The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 2. Томас Де Квинси

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СКАЧАТЬ however, though going over so narrow a space, go far enough to throw a pathetic light upon Coleridge's frailties of temperament. They indicate the sort of nervous agitation arising from contradictory impulses, from love too tender, and scorn too fretful, by which already in childish days the inner peace had been broken up, and the nervous system shattered. This revelation, though so unpretending and simple in manner, of the drama substantially so fearful, that was constantly proceeding in a quiet and religious parsonage—the bare possibility that sufferings so durable in their effects should be sweeping with their eternal storms a heart so capacious and so passively unresisting—are calculated to startle and to oppress us with the sense of a fate long prepared, vested in the very seeds of constitution and character; temperament and the effects of early experience combining to thwart all the morning promise of greatness and splendour; the flower unfolding its silken leaves only to suffer canker and blight; and to hang withering on the stalk, with only enough of grace and colour left to tell pathetically to all that looked upon it what it might have been.

      EDITOR'S NOTE TO THIS ESSAY

      Certainly this idea of De Quincey about the misfortune to Coleridge of the early loss of his father, separation from his mother, and removal from Devon to London, is fully borne out by the more personal utterances to be found in Coleridge's poems. Looking through them with this idea in view, we are surprised at the deposit left in them by this conscious experience on Coleridge's part. Not to dwell at all on what might be very legitimately regarded as indirect expressions of the sentiment, we shall present here, in order to add emphasis to De Quincey's position, some of the extracts which have most impressed us. From the poem in the Early Poems 'To an Infant,' are these lines:

      'Man's breathing miniature! thou mak'st me sigh—

      A babe art thou—and such a thing am I,

      To anger rapid and as soon appeased,

      For trifles mourning and by trifles pleased,

      Break friendship's mirror with a tetchy blow,

      Yet snatch what coals of fire on pleasure's altar glow.'

      Still more emphatic is this passage from the poem, 'Frost at Midnight':

      'My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart

      With tender gladness thus to look at thee,

      And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,

      And in far other scenes! For I was reared

      In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,

      And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.

      But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze

      By lakes and sandy shores beneath the crags

      Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,

      Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores

      And mountain crags; so shalt thou see and hear

      The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible

      Of that eternal language, which thy God

      Utters, who from eternity doth teach

      Himself in all and all things in Himself.

      Great Universal Teacher! he shall mould

      Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.'

      In another place, when speaking of the love of mother for child and that of child for mother, awakened into life by the very impress of that love in voice and touch, he concludes with the line:

      'Why was I made for Love and Love denied to me?'

      And, most significant of all, is that Dedication in 1803 of his Early Poems to his brother, the Rev. George Coleridge of Ottery St. Mary, when he writes, after having dwelt on the bliss this brother had enjoyed in never having been really removed from the place of his early nurture:

      'To me the Eternal Wisdom hath dispensed

      A different fortune, and more different mind—

      Me, from the spot where first I sprang to light

      Too soon transplanted, ere my soul had fixed

      Its first domestic loves; and hence, through life

      Chasing chance-started friendships. A brief while

      Some have preserved me from life's pelting ills,

      But like a tree with leaves of feeble stem,

      If the clouds lasted, and a sudden breeze

      Ruffled the boughs, they on my head at once

      Dropped the collected shower: and some most false,

      False and fair-foliaged as the manchineel,

      Have tempted me to slumber in their shade

      E'en 'mid the storm; then breathing subtlest damps

      Mixed their own venom with the rain from Heaven,

      That I woke poisoned! But (all praise to Him

      Who gives us all things) more have yielded me

      Permanent shelter: and beside one friend,

      Beneath the impervious covert of one oak

      I've raised a lowly shed and know the name

      Of husband and of father; not unhearing

      Of that divine and nightly-whispering voice,

      Which from my childhood to maturer years

      Spake to me of predestinated wreaths,

      Bright with no fading colours!

      Yet, at times,

      My soul is sad, that I have roamed through life

      Still most a stranger, most with naked heart,

      At mine own home and birthplace: chiefly then

      When I remember thee, my earliest friend!

      Thee, who didst watch my boyhood and my youth;

      Did'st trace my wanderings with a father's eye;

      And, boding evil yet still hoping good,

      Rebuked each fault and over all my woes

      Sorrowed in silence!'

      And certainly all this only gains emphasis from the entry we have in the 'Table Talk' under date August 16, 1832, and under the heading, 'Christ's Hospital, Bowyer':

      'The discipline of Christ's Hospital in my time was ultra-Spartan; all domestic ties were to be put aside. "Boy!" I remember Bowyer saying to me once when I was crying the first day of my return after the holidays. "Boy! the school is your father! Boy! the school is your mother! Boy! the school is your brother! the school is your sister! the school is your first cousin, and all the rest of your relations! Let's have no more crying!"'

      II. MR. FINLAY'S HISTORY OF GREECE

      In attempting to appraise Mr. Finlay's work comprehensively, there is this difficulty. It comes before us in two characters; first, as a philosophic speculation upon history, to be valued against others speculating on other histories; secondly, as a guide, practical altogether and not speculative, to students who are navigating that great trackless ocean the Eastern Roman history. Now under either shape, this work traverses so much ground, that by mere multiplicity of details it denies to us the opportunity of reporting on its merits with that simplicity of judgment which would have been available in a case of severer unity. So many separate situations of history, so many critical continuations of political circumstances, sweep across the field of Mr. Finlay's telescope whilst sweeping the heavens of four centuries, that it is naturally impossible to effect any comprehensive abstractions, as to principles, from cases individual by their nature and separated by their period not less than by their relations in respect to things and persons. The mere necessity of the plan СКАЧАТЬ