RADICALISM IN CONTEMPORARY POETRY

A poet is the product of his time. Shelley observes that there is a resemblance, which does not depend on their own will, between the writers of any particular age. They are all subjected to a common influence “which arises out of a combination of circumstances belonging to the time in which they live, though each is in a degree the author of the very influence by which his being is thus pervaded.” Hence it is that the works of any poet cannot be thoroughly appreciated unless the spirit that pervaded the life of the period be understood. This is particularly true of the poetry of Shelley. It embodies the aspirations and ideals of the philosophers of his time. Its themes are liberty, justice and revolt. On every side are heard protests against conventionality, against government, and against religion. The philosophers of the French Revolution are hailed as the saviors of society and their theories put forth as a panacea for all human ills. Shelley is the high water mark of the waves of revolt which threatened to inundate the country. A brief investigation, then, of the poetical atmosphere of the end of the eighteenth century will help us in our study of the sources of his radicalism.

There can be no doubt but contemporary literature had some influence on his sensitive nature. “The writings of the future laureate (Southey) as likewise of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and Landor’s Gehir were among those for which Shelley in early youth had a particular predilection.”[168] Since the influence of Southey soon began to decline on account of his fulsome praise of George III, we shall confine our attention to Wordsworth and Coleridge. “One word in candor,” Shelley writes, “on the manner in which the study of contemporary writing may have modified my composition. I am intimately persuaded that the peculiar style of intensive and comprehensive imagery in poetry which distinguishes modern writers has not been as a general power the product of the imitation of any particular one. It is impossible that any one contemporary with such writers (Wordsworth and Coleridge were specified at first) as stand in the front ranks of literature of the present day can conscientiously assure themselves or others that their language and tone of thought may not have been modified by the study of the productions of these extraordinary intellects.”[169]

Radicalism, we said, was the characteristic of this period and this extended both to the form and the matter of poetry. Byron characterizes one eminent poet as “the mild apostate from poetic rule.”[170]

During the greater part of the eighteenth century conservatism and classicism were in the ascendant. After the Revolution of 1688 everything medieval and Catholic was looked upon with suspicion. Old customs and festivities were allowed to fall into disuse. Compared with the past it was a material age. In the early part of the century agriculture and commerce flourished and with this advance in material prosperity came the decline of romanticism. “Correctness” in form and thought is the guiding light of prince and peasant, of poet and philosopher. Imagination is concerned almost entirely with society and fine manners. Pope’s themes are beaux and belles, pomatum, billets-doux, and patches. He preferred the artificial to the natural. Form, imitation of the classics, is to him and the men of that period, the all important matter in literature. In his Essay on Criticism he tells us again and again

Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem
To copy nature is to copy them.

“To his immediate successors Pope was the grand exemplar of what a poet should be,”[171] but unfortunately he was followed by a horde of imitators whose only claim on the muse of poetry was ability to turn out heroic couplets. As a consequence poetry became a cold, lifeless affair, devoid of imagination and “divorced from living nature and the warm spontaneity of the heart.”[172]

A reaction against this pseudo-classicism was inevitable. That small but constantly flowing stream of romanticism which is found in the works of Thomson, Blake, Warton and Gray, increased in size until it broke loose in the Lyrical Ballads of 1798. This was the joint work of Coleridge and Wordsworth. The two poets met for the first time in 1796. Coleridge was then 24 years of age and Wordsworth but two years his senior. In July, 1797, Wordsworth and his sister moved to Alfoxden, in Somersetshire, that they might be near Coleridge, who was living with his wife at Nether-Stowey. They were, as Coleridge has said somewhere, three people but one soul. A good description of the relationship between them is given in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Alfoxden Journal, and in Coleridge’s The Nightingale; a conversation poem. Their most frequent topic of conversation was “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 colors of imagination.”[173] From these conversations originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads. The work was divided into two parts. Coleridge was to direct his attention to romantic and supernatural characters and to enshroud these with a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to engage our interest and attention. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to produce the same effect by giving the charm of novelty to objects chosen from ordinary life. It seemed to them that the beauty of a landscape often depended on the accidents of light and shade; that moonlight or sunset sometimes transformed an uninviting scene into one of entrancing beauty; and so they believed that they could diffuse the glow of their imagination over any object and make it attractive. As might be expected the publication of the Ballads did not meet with success. The change from the stereotyped verse of the age to these carelessly formed effusions was too much for the critics. Some scoffed at them; others thought they were being hoaxed. The subjects dealt with in these poems were long considered as unfit for poetry; and of course the conservative felt it his bounden duty to protest against the innovation. In the second edition of the Ballads, which was entirely Wordsworth’s own work, an attempt is made to justify this radical departure from the beaten path. A poet, he explains, is a genius, and should not be hampered by any conventions of art or traditions of society. His imagination is the purifying fire which transmutes the rough ore of the commonplace into the choice gold of literature. “Good poetry,” he writes, “is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” “He (the poet) is a man speaking to men; a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.”[174] This is a good picture of Shelley. “With a spiritual gaze turned first inward, on his own passions and volitions, and then turned outward upon the universe, Shelley looked in vain for external objects answering to the forms generated by his dazzling imagination.”[175]

Meter and poetic diction, Wordsworth says, are something altogether accidental to poetry, and consequently there is no essential difference between the language of poetry and that of prose. “The distinction,” Shelley writes, “between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error. Plato was essentially a poet.”[176] Wordsworth contends, too, that the proper language of poetry is the ordinary language of the rustic. The excellence of poetry depends not so much on the dignity of the words used as on their capacity to arouse emotions. “The language of poets,” Shelley writes, “is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before-unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension; until words which represent them, become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thought instead of pictures of integral thoughts.... Every original language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem.”[177]

Not only Shelley’s principles as regards “the use of language” but also his “tone of thought” was influenced by Wordsworth. Coleridge and Wordsworth removed the sphere of poetry from social action to philosophical reflection; they exchanged the ancient method, consisting in the ideal imitation of external objects, for an introspective analysis of the impressions of the individual mind.[178] Many of Wordsworth’s poems are records of the moods of his own soul, and of phases of his life; so also are Shelley’s. A brief examination of some of Wordsworth’s works will serve to make this clear.

Wordsworth planned an epic poem, The Recluse, of which The Prelude, or introduction, and The Excursion are the only parts extant. In these two poems we can trace out the history of his radicalism. The Prelude is his autobiography; and The Excursion supplements what is lacking to a thorough revelation of the workings of his mind. He begins The Prelude by telling about his childhood and schooltime, his residence at Cambridge, vacation and love for books. He then treats of his first trip to the Continent and his residence in London. Book IX is concerned with his second visit to France in 1791. While there he mixed up with all classes

... and thus ere long
Became a patriot; and my heart was all
Given to the people, and my love was theirs.[179]

It was natural for him to do so, because he lived from boyhood among those whose claims on one’s respect did not rest on accidents of wealth or blood. He describes his friend General Beaupis, who inoculated him with enthusiasm for the cause of the Revolution. In The Revolt of Islam Shelley describes Dr. Lind, who taught him to curse the king. Hatred of absolute rule, where the will of one is law for all, was becoming stronger in Wordsworth every day. After the September massacres and the imprisonment of the king he returned to Paris.

And ranged with ardor heretofore unfelt
The spacious city.[180]

He was about to cast in his lot with the Revolutionists when he was forced to return to England. The excesses of the Revolution, however, deprived him of some of the hopes that he placed in it. At that time his “day thoughts” were most melancholy. When news came of the fall of Robespierre his hopes began to revive. The earth will now march firmly towards righteousness and peace.

Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, us who were strong in love;
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven.[181]

In Canto V of The Revolt of Islam Shelley describes how oppressors and oppressed are persuaded to forego revenge. Love has conquered and a new era of peace and happiness is about to begin.

To hear, to see, to live, was on that morn
Lethean joy.

Although Shelley does not dwell on details as Wordsworth does, still there is a striking similarity between the spirit of parts of The Excursion and that of many of Shelley’s poems. An extract from The Revolt of Islam will help to verify this.

Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear friend, when first
The clouds that wrapt me from this world did pass.
I do remember well the hour which burst
My spirit’s sleep. A fresh May-dawn it was,
When I walked forth upon the glittering grass,
And wept, I know not why; until there rose
From the near schoolroom voices that, alas!
Were but one echo from a world of woes,
The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.

And then I clasped my hands and looked around—
But none was near to mock my streaming eyes,
Which poured their drops upon the sunny ground—
So without shame I spoke: “I will be wise,
And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies
Such power, for I grow weary to behold
The selfish and the strong still tyrannize
Without reproach or check.

Wordsworth’s joy, however, was short-lived. In 1796 Napoleon started on a campaign of conquest and this completely shattered Wordsworth’s faith in the Revolution. When he saw that the French were changing a war of self-defense into one of subjugation, losing sight of all which they themselves had struggled for, he became “vexed with anger and sore with disappointment.” About the year 1793 he fell under the influence of Godwin, and it is to his doctrines that he now turned for solace. Godwin, as we have seen, makes reason the sole guide and rule of conduct. Custom, law, and every kind of authority are inimical to the well-being of humanity. Wordsworth then at this time began dragging all precepts, creeds, etc., “like culprits to the bar of reason, now believing, now disbelieving,”

till, demanding formal proof
And seeking it in everything, I lost
All feeling of conviction, and, in fine,
Sick, wearied out with contrarieties,
Yielded up all moral questions in despair.[182]

He had sounded radicalism to its lowest depths and found it wanting.

I drooped
Deeming our blessed reason of the least use
Where wanted most.

In The Prelude Wordsworth records how he had in youth moments of supreme inspiration, and had taken vows binding himself to the service of the spirit he felt in nature.

To the brim
My heart was full, I made no vows but vows
Were made for me; bond unknown to me
Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly
A dedicated spirit.So with Shelley in Alastor:

Mother of this unfathomable world!
Favor my solemn song! for I have loved
Thee ever and thee only.

The sense of life and the sense of mystery are seen in Alastor and these are due to the influence of Wordsworth.

During all this time Wordsworth wrote very little poetry embodying his radical sentiments. The only important work of this kind which appeared is his drama, The Borderers. Even this cannot be called a radical word as it marks his rejection of Godwinism. Marmaduke loves Idonea, Herbert’s daughter, and is told that she is about to be sacrificed by her father to the lust of a neighboring noble. Oswald, the Godwinian, persuades Marmaduke, by dint of reasoning, to disregard the musty command of tyrants, to obey the only law “that sense submits to recognize,” and kill blind Herbert. This Marmaduke does, but later on finds out his mistake and tells Idonea towards the end that

Proof after proof was pressed upon me; guilt
Made evident, as seemed, by blacker guilt,
Whose impious folds enwrapped even thee.[183]

He realizes that he has committed a crime; that it is the height of folly to ignore instinct and tradition, and so he wanders over waste and wild

till anger is appeased
In heaven, and mercy gives me leave to die.

Although the radicalism of his early years does not reveal itself to any great extent in his poetry of that time, still it is responsible for his largest work, The Excursion. This poem is an attempt to reconstruct a new theory of life out of the ruins of the French Revolution. According to Wordsworth, the poet is a teacher. “I wish,” he says, “to be considered as a teacher or as nothing.” Shelley says that “poets are the unacknowleged legislators of the world.”[184] His Revolt of Islam and other poems attempt to inculcate “a liberal and comprehensive morality.” What particularly distinguishes Wordsworth and Shelley from preceding poets is that they moralize and draw lessons from their own experiences. The two principal characters in The Excursion—the Solitary and the Wanderer—represent Wordsworth the radical and Wordsworth the conservative. The Wanderer, who has had a long experience of men and things, derives from nature moral reflections of various kinds. In his walks he meets the Solitary, a gloomy, morose sceptic. This man tells about his desire to find peace and contentment; his delight in nature; and the happiness of his wedded life. The death of his wife and children filled him with despair. He then begins to question the ways of God to men and exclaims

Then my soul
Turned inward—to examine of what stuff
Times fetters are composed; and life was put
To inquisition, long and profitless![185]

He is aroused from these abstractions by the report that the dread Bastile has fallen; and from the wreck he sees a golden palace rise

The appointed seat of equitable law
The mild paternal sway
... from the blind mist issuing
I beheld
Glory, beyond all glory ever seen.

In Queen Mab Shelley has a somewhat similar phrase:

Hope was seen beaming through the mists of fear.

He thus becomes interested once more in life; and joins in the chorus of Liberty singing in every grove.

War shall cease
Did ye not hear that conquest is abjured?
Bring garlands, bring forth choicest flowers, to deck
The tree of Liberty.[186]

Society then became his bride and “airy hopes” his children. Although no Gallic blood flows in his veins, still not less than Gallic zeal burns among “the sapless twigs of his exhausted heart.” He is in entire sympathy with the plans and aspirations of the revolutionists, and he feels that a progeny of golden years is about to descend and bless mankind. All the hopes of the Solitary, though, are blasted. He is disgusted with the way in which the revolution is progressing and sets sail for America, where he expects to find freedom from the restraints of tyranny. Shelley writes about America as follows:

There is a people mighty in its youth.
A land beyond the oceans of the west
Where, though with rudest rites, Freedom and Truth
Are worshipped.[187]

The Solitary’s expectations are not fulfilled, and so he returns, despondent, to his own country. He is in this frame of mind when he meets the Wanderer, who tells him that the only adequate support for the calamities of life is belief in Providence. Victory, the Wanderer says, is sure if we strive to yield entire submission to the law of conscience. He compares the force of gravity, which constrains the stars in their motions, to the principle of duty in the life of man. In Act IV of Prometheus Unbound Shelley compares the force of gravity to the impulse of love. There is no cause for despair, and “the loss of confidence in social man.” The beginning of the revolution had raised man’s hopes unwarrantably high. As there was no cause then for such exalted confidence, so there is none now for fixed despair.

The two extremes are equally disowned
By reason.

One should have patience and courage. It is folly to expect the accomplishment in one day of “what all the slowly moving years of time have left undone.” In the preface to The Revolt of Islam Shelley writes: “But such a degree of unmingled good was expected (from the revolution) as it was impossible to realize.... Could they listen to the plea of reason who had groaned under the calamities of a social state according to the provisions of which one man riots in luxury whilst another famishes for want of bread? Can he who the day before was a trampled slave suddenly become liberal-minded? This is the consequence of the habits of a state of society to be produced by resolute perseverance and indefatigable hope, and long-suffering and long-believing courage, and the systematic efforts of generations of men of intellect and virtue.” The Wanderer exhorts the Solitary to engage in bodily exercise and to study nature. He contrasts the dignity of the imagination with the presumptuous littleness of certain modern philosophers. At this point the Solitary remarks that it is impossible for some to rise again; that the mind is not free. It is as vain to ask a man to resolve as bid a creature fly “whose very sorrow is that time hath shorn his natural wings.” The Wanderer replies that the ways of restoration are manifold

fashioned to the steps
Of all infirmity, and tending all
To the same point, attainable by all
Peace in ourselves and union with our God.

The Wanderer calls upon the skies and hills to testify to the existence of God. Wordsworth the Wanderer finds an answer for Wordsworth the Solitary in Nature. He sees that there is a Living Spirit in Nature; a spirit which animates all things, from “the meanest flower that blows” to the glorious birth of sunshine; a spirit which pervades matter and gives to each its distinctive life and being. He sees God in everything.

To every form of being is assigned
An active principle ...
... from link to link
It circulates the soul of all the worlds.[188]

Shelley, in a letter to Hogg, January 3, 1812, speaks about “the soul of the Universe, the intelligent and necessarily beneficent actuating principle.”

Wordsworth’s treatment of nature is original in this that nature is no longer viewed as a garden or laboratory where man’s processes are carried on, but she is recognized as being over and above him and penetrating his whole life by impulses that emanate from her. Wordsworth spiritualizes nature. He views her phenomena as so many “varying manifestations of one life sacred, great, and all-pervading. “This life of nature is felt more when man is alone with her and hence the love of solitude which marks the Wordsworthian habit of mind.”[189] Other characteristics of Wordsworth besides the love for Nature’s seclusion are “the reverence which sees in her a revelation of infinity and the recognition in her of a mysterious and poetic life.” These are also characteristics of Shelley. His love of solitude is inspired by the desire to know nature in her inmost heart; “he has the same feeling for infinite expanse and the same perception of an underlying life.” He also insists, like Wordsworth, on “the education of nature.”

In the preface to Alastor, Shelley says that the subject of the poem represents a youth “led forth by an imagination inflamed and purified through familiarity with all that is excellent and majestic, to the contemplation of the universe.... The magnificence and beauty of the external world sinks profoundly into the frame of his conceptions and affords to their modifications a variety not to be exhausted.” In the introductory stanzas, Shelley asks this great parent, Nature, to inspire him that his “strain may modulate with murmurs of the air.” He tells us, too, “that every sight and sound from the vast earth and ambient air sent to his heart its choicest blessings.” Wordsworth says, in Lines on Tintern Abbey, that

Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life to lead
From joy to joy; for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e’er prevail against us or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.

In the Prelude, Wordsworth speaks of the influence of nature as follows:

Wisdom and spirit of the universe!
That soul that art the eternity of thought.
That givest to forms and images a breath
And everlasting motion, not in vain
By day or star-light thus from my first dawn
Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me
The passions that build up our human soul.This and the Intimations of Immortality remind us of the following passage in Queen Mab:

Soul of the Universe! eternal spring
Of life and death, of happiness and woe,
Of all that chequers the phantasmal scene
That floats before our eyes in wavering light,
Which gleams but on the darkness of our prison,
Whose chains and massy walls
We feel, but cannot see.

Wordsworth goes into the woods and hears a thousand notes all making sweet music, all in harmony. Furthermore, he feels that all living things, flowers and animals, are possessed of conscious life.

And ’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.
(Lines written in early spring.)

Nature is throbbing not only with life but with the spirit of love, a spirit that knits the whole world of living things together.

Love, now a universal birth,
From heart to heart is stealing,
From earth to man, from man to earth.
(To my sister.)

The same thought runs through many of Shelley’s poems. In The Sensitive Plant the flowers live, love, and die.

none ever trembled and panted with bliss
In the garden, the field, or the wilderness,
Like a doe in the noontide, with love’s sweet want,
As the companionless sensitive plant.

The beauty and loveliness of nature will do us more good “than all the sages can.” They will inspire us as nothing else will.

Dr. Ackermann draws attention to the kindness of Wordsworth and Shelley for animals, and notes the similarity between the two following passages.[190] Thus Wordsworth in The Excursion, II, 41-47:

Birds and beasts
And the mute fish that glances in the stream
And harmless reptile coiling in the sun
... he loved them all:
Their rights acknowledging he felt for all.And Shelley in Alastor, 13-15:

If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast
I consciously have injured, but still loved
And cherished these my kindred.

Wordsworth concludes The Excursion and Shelley the Alastor with the desire for death.

With the name of Wordsworth, the name of that greater genius, Coleridge, will always be linked. Although they were life-long friends still no two could be more unlike in character and temperament. Wordsworth was moody and determined. He, like Shelley, worked out his plans unmindful of the opinion of others. Neglect and ridicule did not trouble him in the least. He was an excellent type of mens sana in corpore sano. Coleridge, on the other hand, was without ambition and steadiness of purpose. He drifted on through life in a listless manner, “sometimes committing a golden thought to the blank leaf of a book, or to a private letter, but generally content with oral communication.”[191] At an early age he had accomplished great things and it was felt that these were but “the morning giving promise of a glorious day.” He was scarcely thirty when he won distinction as a poet, journalist, lecturer, theologian, critic and philosopher. The “glorious day,” however, never matured. Sickness and opium were the clouds that obscured the brightness of his genius. His married life was not a happy one. As in the case of Shelley, jealousy and irritation on the part of the wife, and disenchantment on the part of the husband made home-life intolerable.

One of the earliest manifestations of Coleridge’s radicalism is his Ode on the Destruction of the Bastile, written in 1789. In it he rejoices at the overthrow of tyranny and the success of Freedom. Liberty with all her attendant virtues will now be the portion of all.

Yes! Liberty the soul of life shall reign,
Shall throb in every pulse, shall flow thro’ every vein!

He hopes that she will extend her influence wider and wider until every land shall boast “one independent soul.” In his Ode to France he writes:

With what deep worship I have still adored
The spirit of divinest Liberty.

Shelley may have had this in mind when he wrote in Alastor

And lofty hopes of divine liberty
Thoughts the most dear to him.

Coleridge’s most important radical work, which Lamb considered to be more than worthy of Milton, is Religious Musings. Shelley’s Queen Mab bears so strong a resemblance to it that the Religious Musings has been called Coleridge’s Queen Mab. In the first part he lashes his countrymen for joining the coalition against France under pretence of defending religion. Further on he gives his views on society, its origin and progress. It is to private property that we must attribute all the sore ills that desolate our mortal life. Unlike many radicals, however, Coleridge can see the good in an institution as well as the evil. Thus he holds that the rivalry resulting from our present economic condition has stimulated thought and action

From avarice thus, from luxury and war,
Sprang heavenly science; and from science freedom.

The innumerable multitude of wrongs, continues Coleridge, by man on man inflicted, cry to heaven for vengeance. Even now (1796) the storm begins which will cast to earth the rich, the great, and all the mighty men of the world. This will be followed by a period of sunshine, when Love will return and peace and happiness be the portion of all.

As when a shepherd on a vernal morn
Through some thick fog creeps timorous with slow foot,
Darkling with earnest eyes he traces out
The immediate road, all else of fairest kind
Hid or deformed. But lo! the bursting Sun!
Touched by the enchantment of that sudden beam
Straight the black vapor melteth, and in globes
Of dewy glitter gems each plant and tree:
On every leaf, on every blade it hangs;
And wide around the landscape streams with glory!

So we will fly into the sun of love, impartially view creation, and love it all. We will then see that God diffused through society makes it one whole; that every victorious murder is a blind suicide; that no one injures and is not uninjured. This change will be brought about by a return to pure Faith and meek Piety. He differs from Shelley in this, that he does not look for reformation through the overturning of thrones and churches. The existing frame-work of society is all right; it needs only to be freed from some of its barnacles.

The first stanza of Coleridge’s Love reminds one of the following passage from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (Act IV, 406):

His will, with all mean passions, bad delights
And selfish cares, its trembling satellites,
A spirit ill to guide, but mighty to obey,
Is as a tempest-winged ship, whose helm
Love rules.

Coleridge’s stanza runs as follows:

All thoughts, all passions, all delights
Whatever stirs this mortal frame
All are but ministers of Love
And feed his sacred flame.[192]

Shelley’s sonnet to Ianthe is little more than a transposition of Coleridge’s sonnet to his son. Shelley says:

I love thee, Baby! for thine own sweet sake:
Those azure eyes, that faintly dimpled cheek,
Thy tender frame, so eloquently weak,
Love in the sternest heart of hate might wake;
But more when o’er thy fitful slumber bending
Thy mother folds thee to her wakeful heart,
Whilst love and pity, in her glances blending,
All that thy passive eyes can feel impart:
More, when some feeble lineaments of her,
Who bore thy weight beneath her spotless bosom,
As with deep love I read thy face, recur,—
More dear art thou, O fair and fragile blossom;
Dearest when most thy tender traits express
The image of thy mother’s loveliness.[193]

Coleridge’s runs as follows:

Charles! my slow heart was only sad when first
I scanned that face of feeble infancy:
For dimly on my thoughtful spirit burst
All I had been, and all my child might be!
But when I saw it on its mother’s arm,
And hanging at her bosom (she the while
Bent o’er its features with a tearful smile),
Then I was thrilled and melted, and most warm
Impressed a father’s kiss; and all beguiled
Of dark remembrance and presageful fear.
I seemed to see an angel’s form appear—
’Twas even thine, beloved woman mild!
So for the mother’s sake the child was dear
And dearer was the mother for the child.

Coleridge and Shelley made a universal application of a few metaphysical principles acquired in their early years; and on them ground their political and religious views. Poetry, metaphysics, morals and politics mixed themselves forever in their imagination.[194]