able to trace the spring and early summer of Alfoxden with you, and that wherever your after residence may be, it is probable that you will be within the reach of my tether, lengthened as it now is."* By going back to Stowey, Coleridge could renew his intimacy with Wordsworth, and how often they met, how the lives and interests of the Wordsworth household were identified with his, during the next four months, Dorothy's Journal is the best evidence. Coleridge said of them, We are three people, but only one soul." This Journalwhich, from the end of January to the beginning of May will be printed almost in its entirety--requires little comment; and it renders any description of the district by another pen worse than useless. Some persons will doubtless wish that Dorothy had written fewer trivial details, and given us instead an ampler record of the talk of the most brilliant conversationalist of the century, especially during that annus mirabilis, in which he and her brother walked so much together, and planned and wrote the Lyrical Ballads in concert. But it must be remembered, first, that she jotted down these humble memoranda merely as aids to her memory, and without the faintest idea that they would ever see the light; and secondly, that it was almost impossible to record Coleridge's talk. Wordsworth himself described it as "like a majestic river, the sound or sight of whose course you caught at intervals; which was sometimes concealed by forests, sometimes lost in sand; then came flashing out broad and distinct; and even when it took a turn which your eye could not follow, yet you always felt and knew that there was a connection in its parts, and that it was the same river." It is not at all likely that the discussions of these two friends turned to the politics of the day, * See Memoirs, vol. i., p. 116. nearly so much as to Nature, and to the very things that Dorothy, in her own characteristic way, so directly, naïvely, and laconically sets down. Coleridge, in the Biographia Literaria,—speaking of his residence at Stowey, of what he gained from Wordsworth, and of his reverence for him as a poet, a philosopher, and a man, adds," his conversation extended to almost all subjects, except physics and politics; with the latter he never troubled himself." Besides, on politics the two men were slowly drifting asunder, while their poetic work still ran in parallel lines. Mr Nichol's remark on the difference between them is excellent—" No two men could be more unlike than the poets who now met beside the Quantocks. Coleridge, a student and recluse from his boyhood, of immense erudition, a heluo librorum; all his life a valetudinarian, who scarcely knew what health was-ever planning mighty works-multa et pulcra minans—yet so irresolute and infirm of purpose, as never to realise his aspirations-the very Hamlet of literature; Wordsworth, on the other hand, as robust in body as one of the peasants of his native Cumberland, of indomitable purpose, keeping his way right onward when made the scorn of fools, till he became the glory of his age-was no reader of books, except of the great book of Nature, and his study was on the Quantock downs. In addition to its allusions to Coleridge, Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal will be appreciated by many, from the very minuteness of its record, its notes on the gradual changes of the seasons as the months advanced, and even its homely domestic and economic jottings. * The Quantocks, and their Associations. CHAPTER IX. DOROTHY WORDSWORTH'S JOURNAL, WRITTEN AT ALFOXDEN IN 1798. THE following chapter contains the larger part of the Journal which Dorothy Wordsworth kept, of her own and her brother's daily life at Alfoxden, during the first four months of 1798. Many trivial details are omitted, and if any that are recorded are thought too trivial for preservation, it will be seen that this Journal brings out, in a way that nothing else could do, the closeness of the tie between Coleridge and the Wordsworth household. It is probable that during these Alfoxden days Dorothy Wordsworth "maintained," for Coleridge as well as for her brother,a saving intercourse with his true self." If she did not give him eyes," and "give him ears," she kept him,—during their conversations in the woods and coombes of the Quantocks, and on the road to Stowey,-true to his vocation as a poet. Had it not been for Alfoxden, and the magnet that drew him thither in all weathers in 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge might have drifted away from "Lyrical Ballads," into popular preaching, and miscellaneous newspaper writing, for many a year to come. tr "Alfoxden, 20th January 1798.-The green paths down the hill-sides are channels for streams. The young wheat is streaked by silver lines of water running between the ridges, the sheep are gathered together on the slopes. After the wet dark days, the country seems more populous. It peoples itself in the sunbeams. The garden, mimic of spring, is gay with flowers. The purple-starred hepatica spreads. itself in the sun, and the clustering snow-drops put forth their white heads, at first upright, ribbed with green, and like a rosebud when completely opened, hanging their heads downwards, but slowly lengthening their slender stems. The slanting woods of an unvarying brown, showing the light through the thin net-work of their upper boughs. Upon the highest ridge of that round hill covered with planted oaks, the shafts of the trees show in the light like the columns of a ruin. " 21st.—Walked on the hill-tops-a warm day. Sate under the firs in the park. The tops of the beeches of a brown-red or crimson; those oaks fanned by the sea breeze thick with feathery sea-green moss, as a grove not stripped of its leaves. Moss cups more proper than acorns for fairy goblets. The ivy "22nd.-Walked through the wood to Holford. twisting round the oaks like bristled serpents. The day cold-a warm shelter in the hollies, capriciously bearing berries. Query: Are the male and female flowers on separate trees? "23rd.-Bright sunshine. I went out at three o'clock. The sea perfectly calm blue, streaked with deeper colour by the clouds, and tongues or points of sand; on our return of a gloomy red. The sun gone down. The crescent moon, Jupiter, and Venus. The sound of the sea distinctly heard on the tops of the hills, which we could never hear in summer. We attribute this partly to the bareness of the trees, but chiefly to the absence of the singing of birds, the hum of insects, that noiseless noise which lives in the summer air. * The villages marked out by beautiful beds of smoke. * Compare Keats There crept A little noiseless noise amongst the leaves —(Miscellaneous Poems.) : The turf fading into the mountain road. The scarlet flowers of the moss. "24th.-Walked between half-past three and half-past five. The evening cold and clear. The sea of a sober grey, streaked by the deeper grey clouds. The half dead sound of the near sheep-bell, in the hollow of the sloping coombe, exquisitely soothing. "25th.-Went to Poole's after tea. The sky spread over with one continuous cloud, whitened by the light of the moon, which, though her dim shape was seen, did not throw forth so strong a light as to chequer the earth with shadows. At once the clouds seemed to cleave asunder, and left her in the centre of a black-blue vault. She sailed along, followed by multitudes of stars, small, and bright, and sharp. Their brightness seemed concentrated. "26th.-Walked upon the hill-tops; followed the sheep tracks till we overlooked the larger coombe. Sat in the sunshine. The distant sheep-bells, the sound of the stream; the woodman winding along the half-marked road with his laden pony; locks of wool still spangled with the dewdrops; the blue-grey sea shaded with immense masses of cloud, not streaked; the sheep glittering in the sunshine. Returned through the wood. The trees skirting the wood, being exposed more directly to the action of the sea breeze, stripped of the net-work of their upper boughs, which are stiff and erect and like black skeletons; the ground strewed with the red berries of the holly. Set forward before two o'clock. Returned a little after four. "27th.-Walked from seven o'clock till half-past eight. Upon the whole an uninteresting evening. Only once while we were in the wood the moon burst through the And Coleridge The stilly murmur of the distant sea Tells us of silence.-(The Eolian Harp.) |