the brow of the hill I met a man dismounted, who could not sit on horse-back. He seemed quite scared by the uproar, and said to me, with much feeling, 'O sir, it is a perilous buffeting, but it is worse for you than for me, for I have it at my back.' However I got safely over, and immediately all was calm and breathless, as if it was some mighty fountain put on the summit of Kirkstone, that shot forth its volcano of air, and precipitated huge streams of invisible lava down the road to Patterdale. I went on to Grasmere."

Again (Jan. 14, 1803), he writes, "You ask me 'Why, in the name of goodness, I did not return when I saw

the state of the weather?' The true reason is simple, though it may be somewhat strange. The thought never once entered my head. The cause of this I suppose to be, that (I do not remember it at least) I never once in my whole life turned back in fear of the weather. Prudence is a plant of which I no doubt possess some valuable specimens, but they are always in my hothouse, never out of the glasses, and least of all things would endure the climate of the mountains. In simple earnestness, I never find myself alone, within the embracement of rocks and hills, a traveller up an alpine road, but my spirit careers, drives, and eddies, like a leaf in autumn; a wild activity of thoughts, imaginations, feelings, and impulses of motion rises up from within me; a sort of bottom wind, that blows to no point of the compass, comes from I know not whence, but agitates the whole of me; my whole being is filled with waves that roll and stumble, one this way, and one that way, like things that have no common master. I think that my soul must have pre-existed in the body of a chamois chaser. simple image of the old object has been obliterated, but the feelings, and impulsive habits, and incipient actions, are in me, and the old scenery awakens them."

The

The Coleridge depicted in these letters is not the Coleridge of much biography and criticism, but it is unquestionably the Coleridge of reality. Here is a

companion portrait by Wordsworth:

"Within our happy Castle there dwelt one
Whom without blame I may not overlook;

For never sun on living creature shone

Who more devout enjoyment with us took ;

Here on his hours he hung as on a book;
On his own time here would he float away,

As doth a fly upon a summer brook ;
But go to-morrow-or, belike, to-day-

Seek for him, he is fled; and whither none can say.

Thus often would he leave our peaceful home,

And find elsewhere his business or delight;
Out of our valley's limits did he roam :

Full many a time upon a stormy night

His voice came to us from the neighbouring height :

Oft did we see him driving full in view,

At midday, when the sun was shining bright •
What ill was on him, what he had to do,

A mighty wonder bred among our quiet crew."

Towards the end of 1802 Coleridge made a tour in Wales with Thomas Wedgewood, whose health was failing. In 1803 he was much from home. He visited the Wedgewoods in London, Poole at Stowey, and Southey at Bristol. Southey's wife lost her only child in the summer of this year, and in her sorrow she went off to her sister at Keswick. Southey accompanied her, and forthwith pitched his tent there, sharing Greta Hall with Coleridge and their landlady. During the same summer Coleridge made a tour into Scotland with Wordsworth and his sister. Wordsworth had married, in the previous October, an old playfellow from Penrith, Mary Hutchinson. Early in his residence at Grasmere he had published, with his own name only, a second series of the "Lyrical Ballads," through Longmans, who paid £100 for the two volumes. It does not appear that Coleridge shared this sum, though the "Ancient Mariner" and some four

I

of his other poems were still included. The party were not long together in Scotland. They visited Burns's grave, the Clyde, Loch Katrine, and the Trossachs. Rogers met them in the course of the tour, "in a vehicle that looked very like a cart." The weather was wet and dull, and Coleridge began to suffer from rheumatism. Before long, he left the Wordsworths, and returned home rather hastily. "Poor Coleridge," Wordsworth wrote, was at that time in bad spirits, and somewhat too much in love with his own dejection, and he departed from us." Wordsworth was not often so much ruffled beneath his calm exterior. He loved Coleridge as a brother, and generally spoke of him with brotherly affection.

And now we are at a point of the highest importance in the record of Coleridge's life. From the date of his return from Scotland to Keswick, to nurse his rheumatism and suppressed gout with the "Kendal Black Drop," the current of his life takes a change. He had hitherto been a man of enormous mental activity and sufficient physical energy. His personal character had been sweet and affectionate. He was a man made to love, and to be beloved. His friends had been bound to him by hooks of steel. As husband and father he had shown infinite love and tenderness, and even more anxiety for the material welfare of his wife and children than the vicissitudes of his career had justified. All was peace and love in his home. He had worked hard and continuously, and produced an enormous body of work. Some of it was the very highest of its order, and a little

A year later Wordsworth offered Coleridge £100 to enable him to go to Madeira in search of health.