Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 2: being The Biographical Supplement of Coleridge's Biographia LiterariaColeridge, Samuel Taylor
General
Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 2: being The Biographical Supplement of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834 -- Correspondence
[Coleridge and Wordsworth, who, as we have seen, had had a serious
estrangement in 1810, but gradually drew together again with the
softening of the years, went on tour to the Rhine in 1828; and this was
Coleridge's third time on the Continent. On their way they met Thomas
Colley Grattan, novelist and miscellaneous writer. He gave in his
_Beaten Paths_ some account of the two poets as they appeared at the
time--partly reproduced in Knight's _Life of Wordsworth_. This passage
is the best description of the two poets in their later period and the
most reliable, along with Clement Carlyon's description of Coleridge in
Germany. There is no attempt in Grattan to spin rhetoric out of
Coleridge, such as we find in De Quincey, Hazlitt, and Carlyle. Another
diarist gave a picture of the poets during the Rhine Tour, Julian
Charles Young, who wrote the memoir of his brother, Charles Mayne Young,
an actor of the time. This account is also partly reproduced in Knight's
_Life of Wordsworth_. Grattan says: "He was about five feet five[143]
inches in height, of a full and lazy appearance but not actually stout.
He was dressed in black, and wore short breeches, buttoned and tied at
the knees, and black silk stockings. And in his costume (the same that
he describes to have been worn in his earliest voyages and travels in
the year 1798), he worked along, in public coaches or barges, giving
the idea of his original profession, an itinerant preacher. His face was
extremely handsome, its expression placid and benevolent. His mouth was
particularly pleasing, and his grey eyes, neither large nor prominent,
were full of intelligent softness. His hair, of which he had plenty, was
entirely white. His forehead and cheeks were unfurrowed and the latter
showed a healthy bloom" (_Beaten Paths_, ii, 108-109). On all topics
touched by Coleridge he said something to be remembered. "In almost
everything that fell from Coleridge there was a dash of deep
philosophy--even in the outpourings of his egotism--touches not to be
given without the whole of what they illustrated" (_Beaten Paths_, ii,
113). "Coleridge took evident delight in rural scenes. He was in
ecstasies at a group of haymakers in a field we passed. He said the
little girls, standing with their rakes, the handles resting on the
ground, 'looked like little saints.' Half-a-dozen dust-covered children
going by the roadside, with a garland of roses raised above their heads,
threw him into raptures" (_Beaten Paths_, ii, 115).
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