Mr. Carlyle has made the same marvellous blunder. It is as if a turnip-field were to brag over its superiority to a rose of Provence. What says Ben Jonson ? "It is not growing like a tree In bulk doth make men better be; Or standing long an oak, three hundred year, Is fairer far in May, Although it fall and die that night : It was the plant and flower of light." Coleridge did nothing, forsooth! as Mr. Gladstone might say. Why, he wrote Christabel; but for which we should never have had the two series of poems which begin with Scott's Minstrel and Byron's Giaour. As to his philosophy- But I will not deal with these vexed questions. Let me forgive Hazlitt his splenetic attack upon his mightier friend, and walk with him from Shrewsbury to Nether Stowey, in Somerset. For Somerset was then Coleridge's country; and he invited his young admirer to come and see him there, offering to walk half-way to meet him. You see there were no railways in 1798; nor do I expect that the mailcoach service was quite as perfect as I remember it in my school-days. Was the old-fashioned stage-wagon extinct? Mr. Timbs or Mr. Thornbury would know. However, young men could walk-young poets and essayists especially; and William Hazlitt thought nothing of walking from Shropshire to Somersetshire, considerably more than a hundred miles as the crow flies; and he would have to fly across the Bristol Channel, just above last fatal scene, when she turns a board the sinking vessel, who offers her, because he has stripped himself if I remember aright-it is quite thi Paul and Virginia-praises the Well said Swift that a nice man is a Hazlitt's further account of his jo we can follow him in imagination, the roads, with happy expectation at the end of his travel. He passe stopped perchance at Mr. Phillpott have seen the late Bishop of Exet Church, my orthodox journals tell with some other little schoolboy of first decade. The wayfarer was eage for he found himself two days before them in the unhappy little town of Burgh Walter), since famous for ha historian to authorise bribery. Somerset is not a picturesque VOL. II. some sipping tea, _nly see, nned"? e and the Seven Wells are Coleridge carried his young into his own county. There the air brighter and more sea of a purer blue. After keeping time to the rhythm ached Lynton at midnight. ospitality of Devon was not cellent supply of bacon and rewith is not noted: I hope r. A still cider of Devon, beat Clicquot and Roederer saw the Valley of Rocks, k much of it. In fact, his the true poetic form. He and toast, eggs and honey, darlings learnt of father had Although Lakes, and own, it is w their beaut Windermere prose; but t an infinite lo written of ridge's: unknown to the ancients: maidens darlings of old romance; and when learnt of a surety that it was the ver father had vainly attempted to turn "Let Uther Pendragon do w Eden shall run where Eder Although Wordsworth and Southey Lakes, and the former did much to own, it is with Coleridge, above all their beauty. Certainly Professo Windermere in wondrous periods of prose; but the Professor, though he an infinite love, was not quite a po written of his beloved vicinage d ridge's : And oft too, by the knell offended, Just as their one! two! three! is ended, The devil mocks the doleful tale With a merry peal from Borrowdale.” It was in the year 1848 that I first made acquaintance with Coleridge's country. Fourteen years had the great poet been dead. But I met Wordsworth—Virgilium .tantum vidi. Henry Crabb Robinson was with him at the time. Less than two years had passed when the great poet died; and the recollection of those brief hours in his presence will never pass from me so long as my memory endures. I remember the sacred splendour, the lambent light of his eyes beneath overhanging brows; I remember the boyish delight wherewith, in his sixteenth lustrum, the old poet welcomed a boyish admirer; I remember his showing me his favourite views, his favourite laurel-trees, all planted from slips taken by his own hand from those which Petrarch set around Virgil's tomb; I remember how sorrowful he seemed at the thought that after his death Rydal Mount might be occupied by those who would not recognise the name of Wordsworth. Lighter things I remember. Among them, that I myself should have some difficulty in obtaining poetic repute, seeing that my name had been made illustrious by the author of certain odes which are among the most beautiful in the language. Also the great poet's critical judgments on Southey and Macaulay. Southey, he thought, had written one tolerable poem, that on the holly-tree; and even in that there was a blemish in the very first line. Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome should have been. called Lays of Modern Athens; they were utterly untrue, |