Coleridge and Southey in Bristol, 1795

The association of Coleridge and the two Wordsworths in Somerset has been closely examined and frequently celebrated.  But before Coleridge met Wordsworth he ran into Southey by chance in Oxford; and the consequences of that meeting were nothing if not fateful.  Pantisocracy, the child of Southey’s dreaming and the nucleus of the collaboration of 1795, has so often been discussed with indulgent condescension that the Bristol period has to some degree escaped serious attention.  Yet both Southey and Coleridge bear weighty testimony, at the time and later, that that conjunction of their orbits was crucial; and if their letters of the period are sometimes light-headed or pompous there is no suggestion of trifling.  ‘Our names are written in the book of destiny, on the same page’, Southey writes in February 1795; and in July, ‘[this last] twelvemonth...has improved my head & heart whatever effect it may have had on my happiness’.  In 1804 Southey said that their first meeting ‘decided the destiny of both’, and on the occasion of Coleridge’s death that ‘from that meeting the course of my life received its bias’.[1]  Southey spoke then with deeper truth perhaps than he himself knew.  Coleridge’s references to the meeting are rarer, more guarded, more agonized.  A letter to Morgan in 1808 gives some indication of the range of the effect upon himself: ‘O had I health and youth and were what I once was – but I played the fool and cut the throat of my own happiness, of my own genius, of my utility, in compliment to the merest phantom of over-strained honor – O Southey, Southey, what an unthinking man were you, and an unjust!’[2]

With the tragic consequences of that meeting, and with the rights and wrongs of their relationship, we are not here concerned.  Such autobiographical accounts as Southey and Coleridge have left stop short of the Bristol period or pass it over in silence, leaving the period lightly documented.  But in addition to the Gutch Memorandum Book a single document, spanning the whole period, has survived – the bare laconic record of their borrowings from the Bristol Library Society, starting before the two men first met and continuing beyond their first separation and the creation of Coleridge’s three great Stowey poems.[3]  Completely to unravel all the implications of the Bristol Library borrowings would involve a biographical reconstruction far beyond the limit of the years 1793 to 1798, and the repetition of much of the work of Haller and Simmons, Dykes Campbell, Lowes, and Lawrence Hanson.[4]  Because the months of the Bristol collaboration remain confused in detail and indistinct in outline I wish to evince from that single document details to clarify some biographical problems and to throw light upon the poetical development of the two men.

I

Southey’s first recorded borrowing from the Bristol Library Society is entered for 22 October 1793.  Between that date and the following June, when he first met Coleridge, twenty entries (of which only one is in his own hand) appear for Southey in the Library register.  ‘At that time’, he noted later, ‘I was a verbatim reader of indefatigable patience.’[5]  During those eight months we can follow his conscientious, methodical reading – history and topography, Headley’s Ancient English Poetry, Homer and Theocritus in translation, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Godwin’s Political Justice, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman; but first of all Enfield’s History of Philosophy of which we shall have more to say presently.  Behind this orderly list we see clearly an earnest young man whose ‘mimosa sensibility’ was as much disturbed by the stinging political and social issues of his day as by the more theoretical problems which cast their shadow in front of his facile poetic quill.  Then in the middle of June 1794 he meets Coleridge in Oxford, and the centre of gravity in his reading immediately shifts although the patient method is not noticeably disturbed.  After Coleridge arrived in Bristol to take up permanent residence in January 1795, the pattern of Southey’s list disintegrates and reveals the outline of the joint pursuits to which they then addressed themselves.  Indeed, between March and June 1795 the borrowings of the two cannot be disentangled with any certainty.  In the middle of June 1795 an abrupt break occurs in Southey’s borrowings.  Thereafter he made only three entries in the Register; and these are the seeds of fresh poems as he withdrew irrevocably from the Pantisocratic dream which had first brought him into collaboration with Coleridge.

Lowes’s The Road to Xanadu has made familiar the pattern, method, and creative penetration of Coleridge’s reading.  But his concentration upon the curiosity and range of Coleridge’s reading between 1795 and 1798 has thrown into the background the range and curiosity of Southey’s reading: it has also tended to conceal the importance of Southey’s early influence upon Coleridge.[6]  Taking his departure from much less bookish surroundings than Coleridge’s, Southey was already in 1794 a helluo librorum in his own right.  His account (written in 1823) of discovering Gerusalemme Liberata, Orlando Furioso, and The Faerie Queene reads like a passage from The Road to Xanadu;[7] and even if the four large published volumes of Southey’s Commonplace Book look a little too much like the work-books of  professional polymath, they reflect ‘an hydroptic, immoderate thirst of human learning’ comparable with Coleridge’s.[8]  The history of their boyhood reading is strikingly similar.  For a time in early manhood their reading was nearly identical.  But the men were temperamentally different, their education was different, and the poetry which grew out of the Bristol reading was very different.  Haller’s conclusion about Southey is just, and precludes the notion that reading of a certain kind can produce poetry of a certain kind: ‘He remained always in the tragic position of the man who, within his limitations, has left nothing undone that he can do to be a very great poet, and lacks nothing necessary for being one except genius.’[9]

Wordsworth, despite his later inflexibility, responded creatively in his early association with Coleridge: Southey did not.  In October 1795 Southey acknowledged that his ‘poetical taste was much meliorated by Bowles, and the constant company of Coleridge’;[10] but he resisted the more profound creative influence of Coleridge with a firmness approaching the obtuse.  Despite his acute sensibility and wide-ranging interests, Southey’s moral rectitude – rapidly hardening throughout these months to 1795 – made him rigid, opaque, and intolerant; and not even the impact of Coleridge’s mercurial ebullience could work a sea-change in him.[11]

The incompatibility of Southey and Coleridge has not escaped attention; but usually it has been examined, at this period, in the light of the external crises arising from Pantisocracy and Coleridge’s engagement to Sarah Fricker.[12]  But Pantisocracy simply became the battle-ground over which their fundamental incompatibility was fought out.  Pantisocracy needed money: this need threw them upon their only resource – their pens.  Their active literary collaboration lasted for little more than six months.  But during that period they wrote together and shared each other’s books.  If we compare the two men at the intellectual and imaginative level we see that disagreement would arise as quickly and inevitably as between Van Gogh and Gauguin.  And the library record of the raw materials for their collaboration bears testimony enough to the centrifugal forces which, from the very beginning, threatened to destroy a delicate balance of divergent personalities – a balance which could probably not have been achieved at all without some specific and practical enthusiasm like Pantisocracy.

A mere glance at the two lists of borrowings suggests the nature of the difference between the two men; and the difference is not simply that between a methodical and an immethodical man, for Coleridge had his method too, esoteric it may be but well worth discovering.  Closer scrutiny of two items shows the difference more clearly and suggests the sort of disagreements which, magnified by proximity, soon became intolerable to both.

In October 1793 Southey borrowed and read Enfield’s History of Philosophy (Borrowings 1, 2).  At the end of a high-spirited letter to Bedford, Southey writes self-consciously (26 October 1793): ‘You must not be surprised at nonsense, for I have been reading the history of philosophy, the ideas of Plato, the logic of Aristotle, and the heterogeneous dogmas of Pythagoras, Antisthenes, Zeno, Epicurus, and Pyrrho, till I have metaphysicized away all my senses.’[13]  Southey, with disturbed and indifferent schooling, was largely self-taught; if Oxford gave him better opportunities for self-education it did not provide him with a mentor to stretch and stimulate his mind.  He suffered from uncertainty, moral, social, and intellectual.  There was nothing in his mental history to help him to distinguish between a history of philosophy and philosophy itself.  With no philosophical bent either natural or acquired, he was not to borrow any single work of formal philosophy during the three years he used the Bristol Library – if we except Godwin’s Political Justice and Hartley On Man.  On 12 June 1796 we find him forswearing metaphysics and claiming to be able to prove that ‘all the material and necessarian controversies [are] “much ado about nothing”’.  Whether or not Southey was wise so to neglect philosophy, and whether or not Coleridge was wise to become so engrossed with it, we are not here concerned to inquire.  At very least Southey’s impatience of philosophy became the keystone of the dyspathy which was soon to separate the two poets.

When Coleridge first met Southey he already had behind him a long history of arduous schooling and some strenuous if sporadic scholarship; and, on Lamb’s word as well as Coleridge’s, he was already firmly set in that ‘habit of abstruse research’ which he later came to regard as one of the causes of his undoing as a poet.  In 1794 and 1795 Coleridge, somewhat versed in academic philosophy and radical thought, and with an incurable flair for philosophical disquisition, was beginning to feel the power of his mind and the stir of his imagination.  The ‘inspired charity-boy’ had reason to feel self-assured.  But from that self-assurance grew the restless idiosyncrasy which Southey distrusted, and the condescending arrogance against which Lamb was soon to revolt.[14]  But we must also remember Coleridge’s remarkable maturity; that late in 1797 he was to tackle, single-handed by letter, the radical atheist Thelwall, thereby converting to Christianity Thelwall, and as a by-product Godwin.

Coleridge’s reaction to Enfield’s History of Philosophy is interesting.  In March 1795 he borrowed volume i, kept it for ten days, and did not continue with the second (Borrowing 43).  Two years later he turned to the original of which Enfield was an abridgement, Brücker’s two-volume Historia Critica Philosophiae (Borrowings 93, 94) – possibly the first concrete example of that habit of verifying originals which Lowes has emphasized.  As far as I can discover Coleridge made no comment upon either Enfield or Brücker as early as 1797.  Early in 1800, discussing with Southey as projected ‘History of Levellers’, he recommends Brücker with reservations.[15]  But in 1815, writing of his plans for the Logosophia, he makes a remark which may have germinated as early as 1797: ‘A perspicuous compendium of the Hist. of Phil. has been long wanted: for Enfield’s is a mere Booksellers Job Abridgement of Brucker, a man of great learning and unwearied industry, but scantily gifted with the true philosophical instinct’.[16]  The Logosophia with its introductory history of philosophy was never completed.  But the Philosophical Lectures of 1818-19 take a magnificent stride towards a history of philosophy which shall be more than ‘collections of sentences and extracts, formed into separate groups under the several names, and taken (at first or second hand) from the several writings of individual philosophers, with no principle of arrangement, with no method, and therefore without unity and without progress or completion’.[17]  Whitehead has observed that disagreement is not a disaster; it is an opportunity for discovery.  Can it be that arguments with Southey in the College Street lodgings came to fulfilment after more than twenty years in the Philosophical Lectures?

For we catch a glimpse of Southey and Coleridge in their lodgings, with the shadows of Lovell and Burnett in the background.  ‘Coleridge goes to work like a hound’, Southey wrote in 1810, ‘nosing his way, turning, and twisting, and winding and doubling, till you get weary with following the mazy movements.  My way is, when I see my object, to dart at it like a greyhound.’[18]  ‘The truth is’, wrote Coleridge in November 1795, ‘you sat down and wrote; I used to saunter about and think what I should write.  And we ought to appreciate our comparative industry by the quantum of mental exertion, not the particular mode of it – by the number of thoughts collected, not by the number of lines through which these thoughts are diffused.’[19]  No doubt the mazy movements of Coleridge’s mind could be maddening beyond endurance.  But the difference between the two men was not simply a divergence of interests nor the gap of two years between their ages.  Southey’s greyhound directness assumed too abstract a view of the distinctness of an imaginative ‘object’: he never experienced, he never quite understood, that working of the imagination, which ‘dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate’.

II

The point of greatest interest in the Bristol association of Southey and Coleridge is their concern with that crucial problem for the poet – the symbolic transmutation of experience.  Both were acutely aware of the problem and tackled it, theoretically and practically, with determined energy.  Again we see clearly the divergence of the two minds; but Southey makes a contribution here which has not, I think, been previously recognized, and which goes far to justify Southey’s claim of October 1795 that ‘[Coleridge] did me much good – I him more’.[20]

Southey, I suggest, stimulated Coleridge’s interest in the poetic possibilities of travel literature and the twilight materials of nascent science.

Even since the emergence of the English novel, travel literature had been the staple of light reading.  Explorations were going ahead and accounts of them, both written and verbal, were actively current, adding to the older stores laid up by Hakluyt and Purchas.[21]  Mr. Blunden has drawn attention to the Christ’s Hospital custom of improvising tales of travel and adventure, presumably on the pattern of Defoe and his imitators.[22]  And Coleridge, who could see from the dormer window of his Bristol lodgings the masts of ships – slavers, merchantmen, and men-of-war – lying in the pools and at the wharves of the second seaport of England, cannot but have been stirred by the fabulous currents that crossed the sea-walls.  Southey, then, can scarcely be said to have introduced Coleridge to the literature of travel.[23]  But when did Coleridge begin to recognize the poetic possibilities of such material?  Admittedly there are sea-images in his contributions to Boyer’s Liber Aureus; but they are stereotyped and show no sign of taking on that peculiar fire with which Coleridge was soon to endow his poetic images.

The details of Coleridge’s early reading of travel literature are far from clear.  In an undated letter of 1794 he says that, in preparation for the Pantisocratic venture, ‘The minutiae of topographical information we are daily endeavouring to acquire’.[24]  The Bristol Library registers do not, however, reflect any very determined effort in this direction.  Coleridge had other sources of books, no doubt; Haller, Lowes, and Lane Cooper have recovered a few details, but much of it is conjectural and most of it late.  Before 1797 the Library registers assign very few works of travel to Coleridge: one work on the slave trade and two on the West African and West Indian Colonies (Borrowings 61, 64, 49), and two of these are clearly connected with his lecture on the Slave Trade. Benyovsky’s Memoirs (Borrowing 98) was read in December 1797 specifically for the abortive ‘Siberian Exiles’.  Lowes has shown something of the importance of Anthologia Hibernica, the Manchester Memoirs, and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (Borrowings 76, 104, 105); but these were all late readings, and incidentally contain much more germinal material than Lowes discusses – material reaching out into other regions than the three great poems.  Three travel books of importance to The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan – Bruce, Bartram, and Purchas – do not appear in the Bristol borrowings at all; and judging from the Gutch Memorandum Book Bartram turned up in Stowey and not in Bristol.[25]  Keate’s Pelew Islands makes its first specific appearance in a note to the 1796 edition of Poems on Various Subjects; but since Lee Boo appears in the original version of the poem ‘To a Young Lady’ Coleridge may have been reading Keate late in 1794 – after meeting Southey.[26]  All these outstanding items point to dates after meeting Southey, and most of them to dates after the break with Southey.

When did Coleridge start making creative use of such material?  If we except ‘The Mimic Morn Electric’ of the Sonnet to William Godwin (which owes much to his Cambridge favourite, Erasmus Darwin, and probably also to Thompson), and the long note on ‘Light from plants’ added to ‘Lines written at Shurton Bars’, the ‘footless birds of Paradise’ in ‘The Eolian Harp’ offer the first example of curious material glowing with the light of The Ancient Mariner.[27]  ‘The Eolian Harp’ was written on 20 August 1795.  There is nothing like it except for the anticipation of the Mariner’s sea-snakes in his contribution to Book II of Joan of Arc, written at about the same time.[28]

During the closing years of the eighteenth century Tasso, Ariosto and Dante, Gray, Ossian, and the Edda, northern themes and exotic materials, were with Milton solid constituents of the literary climate.  Wordsworth took a copy of Orlando Furioso on his walking tour in the Alps in 1791.  Everybody seemed to be sickening for epics: Joan of Arc was ‘An Epic Poem’, Joseph Cottle’s Alfred appeared in 1801 to the contemptuous delight of Lamb and Coleridge and even Coleridge himself laid portentous plans for an epic on the origin of evil.  As we watch the development of Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth we witness a poetic discovery – or more properly, rediscovery – no less dramatic and important than Chaucer’s trimming of sail in Anelide and Arcite as he discovers the method for Troilus and Criseyde.

Southey’s letters and Commonplace Book suggest that his reading of travel and topography was already extensive and curious before he met Coleridge: and we know that that reading had a specific poetic purpose in view.  During the Bristol period, and indeed for some time before and after, Southey was much concerned to revivify epic poetry by using exotic materials and mythologies.  At an early date Southey planned to use the northern materials he had glimpsed in Gray’s work, in Sayers’s Dramatic Sketches of Northern Mythology, and in Percy’s translation of Mallet’s Northern Antiquities.  The first book Southey ever bought for himself – in the autumn of 1792 after leaving Westminster – was Sayers’s Dramatic Sketches.[29]  Since the work of Gray and Collins, Sayers’s desire ‘of giving some slight idea of the neglected beauties of the Gothic religion, and of recommending a freer introduction of its imagery into the Poetry of the English nation’ can hardly be taken for an innovation.  But his notes, referring to the Edda, Mallet’s Northern Antiquities, the Asiatic Researches, and the like, are more suggestive than the Sketches themselves; and Sayers became the god of Southey’s idolatry.  In June 1794 Southey wrote that Sayers was ‘a man to whom I am more obliged for enlarging my views in poetry than to any author ancient or modern’.[30]  Sayers gave Southey the monodrama form;[31] he also left him with the fatal conviction that use of certain kinds of ‘poetic’ material may absolve the writer of the responsibility of being a poet.

It is impossible to imagine that Southey did not discuss these problems and enthusiasms with Coleridge as eagerly as he was later to discuss them with William Taylor.  There is even quite sound evidence for believing that he showed Sayers’s book to Coleridge.[32]  Coleridge seems to have responded at first, for we find on the third folio of the Gutch Memorandum Book the tentative note: ‘Jonas – a monodrama.’  But three months later he writes to Southey: ‘I detest monodramas, but I never wished to establish my judgment on the throne of critical despotism.’[33]  Southey no doubt clarified the problem for Coleridge by providing the resistance of argument.  But Coleridge has picked out the tiny fruitful seed; it will take time to come to flower, but when it does it will not be recognizable as owing anything to Sayers or to Southey.  Coleridge was working towards his own solution, by way of Gray, Collins and Young, Akenside, and Bowles, in his own poetry.  The theoretical exposition of it begins tentatively to take shape in his reviews of Gothic romances in the Critical Review (1794-8) as he approaches his theory of Dramatic Illusion.  He had plenty of opportunity to watch and test Southey’s theories while they worked together on Joan of Arc and criticized each other’s shorter poems.  The ‘shaping Spirit of Imagination’ was only just beginning to possess Coleridge; and the way to The Ancient Mariner was not marked out with theories.  Coleridge admired Southey’s early work at the time: not until much later did he see, with clear critical detachment, that Southey’s semi-didactic manipulation of exotic materials was ‘cold-blooded carpentry’ and a poetical failure.  Theoretical clarity was withheld until, in discussion with Wordsworth in 1799 and 1800, Coleridge meditated upon what had happened to him at Stowey and in the Quantocks.  Meanwhile his theory of poetry remained happily in suspension; and in the short but intimate collaboration in Bristol, as Coleridge acknowledged in Biographia Literaria, Southey was not the only debtor.

If Southey could contribute, he could not follow; his mind and imagination moved in a different orbit.  On 11 November 1797, two years after their first separation, Southey wrote from Portugal to his naval brother: ‘You are on the seas.  If at any time the morning or evening appearance of the water strikes you as singularly beautiful or strange, and you should not dislike to register the appearance, do keep some little log-book of this kind for me: tell its tints at sunrise and at sunset &c &c.’[34]  Two days later Coleridge set off with the Wordsworths on the walking tour which saw the birth of The Ancient Mariner.  In October of the next year Southey, blind to the range and magnitude of Coleridge’s success in solving the very problem with which Southey himself had struggled long and patiently, the problem which he undoubtedly helped Coleridge to clarify, reviewed Lyrical Ballads in the Critical Review.  Of The Ancient Mariner he wrote: ‘Many of the stanzas are laboriously beautiful; but in connection they are absurd and unintelligible...We do not sufficiently understand the story to analyze it.  It is a Dutch attempt at German sublimity.’[35]  It remained for Lamb two years later to write to Wordsworth the most penetrating contemporary comment upon that great poem – a comment which is still valid.[36]

III

The only means Southey and Coleridge had of financing their removal to America was their pens.  We shall not discuss here the details and peculiar intimacy of their poetic collaboration, but turn to a matter more lucrative for the Pantisocrats and more problematical for the biographer – the Bristol lectures of 1795.

The Library registers do not help to determine the date of Southey’s journey to fetch Coleridge from the ‘Angel’ inn in London to meet his obligations in Bristol.  We know from Southey’s letters that he had not left by 5 January 1795, and by that date apparently had no definite plan of going to London.  There are two gaps in his Library transactions – one of three weeks in January, and one of a month between January and February.  All we can do is accept the tradition that Coleridge arrived in Bristol towards the end of January 1795.  Soon after his arrival he started to lecture.

The details of the lectures given in Bristol by Coleridge and Southey have never been extricated, and recent biographers have been content to give a summary based on Cottle’s account, with the suggestion that Coleridge probably did not give as many lectures as Cottle says he did.[37]  It is seldom safe to accept Cottle’s evidence without question; yet the quantity of evidence he produces for the Bristol lectures and the dogmatic tone with which he offers it has tended to obscure the less voluminous but more reliable evidence of Coleridge and Southey themselves.  The problem of the Bristol Lectures is to decide how many of the lectures enumerated by Cottle were actually delivered.  Coleridge said that he gave eleven lectures; we shall bear this number in mind while we explore Cottle’s account in more detail.

All three of Coleridge’s first lectures were, according to Cottle, double lectures; and all three were published.  The first lecture – ‘written at one sitting between the hours of twelve at night and the Breakfast Time of the day, on which it was delivered’ – had to be published to meet a charge of treason, and appeared in February under the title A Moral and Political Lecture, delivered at Bristol.[38]  The lecture ‘On the Present War’ followed, and in November was printed with the first lecture under the title Conciones ad Populum.  The third lecture, The Plot Discovered, was printed separately in November 1795.[39]  Cottle dates the first lecture at the end of January, the second ‘the latter end of February’, but leaves the third indeterminate.  Coleridge’s Preface to Conciones, dated 16 November 1795, states that ‘The two following addresses were delivered in the month February, 1795, and were followed by six others in defence of natural and revealed religion’.  An undated letter to George Dyer, of the latter half of February, speaks of the delivery of three lectures and the printing of one of them.  If the first lecture was given in February (as Coleridge claimed), all three belong in February.  Coleridge’s Library borrowings, beginning on 2 March 1795, give no clues to the dates of these lectures.  A fourth lecture was projected, but was never delivered, possibly because of the attack of rheumatic fever mentioned in a second undated letter to George Dyer, written about 10 March just when Southey’s Historical Lectures were about to begin.

Cottle prints the Syllabus of Southey’s course of twelve Historical Lectures, with slight variations from the original and with no indication of dates.  A copy of the printed prospectus, with the date of each lecture, is preserved in the Bodleian Library.[40]  The lectures were delivered twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, starting on 14 March (Saturday) and ending officially on 21 April, but actually on 24 April through Coleridge’s failure to deliver the fourth lecture.  Southey’s borrowings, and to a certain extent Coleridge’s, run parallel to the subjects announced in the prospectus, but suggest that details were altered as the course developed.  These were Southey’s only Bristol lectures.  As it was, they absorbed so much time that on 9 May he writes: ‘My Lectures are finished and that very quietly.  I gave thirteen – and said bolder truths than any other Man in this country has yet ventured...My Lectures have occupied so much time that I have written little else.’[41]

It is convenient at this point to draw attention again to Coleridge’s statement in the letter of 13 November 1795 – that long, patient, and at times cold-blooded recitation of grievances which (if delivered normally) must have reached Southey on the eve of his wedding.  ‘My own lectures I wrote for myself, eleven in number, excepting a very few passages which most reluctantly you eked out for me.  And such pages!  I would not have suffered them to have stood in a lecture of yours.  To your lectures I dedicated my whole mind and heart, and wrote one half in quantity; but in quality you must be conscious that all the tug of brain was mine, and that your share was little more than transcription.’  This account may well be one-sided: but it is written to the only other person who really knew how the lectures had been prepared and there must be a good deal of truth in it.[42]  The most interesting detail is the acknowledged intimacy of their collaboration.  In July 1797 Southey claimed that his effort had been the greater in the Bristol collaboration: ‘I supported myself, and almost [Coleridge], I may say, for what my labours earned were as four to one.  I gave lectures, I wrote indefatigably...’[43]  But those words were not written to Coleridge, and they were written two years after the lectures had been given.  We must, then, try to discover which were Coleridge’s eleven lectures.

Cottle assigns far more than eleven lectures to Coleridge.  We have accounted for three in February.  If we follow Coleridge’s account in the Preface to Conciones rather than Cottle’s statement, we find that the next lectures were those ‘in defence of natural and revealed religion’.  Cottle reprints the prospectus of six lectures ‘on Revealed Religion, its Corruptions, and its Political Views’, but without dates.  These Theological Lectures won the friendship of John Prior Estlin, and in 1796 Coleridge considered preparing them for publication.[44]  The Library list shows that he was reading parallel to the syllabus between 13 April and about 11 June.  If we assume that Coleridge was not lecturing at the same time as Southey, and that the Theological Lectures were delivered once a week in the same way that he proposed to deliver his Political Lectures, the Theological Lectures would have started either on 28 April or on 5 May.

On 16 June Coleridge delivered a lecture on the Slave Trade: Cottle reprints the notice with the date.[45]  Cottle mentions a lecture on the Hair Power Tax but is vague about the date.  According to Cottle the substance of this lecture was repeated as a sermon in Bath in January 1796.[46]  E. H. Coleridge states (I know not on what authority) that a lecture on the Corn Laws was delivered in Bath, on a date not specified.[47]

We now have a total of eleven lectures delivered in Bristol: three in February, six in May-June, and two isolated ones – the Slave Trade and probably the Hair Powder Tax – in June.

Cottle mentions ‘three anti-Pittite lectures’, no date suggested: his memory may simply have duplicated the three double lectures of February which were very definitely anti-Pittite.  But more serious to account for is the course of six Political Lectures – on ‘a comparative view of the English Rebellion under Charles the First, and the French Revolution’.  Again Cottle reprints the prospectus.  A copy of this prospectus has been preserved.[48]  The lectures were to be delivered ‘once a week; on Tuesday Evenings’, starting on 23 June.  But the Library registers give no indication that Coleridge lectured at all after the Slave Trade lecture on 16 June.  Cottle’s statement that the Theological Lectures ‘succeeded’ the Political Lectures simply will not fit into the evidence unless his ‘Political Lectures’ are the three separate lectures delivered in February.  I suggest that the Political Lectures, despite the printed and dated prospectus, were cancelled at the last moment and were never delivered.[49]

IV

After Coleridge’s Library borrowings begin, library transactions occur several times for both men on the same date, though only twice do both sign their own entries on the same day (Borrowings 41-2, 47-8; 23 March, 13 April 1795).  Eleventh June is the last occasion on which entries appear for both on the same date.  Southey’s unsociability had been steadily increasing under the pressure of his love for Edith Fricker, his deepening anxiety for the fortunes of his own and the Fricker families.  His letters show that by the middle of May he was morose, solitary, exhausted, and perplexed, and that Coleridge was having to apply ‘the medicine of argument to [his] misanthropical system of indifference’.[50]  A heavy blow fell on 15 June, when Southey received a letter informing him that his friend Edmund Seward had died on 10 June:[51] the effect on him was such that he could vividly recall the incident more than twenty years later.  At the beginning of July he considered that ‘a man has no right to gloom a company with his melancholy feelings’; he hoped to be with Bedford in a fortnight but did not go.[52]  What little effort he could stir out of the dead-level of his apathy he devoted to Edith and Joan of Arc.  Meanwhile Coleridge was working on Joan of Arc, preparing his own and Southey’s poems for joint publication – a project which never matured though far advanced at the time of their quarrel – and no doubt nursing the dying fires of Pantisocracy, a difficult task in view of Southey’s silence and frequent absences.  On 20 August Coleridge rented the Clevedon cottage in anticipation of his marriage, and on the 22nd Southey writes with enthusiasm of the poems they have been preparing together.[53]  At about this time the storm, for weeks threatening, broke in Coleridge’s outraged surprise that Southey could even consider abandoning Pantisocracy in favour of an undertaking with his uncle.  The month drew on, perhaps waiting to see Joan of Arc, Book IV, through the press, perhaps in efforts at reconciliation.  But on 1 September Southey left 25 College Street for Bath, Burnett went home, and Coleridge may have moved to other lodgings.[54]

During the next two and a half months the two poets seldom met and relations were distinctly cool.  Coleridge married Sarah Fricker on 4 October and took his wife, with Burnett and Martha Fricker, on a Pantisocratic honeymoon to Clevedon.  Southey married Edith Fricker on 14 November and immediately set off for Portugal alone.  Coleridge’s long epitaph on Pantisocracy, written to Southey on 13 November, shows how serious that undertaking had been; and behind the cold indignation of the letter there are still many traces of justice and gentleness to show that their collaboration was based upon something more substantial than theoretical idealism.

Probably in September, Coleridge had met Wordsworth – the man whose poems he had read with approval in the summer of 1793, the poet beside whom Coleridge was letter to feel himself ‘a little man’.  Restless months of struggle with the twin giants, Bread and Cheese, were to pass before the fruition of the deep threefold friendship and the creation of inimitable poetry.  A rhythm – of action, gestation, creation, exhaustion – first manifested at Cambridge begins clearly to establish itself.  When he leaves Southey in Bristol, Coleridge is closing the second cycle of the mounting rhythm.  The third will begin at the turn of the year and carry him through a creative movement he was never to repeat.  Coleridge returned later to Bristol; to lecture, to be miserable, to be saved from despair by the devotion of his friends, to struggle with a broken will, a threatening obsession, a fading imagination.  When Southey left Bristol for Greta Hall in 1803 he said: ‘The place is haunted, and it is my wish never to see it again.’  For Coleridge, Bristol must always have remained haunted.  Christabel is charged with the fine tension of the annus mirabilis, set afire by the loving observation that could transmute images into symbols when ‘the Spring comes slowly up this way’.  But its single heart-felt cry of personal anguish recalls Southey, the creative excitement of their first friendship never to be recovered, the bitterness of first disenchantment.

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.

They stood aloof, the scars remaining,

Like cliffs 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 hath been.