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already quoted, Coleridge wrote: "I have for some time past withdrawn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 and uncertain, to muse on fundamental and general
causes, the 'causae causarum.' I devote myself to such works as encroach
not on the anti-social passions--in poetry, to elevate the imagination
and set the affections in right tune by the beauty of the inanimate
impregnated as with a living soul by the presence of life--in prose to
the seeking with patience and a slow, very slow mind, 'Quid sumus, et
quidnam victuri gignimus,'--what our faculties are and what they are
capable of becoming." This last sentence is a sort of half-prophetic
summary of his life's work; but the poetry soon gave way to the prose,
and he never again so nearly realized his poetical ideal as he had
already done in "The Ancient Mariner."
Of his person and the impression he made upon people at this time there
are various contemporary accounts. To Thelwall, in November, 1796, he
sent the following description of himself: "... my face, unless when
animated by immediate eloquence, expresses great sloth, and great,
indeed almost idiotic good-nature. 'Tis a mere carcass of a face; fat,
flabby, and expressive chiefly of inexpression. Yet I am told that my
eyes, eyebrows, and forehead are physiognomically good; but of this the
deponent knoweth not. As to my shape, 'tis a good shape enough if
measured, but my gait is awkward, and the walk of the whole man
indicates _indolence capable of energies_.... I cannot breathe through
my nose, so my mouth, with sensual thick lips, is almost always open. In
conversation I am impassioned, and oppose what I deem error with an
eagerness which is often mistaken for personal asperity; but I am ever
so swallowed up in the _thing_ said that I forget my _opponent_. Such am
I." The Rev. Leapidge Smith, in his "Reminiscences of an Octogenarian,"
remembered him as "a tall, dark, handsome young man, with long, black,
flowing hair; eyes not merely dark, but black, and keenly penetrating; a
fine forehead, a deep-toned, harmonious voice; a manner never to be
forgotten, full of life, vivacity, and kindness; dignified in person
and, added to all these, exhibiting the elements of his future
greatness."[1] Hazlitt, in "My First Acquaintance with Poets" (a paper
that every student of Coleridge's life and poetry should read),
describing him as he appeared on his visit to Hazlitt's father at Wem in
1798, says: "His complexion was at that time clear, and even bright. His
forehead was broad and high, light as if built of ivory, with large
projecting eyebrows, and his eyes rolling beneath them like a sea with
darkened lustre.... His mouth was gross, voluptuous, open, eloquent; his
chin good-humored and round, but his nose, the rudder of the face, the
index of the will, was small, feeble, nothing--like what he has done."
And Dorothy Wordsworth (to close with a contemporary and sympathetic
impression) set him down in her journal after their first meeting at
Racedown thus: "He is a wonderful man. His conversation teems with soul,
mind, and spirit.... At first I thought him very plain, that is for
about three minutes: he is pale, thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips, and
not very good teeth, longish, loose-growing, half-curling, rough black
hair. But if you hear him speak for five minutes you think no more of
them. His eye is large and full, and not very dark, but grey[2]--such an
eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest expression; but it
speaks every emotion of his animated mind; it has more of 'the poet's
eye in a fine frenzy rolling' than I ever witnessed. He has fine dark
eyebrows, and an overhanging forehead." The friendly and keen-sighted
woman gives a more sympathetic picture than the others; but there must
have been truth, too, in the view of the equally keen-sighted and less