Pages from a Journal with Other Papers eBook

ghost story.  From the very first we feel that the Superior Powers are against this match, and that it will be cursed.  The beginning of the curse lies far back in the hereditary temper of the Ravenswoods, in the intrigues of the Ashtons, and in the feuds of the times.  When Love intervenes we discover in an instant that he is not sent by the gods to bring peace, but that he is the awful instrument of destruction.  The spectral appearance of Alice at the hour of her departure, on the very spot “on which Lucy Ashton had reclined listening to the fatal tale of woe . . . holding up her shrivelled hand as if to prevent his coming more near,” is necessary in order to intimate that the interdict is pronounced not by a mortal human being but by a dread, supernal authority.

SEPTEMBER, 1798.  “THE LYRICAL BALLADS.”

The year 1798 was a year of great excitement:  England was alone in the struggle against Buonaparte; the mutiny at the Nore had only just been quelled:  the 3 per cent.  Consols had been marked at 49 or 50; the Gazettes were occupied with accounts of bloody captures of French ships; Ireland may be said to have been in rebellion, and horrible murders were committed there; the King sent a message to Parliament telling it that an invasion might be expected and that it was to be assisted by “incendiaries” at home; and the Archbishop of Canterbury and eleven bishops passed a resolution declaring that if the French should land, or a dangerous insurrection should break out, it would be the duty of the clergy to take up arms against an enemy whom the Bishop of Rochester described as “instigated by that desperate malignity against the Faith he has abandoned, which in all ages has marked the horrible character of the vile apostate.”

In the midst of this raving political excitement three human beings were to be found who although they were certainly not unmoved by it, were able to detach themselves from it when they pleased, and to seclude themselves in a privacy impenetrable even to an echo of the tumult around them.

In April or May, 1798, the Nightingale was written, and these are the sights and sounds which were then in young Coleridge’s eyes and ears:-

“No cloud, no relique of the sunken day
Distinguishes the West, no long thin slip
Of sullen light, no obscure trembling hues. 
Come, we will rest on this old mossy bridge! 
You see the glimmer of the stream beneath,
But hear no murmuring:  it flows silently,
O’er its soft bed of verdure.  All is still,
A balmy night! and tho’ the stars be dim,
Yet let us think upon the vernal showers
That gladden the green earth, and we shall find
A pleasure in the dimness of the stars.”

We happen also to have Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal for April and May. 
Here are a few extracts from it:-

April 6th.—­“Went a part of the way home with Coleridge. . . .  The spring still advancing very slowly.  The horse-chestnuts budding, and the hedgerows beginning to look green, but nothing fully expanded.”