Coleridges Ancient Mariner and Select Poems | Page 8

note to "We Are Seven") and by Coleridge (in the Biographia
Literaria, chap. xiv.). At first, they were to collaborate in writing a poem the proceeds of
which should pay the expenses of a little tour they were making when the plan was
thought of, in November, 1797; and thus "The Ancient Mariner" was begun. As this
poem grew under Coleridge's "shaping-spirit of imagination" Wordsworth saw that he
"could only be a clog" upon its progress, and it was resigned to Coleridge. The plan was
then enlarged to include a volume illustrating "two cardinal points of poetry, the power of
exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the
power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination."
Wordsworth was to illustrate the former principle, Coleridge the latter, and the proceeds
of the book were to go toward the expenses of a trip to Germany, decided on in the spring
of 1798. The bulk of the volume was Wordsworth's, and was typically Wordsworthian,

ranging from such simple ballads of humble incident as "Goody Blake" and "The Idiot
Boy" to the magnificent blank verse of "Tintern Abbey"; Coleridge's share consisted of a
brief poem called "The Nightingale," two short extracts from "Osorio," and "The Rime of
the Ancyent Marinere."
Apart from the "Lyrical Ballads" Coleridge conceived and finished between June, 1797,
and the departure for Germany in 1798, and published in the latter year, "Fire, Famine,
and Slaughter," "Frost at Midnight," "Fears in Solitude," and "France." He conceived and
partly executed, but did not then publish, "Christabel," "Kubla Khan," "Love," "The
Ballad of the Dark Ladie," and "The Three Graves." Thus, all Coleridge's best poetry,
with the exception of those three saddest of voices out of a broken life, "Dejection"
(1802), the lines to Wordsworth on hearing him read "The Prelude" (1807), and "Youth
and Age" (1823-32), belongs either wholly or in its inception to the year of his fellowship
with the Wordsworths in the Quantock Hills.
Of his political, religious, and literary opinions at this time he has left a fairly adequate
account in his published writings and his correspondence, especially in the Biographia
Literaria and in the letter to the Rev. George Coleridge referred to above. The first year
of his married life saw him still, in spite of the failure of Pantisocracy, an eager visionary
reformer upborne by generous enthusiasm and ardent religious feeling. "O! never can I
remember those days," he wrote in the Biographia, "with either shame or regret. For I
was most sincere, most disinterested! My opinions were indeed in many and most
important points erroneous; but my heart was single. Wealth, rank, life itself, then
seemed cheap to me, compared with the interest of (what I believed to be) the truth, and
the will of my Maker." However much he may have consorted with unbelievers like
Thelwall and distressed his good brother George by his heterodoxy, he was by nature
deeply religious. He tried in his letters to recover Thelwall from his "atheism," though he
heartily approved a sentiment expressed by the latter: "He who thinks and feels will be
virtuous; and he who is absorbed in self will be vicious, whatever may be his speculative
opinions." Godwin's system of "Justice," with its soulless logic, he abhorred. He preached
often in Unitarian churches. To young Hazlitt, who heard him preach in January, 1798,
from the text "And He went up into the mountain to pray, Himself, alone," it seemed "as
if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer might
have floated in solemn silence through the universe." In politics he was, when he went to
Stowey, "almost equidistant from all the three prominent parties, the Pittites, the Foxites,
and the Democrats"; he was "a vehement anti-ministerialist, but after the invasion of
Switzerland, a more vehement anti-Gallican [see the last two stanzas of "France"], and
still more intensely an anti-Jacobin." Under Wordsworth's influence his thoughts turned
in great measure from contemporary politics to more fundamental matters. Always his
poetry had been the utterance of his essential being. "I feel strongly and I think strongly,"
he wrote to Thelwall in 1796, "but I seldom feel without thinking or think without feeling.
Hence, though my poetry has in general a hue of tenderness or passion over it, yet it
seldom exhibits unmixed and simple tenderness and passion. My philosophical opinions
are blended with or deduced from my feelings." Wordsworth gave his feelings a new
object and his philosophy a higher aim. In April of the second year at Stowey, in the
letter to his brother already quoted, Coleridge wrote: "I have for some time past
withdrawn myself totally from the consideration of
immediate causes, which are

infinitely complex