The noise of wood and water, and the mist
That on the line of each of those two roads
Advanced in such indísputable shapes;
All these were kindred spectacles and sounds
To which I oft repaired, and thence would drink
As at a fountain ...
Wordsworth ends this sublime and musical passage by saying that a strong wind still
causes in him inward agitations –
Whate’er their office, whether to beguile
Thoughts over-busy in the course they took,
Or animate an hour of vacant ease.
The Wordsworth who re-creates, confronts and draws upon his most painful
memories was no lyric simpleton. Although in 1812 he felt ‘no need of a Redeemer’,
his trust in the providence of Nature, and his sustained transcription of its traces on
his memory, is religious. An even more striking instance of Wordsworth’s moral
originality and of his acceptance of the harshest providence comes in his aged narra-
tor’s astonishing words at the conclusion to The Ruined Cottage, a tale of heart-
breaking bleakness: ‘I turned away / And walked along my road in happiness.’ This
early draft of a narrative included in The Excursion was published in 1949.
Wordsworth is a stranger poet than is usually realized.Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge(1772–1835) had every poetic talent but the ability to
finish something. I t has been said that his greatest masterpiece was Wordsworth, but
his own exceptional gifts produced five absolutely remarkable poems:The Ancient
Mariner in Lyrical Ballads;from the same per iod Frost at Midnight,and the frag-
ments Kubla Khan and Christabel,unpublished until 1816.Finally,Dejection: An Ode
(1802),drafted the night he heard Wordsworth read the Immortality Ode.
Wor dswor th later added a conclusion to his own Ode, declaring that:‘T o me the
meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.’
STC, as he called himself, could not make the same act of faith. He fluently suggests
the beauties of the night that surround ‘Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew /
In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue’, but ends, ‘I see them all so excellently fair,
/ I see, not feel, how beautiful they are.’ He ‘may not hope’, he says, ‘from outward
forms to win / The passion and the life, whose fountains are within’.Dejection ends
with a stifled prayer that Joy will attend a Lady (namely, Sara Hutchinson). He
published it on the fourth anniversary of Wordsworth’s marriage, and the seventh of
his own.
The image of a fountain recurs in Kubla Khan,and in Wordsworth’s commemo-
ration of STC’s death, when ‘every mortal power of Coleridge / Was frozen at its
marvellous source’. Coleridge conceived the mind as active, not as in Locke’s passive
model in which ideas derive from sense-impressions on a blank mental plate.
Coleridge also went beyond the physiological turn given to Locke’s theory of the
association of ideas by David Hartley (1705–1757). Coleridge called his first child
Hartley, but his second after the idealist philosopher Berkeley, who placed the source
of knowledge in the divinely-inspired human mind. For Coleridge, association of
ideas could only lead to the combinatory power of Fancy, as he defined it in234 7 · THE ROMANTICS: 1790–1837
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(1772–1835) Ninth and
last son of the vicar of Ottery
St Mary, Devon. Educated at
Christ’s Hospital, London.
Leaves Cambridge to join Light
Dragoons, as Silas T.
Comberbache; bought out
under insanity clause. Marries
Sara, Robert Southey’s sister-
in-law, as part of the scheme
for Pantisocracy, an ideal
commune in Pennsylvania.
1795 meets Wordsworth;
friendship, Lyrical Ballads.
1798–9 in Germany. 1799 in
love with Sara Hutchinson,
sister of Wordsworth’s future
wife. Addicted to (medically
prescribed) opium. 1804–6 in
Malta; returns to London in
despair. 1810 quarrel with
Wordsworth. Lecturing, play-
writing, writing The Friend.
1813 spiritual crisis. Recovers
from addiction at Dr Gillman’s,
in Highgate, London. 1816
Christabel and Other Poems,
Lay Sermons, Statesman’s
Manual. 1817 Biographia
Literaria, Sybilline Leaves.
1825 Aids to Reflection,
Church and State.