Chapter LXXVI COLERIDGE AND SOUTHEY—­SUNSHINE AND SHADOW

LONG before Wordsworth closed his eyes on this world, Coleridge, in some ways a greater poet than his friend, had gone to his last rest.  Wordsworth had a happy, loving understanding of the little things of real life.  He had an “exquisite regard for common things,” but his words have seldom the glamour, the something which we cannot put into words which makes us see beyond things seen.  This Coleridge had.  It is not only his magic of words, it is this trembling touch upon the unknown, the unearthly beauty and sadness of which he makes us conscious in his poems that marks him as great.

And yet all that Coleridge has left us which reaches the very highest is very little.  But as has been said, “No English poet can be put above Coleridge when only quality and not quantity is demanded."* Of The Ancient Mariner I have already told you, although perhaps it is too full of fearsomeness for you to read yet.  Next to it stands Christabel, which is unfinished.  It is too full of mysterious glamour to translate into mere prose, so I will not try to tell the story, but here are a few lines which are very often quoted—­

Stainsbury.

    “Alas! they had been friends in youth;
    But whispering tongues can poison truth;
    And Constancy lives in realms above;
    And Life is thorny; and Youth is vain;
    And to be wroth with one we love,
    Doth work like madness in the brain. 
    And thus it chanced, as I divine,
    With Roland and Sir Leoline. 
    Each spake words of high disdain
    And insult to his heart’s best brother: 
    They parted—­ne’er to meet again! 
    But never either found another
     To free the hollow heart from paining;
    They stood aloof, the scars remaining,
    Like cliff’s which had been rent asunder;
    A dreary sea now flows between;—­
    But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
    Shall wholly do away, I ween,
    The marks of that which once had been.”

Coleridge’s singing time was short.  All his best poetry had been written before he went to live at Keswick.  There his health, which had never been good, gave way.  Unhappy in his home, and racked with bodily pain, he at length began to use opium in order to find relief.  The habit to which he soon became a slave made shipwreck of his life.  He had always been unstable of purpose and weak of will, never keeping to one course long.  He had tried journalism, he tried lecturing, he planned books which were never written.  His life was a record of beginnings.  As each new plan failed he yielded easily to the temptation of living on his friends.  He had always been restless in mind.  He left his home, and after wanderings now here now there, he at length found a home in London with kind, understanding friends.  Of him here we have a