The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: 1838Gillman, James
General
The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: 1838
Gillman, James
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834; Critics -- Great Britain -- Biography; Poets, English -- 19th century -- Biography
have what he can get,--a very laughable scene as you may suppose, of
awkwardness and agility, and failures on the very brink of success.
Now began a dance. The women danced very well, and, in general, I have
observed throughout Germany that the women in the lower ranks
degenerate far less from the ideal of a woman, than the men from that
of man. The dances were reels and waltzes; but chiefly the latter.
This dance is, in the higher circles, sufficiently voluptuous; but
here the emotions of it were far more faithful interpreters of the
passion, which, doubtless, the dance was intended to shadow; yet, ever
after the giddy round and round is over, they walked to music, the
woman laying her arm, with confident affection, on the man's
shoulders, or around his neck. The first couple at the waltzing was a
very fine tall girl, of two or three and twenty, in the full bloom and
growth of limb and feature, and a fellow with huge whiskers, a long
tail, and woollen night-cap; he was a soldier, and from the more than
usual glances of the girl, I presumed was her lover. He was, beyond
compare, the gallant and the dancer of the party. Next came two boors:
one of whom, in the whole contour of his face and person, and, above
all, in the laughably would-be frolicksome kick out of his heel,
irresistibly reminded me of Shakespeare's Slender, and the other of
his Dogberry. Oh! two such faces, and two such postures! O that I were
an Hogarth! What an enviable gift it is to have a genius in painting!
Their partners were pretty lasses, not so tall as the former, and
danced uncommonly light and airy. The fourth couple was a sweet girl
of about seventeen, delicately slender, and very prettily dressed,
with a full-blown rose in the white ribbon that went round her head,
and confined her reddish-brown hair; and her partner waltzed with a
pipe in his mouth, smoking all the while; and during the whole of this
voluptuous dance, his countenance was a fair personification of true
German phlegm. After these, but, I suppose, not actually belonging to
the party, a little ragged girl and ragged boy, with his stockings
about his heels, waltzed and danced;--waltzing and dancing in the rear
most entertainingly. But what most pleased me, was a little girl of
about three or four years old, certainly not more than four, who had
been put to watch a little babe, of not more than a year old (for one
of our party had asked), and who was just beginning to run away, the
girl teaching him to walk, and who was so animated by the music, that
she began to waltz with him, and the two babes whirled round and
round, hugging and kissing each other, as if the music had made them
mad. There were two fiddles and a bass viol. The fiddlers,--above all,
the bass violer,--most Hogarthian phizzes! God love them! I felt far
more affection for them than towards any other set of human beings I
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