FullReads

Southey was writing poetry and getting paid for it; and beside this had a small income. Coleridge allowed Southey to buy the supplies, and when he went away on tramp lecturing tours he felt perfectly safe in leaving his family with Southey.

While up that way he met a young man, a native, by the name of Wordsworth–William Wordsworth–and a poet, too.

Wordsworth had a sister named Dorothy, and this brother and sister lived together in a little whitewashed stone cottage, built up against the hillside at Grasmere, a village thirteen miles from Keswick. Coleridge liked these people first-rate and they liked him. He used to go down to visit them, and they would all sit up late listening to the splendid talk of the handsome Coleridge. William said he was the only great man he had ever met, and Dorothy agreed in the proposition.

Coleridge was discouraged: the world did not care for his work, and the men in power had set their faces against him–or he thought they had, which is the same thing. There was a conspiracy, he thought, to keep him down; and Wordsworth should have advised him to join it, but did not.

Dorothy Wordsworth was a most extraordinary woman–she was gentle, kind, low-voiced, sympathetic. She was not handsome, but she had the intellect that entitled her to a membership in the Brotherhood of Fine Minds. She knew the splendid excellence of Coleridge, and could follow him in his most abstract dissertations; and if his logic faltered she could lead him back to the trail.

Dorothy Wordsworth admired and pitied Coleridge; and from pity to love is but a step.

But Coleridge was not capable of a passionate love–the substance of his being was all absorbed in abstract thought. And yet Dorothy Wordsworth attracted him as no other woman ever did. He forgot his wife, Sara, up there at Southey’s. Sara was a better-looking woman than Dorothy, but she lacked intellect. Her life was all bound up in housekeeping and going to church, and the petty little round of daily happenings to neighbors and friends. The world of thought and dreams to her was nothing. She loved her husband, but his foolish foibles vexed her, and his lack of application prompted her to chide him. And at such times he would turn to his friends at Dove Cottage for sympathy and rest.

They used to tramp the hills, and discuss philosophy, and recite their poems the livelong day. It was on one such jaunt that out of the ghost of shoreless seas they sighted the “Ancient Mariner.” Then Coleridge went ahead, completed the plot and gave the poem to the world. And once he said, half-boastfully, to Dorothy: “This old seafaring poem is valuable in that it is a tale no one will understand, but which will excite universal interest. Only the perfectly sane and sensible is dull.”

Wordsworth had read somewhat of the works of the German philosophers, and as he and his sister had a little money saved up they decided to go over and attend the lectures at the University of Goettingen for awhile. Coleridge had nothing in the way to prevent his going, too, save that he didn’t have the money. However, he wanted to go and so decided to lay the case before the sons of Josiah Wedgwood. These young men had been schoolfellows of Coleridge at Cambridge, and once he had gone home with them and so had met their father.

And right here comes a very strong temptation to say not another word about Coleridge, but merge this essay off into a sketch of that most excellent, strong and noble man, Josiah Wedgwood. Here is a man who left his impress indelibly on the times, and whose influence outweighed that of a dozen prime ministers. The potter is gone, but he lives in his art, so we still have the best and purest and noblest of the soul of Josiah Wedgwood.