Mr. Coleridge, in writing an harmonious stanza, would stop to consider whether there was not more grace and beauty in a Pas de trois, and would not proceed till he had resolved this question by a chain of metaphysical reasoning without end. Not so Mr. Godwin. That is best to him, which he can do best. He does not waste himself in vain aspirations and effeminate sympathies. He is blind, deaf, insensible to all but the trump of Fame. Plays, operas, painting, music, ball-rooms, wealth, fashion, titles, lords, ladies, touch him not. All these are no more to him than to the magician in his cell, and he writes on to the end of the chapter through good report and evil report. Pingo in eternitatem is his motto. He neither envies nor admires what others are, but is contented to be what he is, and strives to do the utmost he can. Mr. Coleridge has flirted with the Muses as with a set of mistresses: Mr. Godwin has been married twice, to Reason and to Fancy, and has to boast no short-lived progeny by each.

So to speak, he has valves belonging to his mind, to regulate the quantity of gas admitted into it, so that like the bare, unsightly, but wellcompacted steam-vessel, it cuts its liquid way, and arrives at its promised end: while Mr. Coleridge's bark, "taught with the little nautilus to sail," the sport of every breath, dancing to every wave,

"Youth at its prow, and Pleasure at its helm," flutters its gaudy pennons in the air, glitters in the sun, but we wait in vain to hear of its arrival in the destined harbour. Mr. Godwin, with less variety and vividness, with less subtlety and susceptibility both of thought and feeling, has had firmer nerves, a more determined purpose, a more comprehensive grasp of his subject; and the results are as we find them. Each has met with his reward: for justice has, after all, been done to the pretensions of each; and we must, in all cases, use means to ends!

It was a misfortune to any man of talent to be born in the latter end of the last century. Genius stopped the way of Legitimacy, and therefore it was to be abated, crushed, or set aside as a nuisance. The spirit of the monarchy was at variance with the spirit of the age. The flame of liberty, the light of intellect, was to be extinguished with the sword or with slander, whose edge is sharper than the sword. The war between power and reason was carried on by the first of these abroad, by the last at

home. No quarter was given (then or now) by the Government-critics, the authorised censors of the press, to those who followed the dictates of independence, who listened to the voice of the tempter Fancy. Instead of gathering fruits and flowers, immortal fruits and amaranthine flowers, they soon found themselves beset not only by a host of prejudices. but assailed with all the engines of power: by nicknames, by lies, by all the arts of malice, interest, and hypocrisy, without the possibility of their defending themselves "from the pelting of the pitiless storm," that poured down upon them from the strongholds of corruption and authority.

The philosophers, the dry abstract reasoners, submitted to this reverse pretty well, and armed themselves with patience "as with triple steel," to bear discomfiture, persecution, and disgrace. But the poets, the creatures of sympathy, could not stand the frowns both of king and people. They did not like to be shut out when places and pensions, when the critic's praises, and the laurel wreath were about to be distributed. They did not stomach being sent to Coventry, and Mr. Coleridge sounded a retreat for them by the help of casuistry and a musical voice. "His words were hollow, but they pleased the ear" of his friends of the Lake School, who turned back disgusted and panic-struck from the dry desert of unpopularity, like Hassan the cameldriver,

"And curs'd the hour, and curs'd the luckless day, When first from Shiraz' walls they bent their way."

They are safely enclosed there. But Mr. Coleridge did nor enter with them; pitching his tent upon the barren waste without, and having no abiding place nor city of refuge!

LEIGH HUNT (1784-1859)

THE DAUGHTER OF HIPPOCRATES 1 In the time of the Norman reign in Sicily, a vessel bound from that island for Smyrna was driven by a westerly wind upon the island of Cos. The crew did not know where they were, though they had often visited the island; for the trading towns lay in other quarters, and

1 Compare the other versions of this story, one by Mandeville (p. 6, above), the other by William Morris (English Poetry, p. 551).

they saw nothing before them but woods and solitudes. They found, however, a comfortable harbour; and the wind having fallen in the night, they went on shore next morning for water. The country proved as solitary as they thought it; which was the more extraordinary, inasmuch as it was very luxuriant, full of wild figs and grapes, with a rich uneven ground, and stocked with goats and other animals, who fled whenever they appeared. The bees were remarkably numerous; so that the wild honey, fruits, and delicious water, especially one spring which fell into a beautiful marble basin, made them more and more wonder, at every step, that they could see no human inhabitants.

Thus idling about and wondering, stretching themselves now and then among the wild thyme and grass, and now getting up to look at some specially fertile place which another called them to see, and which they thought might be turned to fine trading purpose, they came upon a mound covered with trees, which looked into a flat, wide lawn of rank grass, with a house at the end of it. They crept nearer towards the house along the mound, still continuing among the trees, for fear they were trespassing at last upon somebody's property. It had a large garden wall at the back, as much covered with ivy as if it had been built of it. Fruit-trees looked over the wall with an unpruned thickness; and neither at the back nor front of the house were there any signs of humanity. It was an ancient marble building, where glass was not to be expected in the windows; but it was much dilapidated, and the grass grew up over the steps. They listened again and again; but nothing was to be heard like a sound of men; nor scarcely of anything else. There was an intense noonday silence. Only the hares made a rustling noise as they ran about the long hiding grass. The house looked like the tomb of human nature amidst the vitality of earth.

"Did you see?" said one of the crew, turning pale, and hastening to go. "See what?" said the others. "What looked out of the window." They all turned their faces towards the house, but saw nothing. Upon this they laughed at their companion, who persisted, however, with great earnestness, and with great reluctance at stopping, to say that he saw a strange, hideous kind of face look out of the window. "Let us go, sir,” said he, to the Captain; for I tell ye what I know this place now: and you, Signor Gualtier," continued he, turning to a

young man, "may now follow that adventure I have often heard you wish to be engaged in." The crew turned pale, and Gualtier among them. "Yes," added the man, "we are fallen upon the enchanted part of the island of Cos, where the daughter of - Hush! Look there!" They turned their faces again, and beheld the head of a large serpent looking out of the window. Its eyes were direct upon them; and stretching out of the window, it lifted back its head with little sharp jerks like a fowl; and so stood keenly gazing.

The terrified sailors would have begun to depart quicklier than they did, had not fear itself made them move slowly. Their legs seemed melting from under them. Gualtier tried to rally his voice. "They say," said he, "it is a gentle creature. The hares that feed right in front of the house are a proof of it; let us all stay." The others shook their heads, and spoke in whispers, still continuing to descend the mound as well as they could. "There is something unnatural in that very thing," said the Captain: "but we will wait for you in the vessel, if you stay. We will, by St. Ermo." The Captain had not supposed that Gualtier would stay an instant; but seeing him linger more than the rest, he added the oath in question, and in the meantime was hastening with the others to get away. The truth is, Gualtier was, in one respect, more frightened than any of them. His legs were more rooted to the spot. But the same force of imagination that helped to detain him, enabled him to muster up courage beyond those who found their will more powerful: and in the midst of his terror he could not help thinking what a fine adventure this would be to tell in Salerno, even if he did but conceal himself a little, and stay a few minutes longer than the rest. The thought, however, had hardly come upon him, when it was succeeded by a fear still more lively; and he was preparing to follow the others with all the expedition he could contrive, when a fierce rustling took place in the trees behind him, and in an instant the serpent's head was at his feet. Gualtier's brain as well as heart seemed to sicken, as he thought the monstrous object scented him like a bear; but despair coming in aid of a courage naturally fanciful and chivalrous, he bent his eyes more steadily, and found the huge jaws and fangs not only abstaining from hurting him, but crouching and fawning at his feet like a spaniel. At the same time he called to mind the old legend respecting the creature, and, corroborated as he now saw it,

he ejaculated with good firmness, "In the name of God and his saints, what art thou?"

"Hast thou not heard of me?" answered the serpent in a voice whose singular human slenderness made it seem the more horrible. "I guess who thou art," answered Gualtier; "the fearful thing in the island of Cos."

"I am that loathly thing," replied the serpent; "once not so." And Gualtier thought that its voice trembled sorrowfully.

The monster told Gualtier that what was said of her was true; that she had been a serpent hundreds of years, feeling old age and renewing her youth at the end of each century; that it was a curse of Diana's which had changed her; and that she was never to resume a human form, till somebody was found kind and bold enough to kiss her on the mouth. As she spoke this word, she raised her crest, and sparkled so with her fiery green eyes, dilating at the same time the corners of her jaws, that the young man thrilled through his very scalp. He stepped back, with a look of the utmost horror and loathing. The creature gave a sharp groan inwardly, and after rolling her neck frantically on the ground, withdrew a little back likewise, and seemed to be looking another way. Gualtier heard two or three little sounds as of a person weeping piteously, yet trying to subdue its voice; and looking with breathless curiosity, he saw the side of the loathly creature's face bathed in tears.

"Why speakest thou, lady," said he, "if lady thou art, of the curse of the false goddess Diana, who never was, or only a devil? I cannot kiss thee," and he shuddered with a horrible shudder as he spoke, "but I will bless thee in the name of the true God, and even mark thee with his cross."

The serpent shook her head mournfully, still keeping it turned round. She then faced him again, hanging her head in a dreary and desponding manner. "Thou knowest not," said she, "what I know. Diana both was and never was; and there are many other things on earth which are and yet are not. Thou canst not comprehend it, even though thou art kind. But the heavens alter not, neither the sun nor the strength of nature; and if thou wert kinder, I should be as I once was, happy and human. Suffice it, that nothing can change me but what I said."

"Why wert thou changed, thou fearful and mysterious thing?" said Gualtier.

"Because I denied Diana, as thou dost," answered the serpent; "and it was pronounced

an awful crime in me, though it is none in thee; and I was to be made a thing loathsome in men's eyes. Let me not catch thine eye, I beseech thee; but go thy way and be safe; for I feel a cruel thought coming on me, which will shake my innermost soul, though it shall not harm thee. But I could make thee suffer for the pleasure of seeing thine anguish; even as some tyrants do: and is not that dreadful?" And the monster openly shed tears, and sobbed.

There was something in this mixture of avowed cruelty, and weeping contradiction to it, which made Gualtier remain in spite of himself. But fear was still uppermost in his mind when he looked upon the mouth that was to be kissed; and he held fast round the tree with one hand, and his sword as fast in the other, watching the movements of her neck as he conversed. "How did thy father, the sage Hippocrates," asked he, "suffer thee to come to this?" "My father," replied she, "sage and good as he was, was but a Greek mortal; and the great Virgin was a worshipped Goddess. pray thee, go." She uttered the last word in a tone of loud anguish; but the very horror of it made Gualtier hesitate, and he said, “How can I know that it is not thy destiny to deceive the merciful into this horrible kiss, that then and then only thou mayest devour them?"

I

But the serpent rose higher at this, and looking around loftily, said, in a mild and majestic tone of voice, "O ye green and happy woods, breathing like sleep! O safe and quiet population of these leafy places, dying brief deaths! O sea! O earth! O heavens, never uttering syllable to man! Is there no way to make better known the meaning of your gentle silence, of your long basking pleasures and brief pains? And must the want of what is beautiful and kind from others, ever remain different from what is beautiful and kind in itself? And must form obscure essence; and human confidence in good from within never be bolder than suspicion of evil from without? O ye large-looking and grand benignities of creation, is it that we are atoms in a dream, or that your largeness and benignity are in those only who see them, and that it is for us to hang over ye till we wake you into a voice with our kisses? I yearn to be made beautiful by one kind action, and beauty itself will not believe me!"

Gualtier, though not a foolish youth, understood little or nothing of this mystic apostrophe; but something made him bear in mind, and

really incline to believe, that it was a transformed woman speaking to him; and he was making a violent internal effort to conquer his repugnance to the kiss, when some hares, starting from him as they passed, ran and cowered behind the folds of the monster: and she stooped her head, and licked them. "By Christ," exclaimed he, "whom the wormy grave gathered into its arms to save us from our corruptions, I will do this thing; so may he have mercy on my soul, whether I live or die: for the very hares take refuge in her shadow." And shuddering and shutting his eyes, he put his mouth out for her to meet; and he seemed to feel, in his blindness, that dreadful mouth approaching; and he made the sign of the cross; and he murmured internally the name of him who cast seven devils out of Mary Magdalen, that afterwards anointed his feet; and in the midst of his courageous agony he felt a small mouth fast and warm upon his, and a hand about his neck, and another on his left hand; and opening his eyes, he dropped them upon two of the sweetest that ever looked into the eye of man. But the hares fled; for they had loved the serpent, but knew not the beautiful human being.

Great was the fame of Gualtier, not only throughout the Grecian islands, but on both continents; and most of all in Sicily, where every one of his countrymen thought he had had a hand in the enterprise, for being born on the same soil. The Captain and his crew never came again; for, alas! they had gone off without waiting as they promised. But Tancred, Prince of Salerno, came himself with a knightly train to see Gualtier, who lived with his lady in the same place, all her past sufferings appearing as nothing to her before a month of love; and even sorrowful habit had endeared it to her. Tancred, and his knights and learned clerks, came in a noble ship, every oar having a painted scutcheon over the rowlock; and Gualtier and his lady feasted them nobly, and drank to them amidst music in cups of Hippocras that knightly liquor afterwards so renowned, which she retained the secret of making from her sage father, whose name it bore. And when King Tancred, with a gentle gravity in the midst of his mirth, expressed a hope that the beautiful lady no longer worshipped Diana, Gualtier said, "No, indeed, sir;" and she looked in Gualtier's face, as she sat next him, with the sweetest look in the world, as who should say, "No, indeed: - I worship thee and thy kind heart."

THOMAS DE QUINCEY (1785-1859)

FROM CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER

INTRODUCTION TO THE PAINS OF
OPIUM

If any man, poor or rich, were to say that he would tell us what had been the happiest day in his life, and the why and the wherefore, I suppose that we should all cry out, Hear him! hear him! As to the happiest day, that must be very difficult for any wise man to name; because any event, that could occupy so distinguished a place in a man's retrospect of his life, or be entitled to have shed a special felicity on any one day, ought to be of such an enduring character, as that (accidents apart) it should have continued to shed the same felicity, or one not distinguishably less, on many years together. To the happiest lustrum, however, or even to the happiest year, it may be allowed to any man to point without discountenance from wisdom. This year, in my case, reader, was the one which we have now reached; though it stood, I confess, as a parenthesis between years of a gloomier character. It was a year of brilliant water (to speak after the manner of jewellers), set, as it were, and insulated, in the gloom and cloudy melancholy of opium. Strange as it may sound, I had a little before this time descended suddenly, and without any considerable effort, from three hundred and twenty grains of opium (that is, eight thousand drops of laudanum) per day, to forty grains, or one-eighth part. Instantaneously, and as if by magic, the cloud of profoundest melancholy which rested upon my brain, like some black vapours that I have seen roll away from the summits of mountains, drew off in one day; passed off with its murky banners as simultaneously as a ship that has been stranded, and is floated off by a spring tide,

That moveth altogether, if it move at all.

Now, then, I was again happy: I now took only one thousand drops of laudanum per day,

and what was that? A latter spring had come to close up the season of youth: my brain performed its functions as healthily as ever before. I read Kant again, and again I understood him, or fancied that I did. Again my feelings of pleasure expanded themselves to all around me; and, if any man from Oxford or

Cambridge, or from neither, had been announced to me in my unpretending cottage, I should have welcomed him with as sumptuous a reception as so poor a man could offer. Whatever else was wanting to a wise man's happiness, of laudanum I would have given him as much as he wished, and in a golden cup. And, by the way, now that I speak of giving laudanum away, I remember, about this time, a little incident, which I mention, because, trifling as it was, the reader will soon meet it again in my dreams, which it influenced more tearfully than could be imagined. One day a Malay knocked at my door. What business a Malay could have to transact amongst English mountains, I cannot conjecture; but possibly he was on his road to a seaport about forty miles distant.

The servant who opened the door to him was a young girl, born and bred amongst the mountains, who had never seen an Asiatic dress of any sort: his turban, therefore, confounded her not a little; and as it turned out that his attainments in English were exactly of the same extent as hers in the Malay, there seemed to be an impassable gulf fixed between all communication of ideas, if either party had happened to possess any. In this dilemma, the girl, recollecting the reputed learning of her master (and, doubtless, giving me credit for a knowledge of all the languages of the earth, besides, perhaps, a few of the lunar ones), came and gave me to understand that there was a sort of demon below, whom she clearly imagined that my art could exorcise from the house. I did not immediately go down; but when I did, the group which presented itself, arranged as it was by accident, though not very elaborate, took hold of my fancy and my eye in a way that none of the statuesque attitudes exhibited in the ballets at the opera-house, though so ostentatiously complex, had ever done. In a cottage kitchen, but panelled on the wall with dark wood, that from age and rubbing resembled oak, and looking more like a rustic hall of entrance than a kitchen, stood the Malay, his turban and loose trousers of dingy white relieved upon the dark panelling; he had placed himself nearer to the girl than she seemed to relish, though her native spirit of mountain intrepidity contended with the feeling of simple awe which her countenance expressed, as she gazed upon the tiger-cat before her. And a more striking picture there could not be imagined, than the beautiful English face of the girl, and its exquisite fairness, together with her erect and independent attitude, contrasted

with the sallow and bilious skin of the Malay, enamelled or veneered with mahogany by marine air, his small, fierce, restless eyes, thin lips, slavish gestures, and adorations. Half hidden by the ferocious-looking Malay, was a little child from a neighbouring cottage, who had crept in after him, and was now in the act of reverting its head and gazing upwards at the turban and the fiery eyes beneath it, whilst with one hand he caught at the dress of the young woman for protection.

My knowledge of the Oriental tongues is not remarkably extensive, being, indeed, confined to two words, the Arabic word for barley, and the Turkish for opium (madjoon), which I have learnt from Anastasius. And, as I had neither a Malay dictionary, nor even Adelung's Mithridates, which might have helped me to a few words, I addressed him in some lines from the Iliad; considering that, of such language as I possessed, the Greek, in point of longitude, came geographically nearest to an Oriental one. He worshipped me in a devout manner, and replied in what I suppose was Malay. In this way I saved my reputation with my neighbours; for the Malay had no means of betraying the secret. He lay down upon the floor for about an hour, and then pursued his journey. On his departure, I presented him with a piece of opium. To him, as an Orientalist, I concluded that opium must be familiar, and the expression of his face convinced me that it was. Nevertheless, I was struck with some little consternation when I saw him suddenly raise his hand to his mouth, and (in the school-boy phrase) bolt the whole, divided into three pieces, at one mouthful. The quantity was enough to kill three dragoons and their horses, and I felt some alarm for the poor creature; but what could be done? I had given him the opium in compassion for his solitary life, on recollecting that, if he had travelled on foot from London, it must be nearly three weeks since he could have exchanged a thought with any human being. I could not think of violating the laws of hospitality by having him seized and drenched with an emetic, and thus frightening him into a notion that we were going to sacrifice him to some English idol. No; there was clearly no help for it. He took his leave, and for some days I felt anxious; but, as I never heard of any Malay being found dead, I became convinced that he was used to opium, and that I must have done him the service I designed, by giving him one night of respite from the pains of wandering.