Gents Mag 1834 part 2 p.548
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Gentleman's Magazine 1834 part 2 p.548
"September 2, 1826. "O, it is sad, sir, to know distress, and to feel for it, and yet have no power of remedy! Conscious that my circumstances have neither been the penalty of sloth, nor of extravagance, nor of vicious habits, but to have resulted from the refusal, since earliest manhood, to sacrific my conscience to my temporal interests, and from the practice of writing what my fellow-citizens want rather than what they like, I suffer no pang of shame in avowing to you that I do not possess so many shillings as you mention pounds, and that if I were arrested for a debt of eight sovereigns, I have no other means of procuring the money but by the sale of my books, that are to me the staff of life. The whole of my yearly income does not amoount to the prime cost of my necessary maintenance, clothes, shelter, food, and medicine; the rest I owe to the more than brotherly regard of my disinterested friend, Mr. Gillman, to whose medical skill I owe, under God, that I am alive, and to whose, and his amiable wife's unceasing kindness I am indebted for all that makes life endurable. Even when my health is at the best, I can only exert myself for a few hours in the twenty-four, and these I conscientiously devote to the completion of the great works, in the matter of composition of which I have been employed the last twenty years of a laborious life - if hard thinking and hard reading constitute labour. But for the last six months, such has been the languor and debility of my frame - languor alternating with severe pain - that I have not been able even to maintain the scanty correspondence with the few friends I possess. By Publications I, or rather two or three generous friends, have lost about 300l. - for I cannot, at least will not, write in reviews - and what I can write the public will not read, so that I have no connexion with any magazine, paper, or periodical of any kind, nor have I had interest enough to procure any review or journal even the announcement of my own last work - the Aids to Reflection. I neither live for the world nor in the world." The last memorable circumstance in Coleridge's life, was the publication of a complete edition of his Poems, on which his fame will rest, in three volumes by Pickering. It may not be amiss to point out their threefold nature; as works of passionate and exalted meditation, witness his 'Sunrise in the Valley of Chamouni,' his 'Lines on an Autumnal Evening,' his 'Religious Musings,' his 'Ode to the Departing Year,' and many other of his earlier poems; - as out-pourings of the wild inspiration of old romance, his 'Ancient Mariner,' his 'Genevieve, and his 'Christabel' - and his latest verses, as treasuring in a few lines, matured philosophy - mingling wisdom with retrospect, and intimations of holy truths with pleasant and simple images. Nor must we forget his version of 'Wallenstein,' a master-translation of a master work; or his original dramatic compositions, too full of deep thought and delicate imagery for a stage. After all, however, it was in his conversation that Mr. Coleridge was most remarkable. In an admirable article on his poetical and peculiar genius, which appeared just before his death, in No.103 of the Quarterly Review, are the following remarks on this subject: "Perhaps our readers may have heard repeated a saying of Mr. Wordsworth, that many men of his age had done wonderful things, as Davy, Scott, Cuvier, &c.; but that Coleridge was the only wonderful man he ever knew. Something, of course, must be allowed in this, as in all other such cases, for the anithesis; but we believe the fact really to be, that the greater part of those who have occasionally visited Mr. Coleridge, have left him feeling akin to the judgment indicated in the above remark. They admire the man more than his works, or they forget the works in the absorbing impression made by the living author. And no wonder. Those who remember him in his more vigourous days can bear witness to the peculiarity and transcendant power of his conversational eloquence. It was unlike anything that could be heard elsewhere; the kind was different, the degree was different, the manner was different. The boundless range of scientific knowledge, the brilliancy and exquisite nicety of illustration, the deep and ready reasoning, the strangeness and immensity of bookish lore - were not all; the dramatic story, the joke, the pun, the festivity, must be added - and with these the clerical-looking dress, the thick waving silver hair, the youthful-coloured cheek, the indefinable mouth and lips, the quick yet steady and penetrating greenish grey eye, the slow and continuous enunciation, and the everlasting music of his tones, - all went to make up the image and to constitute the living presence of the man. Even now his conversation is characterized by all the essentials of its former excellence; there is the same individuality, the same unexpectedness, the same universal grasp; nothing is too high, nothing too low for it: it glances from earth to heaven, from heaven to earth, with a speed |
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