Part 15

"It is not 'advantages' that make great men--it is disadvantages!" said White Pigeon. We were eating breakfast at the table set out under the arbor, back of the Coleridge cottage--Grace, Myrtle, White Pigeon and I.

Grace and Myrtle were the Grand Rapids girls, and fine girls, too--pink and twenty, with diaries and autograph-fans. Girls of that age are charming, but they only interest me as do beautiful kittens or colts. Women do not become wise or discreet until they are past thirty. White Pigeon was past thirty.

We took the stage that morning at nine o'clock for Keswick. The stage started from the Red Lion Inn. It is a great event--the starting of a four-horse stage. The guests came out, and so did the boots, and chamber-maids and waiters, and the cook came also. They stood in line and bade the parting guests godspeed, and all the guests were supposed to express gratitude tangibly. The landlady was busy, flying about like a Plymouth Rock hen with a brood of ducks. She saw me handing up the pink-and-white Grace and Myrtle and the dignified, tailor-made White Pigeon, and she came out and apologized profusely for not having had room to accommodate me the night before.

At last all the hatboxes and bloomin' luggage were safely stowed, the trunks were lashed in place behind, and I climbed to the top of the stage and took my seat beside my charges. A merry blast was blown from the tallyho horn. A man with a red coat, high white hat, kid gloves and a brick-dust complexion mounted the box and gathered up a big handful of reins. The hostlers at the heads of the leaders let go, twenty feet of whiplash went singing through the air--and we were off!

We swung through the village with more majesty and clatter than the Empire State Express ever assumed, stopping just an instant at the post-office for a bag of mail that the brick-dusty driver caught with his feet, and then away we went.

I am sorry I did not live in stagecoach times--things are now so dead and dreary and prosaic. Yet I sometimes have imagined that today the stagecoach business in England is a little stagey--many things are done to heighten effects. For instance, the intense excitement of starting is not exactly necessary--why the mad rush? No one is really in a hurry to reach a certain place at a certain time! And all this is apparent when you notice that a mile out of town the pace subsides to a lazy dog-trot, and the boots has jumped down and unchecked each horse so as to make things easy. I was glad the boots got down, for whenever I see a horse's head checked up in the air my impulse is to uncheck him--and once on Wabash Avenue in Chicago I did.

I was arrested, and it cost me five.

The road to Keswick bristles with history. Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey tramped it many a time, and since their day, thousands of literary pilgrims have come this way. That two poets-laureate should have come from this beautiful corner of the earth of course is interesting, but the honor of being poet-laureate to the King is a shifting honor, depending upon the poet. No title can ever really honor a man, although a man may honor a title, and no King by taking thought can add a cubit to a subject's stature. The man is what he is. Southey succeeded the poet Pye, who was laureate before him.

A weaker nature than mine might here succumb to temptation and play pleasant philological pranks concerning the poet Pye, but I am above all that. Pye was a good man, and if I could remember any of the lines he wrote, I would here introduce them; but this is doubtless unnecessary, for the gentle reader can recall to suit.

White Pigeon claimed that Pye was greater than Southey, and she further said that Tennyson's reputation suffered by consenting to act as successor to this line of men in whom felicity and insight were the exception. The tierce of Canary was no pay for acting as successor to Pye, but Southey jumped at the Canary and slipped his last vestige of radicalism quickly.

"Oh, what a funny little church," exclaimed Myrtle; "can't we stop and go in?"

It is a curious little building--that church at Wythburn.

It looks like a little girl's playhouse, that might have belonged to her great-great-grandmother.

Opposite this lovely little church is a tavern, where a lovely barmaid in white apron and lovely collar and cuffs stood in the doorway, ready to serve the thirsty. The red-coated driver pulled in on the tavern side, and men in neckerchiefs, hobnailed shoes, blue woolen stockings and knee-breeches made fussy haste to water the horses. Old Brick-Dusty climbed down to see a man in the tavern, and the Michigan contingent and Colonel Littlejourneys slid down the other side and went into Wythburn Church. There isn't another church in England so peculiar and so interesting. A pew is marked sacred to Wordsworth, and one also to Harriet Martineau, who I did not know before ever went to church. The silver service was the gift of Southey, and is inscribed with his name and crest. Southey was a vestryman of Wythburn Church for many years, and sometimes read the service there. I stood in the pulpit where Southey stood, and so did White Pigeon, and I reminded her that she would never be allowed there on Sunday, for Deity is most easily approached and influenced by men, as all theologians know and have ever stoutly held. One of the busy hostlers came in, pulling his forelock, and apologizing, in a voice full of cobwebs, said that the coach was ready to start. We did the proper thing, and also as much for the red-coated driver, who, in spite of great dignity, we saw was open to reward for well-doing. It was a great mistake, though, to "cross his palm," for he began a lecture on the Cumberland Kings, that lasted until we got to Thirlmere, where he stopped at the Pumping-Station, and told us how the city of Manchester got its water-supply from here. To him all things were equally interesting. He was still deep in the fight between Manchester aldermen and the 'Ouse of Commons when we reached Castle Rigg. The Vale of Keswick opened before us. We implored the well-informed driver to stop, and then we got down and begged him to go on without us.

Seated there on the bankside we viewed the beautiful scene of lake, valley and village stretching out so peacefully before us, all framed in the dark towering hills. Even Grace forgot to say, "How lovely!" but sat there, chin in hand, rapt and speechless.

Down in that valley, just a little to one side of the village, Southey lived for over forty years, and all the visitors he really liked he took to Castle Rigg, to show them as he said, "the kingdoms of the earth." It was a view of which he never tired. Coleridge came up this way first, and took lodgings with a Mr. Johnson, who owned Greta Hall. It is not on record that Coleridge paid any rent, but he was so charmed with the location that he induced Southey to come and visit him. Southey came and liked it so well that he remained. He performed here a life-task that staggers one to contemplate: fifty volumes or more of closely set type are shown you at the Keswick Museum, duly labeled, "The Works of Southey," Charles Lamb's "Works" were the East India ledgers, but he wrote one little book of Essays that are still sweet and fresh as wood-violets--essays written hot from the heart, often in tears; written because he could not help it, or to please Mary--he did not know which.

No man ever divided his time up more systematically than Southey. He produced political and theological essays, histories, poems, diatribes, apologies and criticisms, and worked as men work in the Carnegie Consolidated Steel Works.

Robert Southey was the precocious son of a Bristol linen-draper. Being rather delicate, his parents did not set him to work in a drygoods-store, but gave him the benefit of Oxford. The thing that brought him first into prominence was an article he wrote for "The Flaggellant," a college paper, wherein he ridiculed the idea of a devil. Now the powers did not like that--the creed called for a "personal devil," and they wanted one. They summoned young Southey before them to account for speaking disrespectfully of the devil. The youth was found guilty and expelled.

He was a reckless young man, but recklessness is its own check--in fact, all things in life are self-regulating, everything is limited. Southey's secret marriage with Edith Fricker tamed him. Nothing tames men like marriage; and when babies came, and Coleridge went to Germany, leaving Mrs. Coleridge and young Hartley in his charge, Southey realized he was dealing with a condition, not a theory. Then soon he had the widowed Mrs. Lovell with her brood on his hands, and his old dream of pantisocracy was realized, only not just as he expected.

Too much can not be said for the patience and unflinching fidelity shown by Southey in shouldering the burdens that Fate sent him.

"Any man can succeed with three good women to help him!" said White Pigeon.

"True," said I, "and next in importance to the person who originates a good thing is the one who quotes it." Men weighted with responsibilities fight for the established order. Southey's pension and his steady income came from the men in power, and he made it his business not to offend them. Southey was a scholar; he associated with educated people; and once he complained because he could not get acquainted with workingmen--they shut up like clams on his approach. Of course they did, for we are simple and sincere only with our own.

Learned, scholarly and cultured men are to be pitied, for they are ever the butt, byword and prey of the untaught, who are often the knowing. As success came to Southey he lost the sense of values, that is to say, the sense of humor. He attacked Byron with great severity, and Byron's reply was the dedication of Don Juan, "To the illustrious Poet-Laureate, Robert Southey, LL.D." It was as if the play of "Sappho" were dedicated to the Reverend Doctor Parkhurst.

Southey came out with a card declaring he had given Lord Byron no permission to dedicate any of his detestable works to him. Byron replied, acknowledging all this, but saying he had a right to honor the name of Southey, if he chose, just the same. No taint of excess or folly marks the name of Southey; his life was filled with good work and kind deeds. His name is honored by a monument in the village of Keswick, and in Crosthwaite Church is another monument to his memory, the inscription being written by Wordsworth.

* * * * *

Were Heaven a place, I still politely maintain, it would probably be located in the Lake District of England.

Every man of genius the world has ever produced has come from a little belt of land in the North Temperate Zone. Snow and cold, rock and mountain, danger and difficulty--these are the conditions required to make men. The heaven of which I can conceive is a place with plenty of oxygen, sunshine and water. In a mountainous country water runs (I hope no one will dispute this) and winds blow, and running water and air in motion are always pure.

When I have no thoughts worth recording I take a walk, and the elements, which seem to carry soul, fill me to the brim.

The Tropics may have much to offer in way of soft, luxurious creature comforts. But the Tropics supply sundry and divers discomforts as well, and really offer too much; for with the flowers, vines, fruits and never-ending foliage go mosquitoes, tarantulas, and snakes that wiggle and sometimes bite.

The climate of Cumberland does not overpower one--the air is of a quality that urges you on to think and do.

By no reach of imagination can one conjure forth anything more beautiful in Nature than is to be realized in vicinity of Keswick; and no home thereabouts surpasses Greta Hall in charm of location and quiet, simple beauty.

Greta Hall is a rambling pile, constructed partly of stone and partly of wood, evolved rather than built, for evidently the work was done by many hands, and stretched over a century or more of time. Vines and flowers, fruits and shrubbery, stone walls covered close by creeping bellflowers where birds chirrup and cheep and play hide-and-seek the livelong day--all these are there. The house is situated on a little wooded plateau that overlooks the lake, and back of it the solemn and everlasting hills stand guard. There are no such mountains here as one sees in Switzerland, overpowering, vast, awful in their majesty; but just green-topped, self-sufficient and friendly hills that invite you to lift up your eyes and be strong.

Visitors are welcome to the grounds at Greta Hall at all times, and the kind old gardener who showed us about gathered us bouquets of mignonette, rue and thyme, and gave us the history of a wonderful pear-tree that had turned into a vine and now covers one whole side of a stable thirty feet long. Even a tree will lose its individuality if it is not allowed to assert its nature and care for itself. That particular pear-tree, we were told, sprang from a slip planted by Shelley when he once came here on a visit to Southey; and we were further told that the year Shelley was drowned, the leaves of this tree turned pale and withered, and only by patient, loving nursing on the part of our old gardener's father was its life saved. The residence was closed the day we were there, in dread anticipation of Cook tourists with designs on the shrubbery, we had reason to believe, but we lingered around the grounds, listened to the soothing, rippling lullaby of the Greta, watched the strutting peacocks, and ate bread-and-milk, under the trees, out of big bowls supplied us by the old gardener for the most modest of considerations.

Southey never really mixed in the wealth of beauty that covers this beautiful corner of earth. He was learned and profound, and he took himself and the Church and the State seriously. He felt himself a part of an indestructible institution, whereas man and all his works are no more peculiar, no more wonderful than an ant-hill--and last only a day longer. He never realized that he was a part of the great whole that made up mountain, lake, globe, wooded glen and tireless river. He differentiated. He considered himself a man, an educated man, and therefore a little better, and a little above, and a little outside of it all--otherwise how could he have withered at the top at the early age of sixty-seven?

This question White Pigeon asked as we sat in the dim quiet of Crosthwaite Church, down in the village. I did not attempt to reply--people do not ask questions expecting, necessarily, to have them answered. We ask questions in order to clarify our own minds.

The warning blast of the coach-horn was heard, and we went out into the sunshine. I bade my three friends good-by (first placing my autograph on Grace's and Myrtle's fans), and they climbed to the top of the coach. I sat on the stone wall and watched them until they disappeared around the bend of the road, waving handkerchiefs. That night I made my way over to Penreith on the way to Carlisle. It had been a day brimming with thought and feeling, and beauty expressed and unexpressed, and the kindness of kind friends who understand. That night as I dozed off into deep, calm sleep I said to myself: "They were great men, those Lake Poets, and the world is better because they lived. But there will come other men and they will be greater than those gone--the best is yet to be."

SAMUEL T. COLERIDGE

Beneath the blaze of a tropical sun the mountain peaks are the Thrones of Frost, this through the absence of objects to reflect the rays.

What no one with us shares, seems scarce our own--we need another to reflect our thoughts. --_Samuel Taylor Coleridge_

[Illustration: SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE]

Samuel T. Coleridge was a thinker, and thinkers are so rarely found that the world must take note of them. John Stuart Mill, writing in Eighteen Hundred Forty, assigned first place among English philosophers to Jeremy Bentham, incidentally mentioning that Samuel Taylor Coleridge was Bentham's only rival.

In philosophy there is an apostolic succession. We build on the past, and all the centuries of turmoil and travail which have gone before have made this moment possible. There has never been any such thing as "the fall of man"; for the march of the race has been a continual climb--a movement onward and upward. Were it not for Coleridge and Bentham, we could not have had Buckle, Wallace and Spencer, for the minds of men would not have been prepared to give them a hearing. "Half the battle is in catching the Speaker's eye," said Thomas Brackett Reed; and a John the Baptist to prepare the way is always necessary. Without Coleridge to quietly ignore the question of precedent, and refuse to accept a thing without proof, and ask eternally and yet again, "How do you know?" Charles Darwin with his "Origin of Species" would have been laughed out of court. Or probably had Darwin been persistent we would have consigned him to the stocks, burned his book in the public square, and with the aid of logical thumbscrews made him recant.

Even as it was, the gibes and guffaws of the press and pulpit came near drowning the modest, moderate voice of Darwin; and for a score of years, his reputation as a scientist seemed to be trembling in the balance. Yet today the man who would seriously attempt in an educated assembly to throw obloquy upon the doctrine of Evolution and the name of Charles Darwin would find himself speedily listed with Brudder Jasper of Richmond, Virginia. The Church now, everywhere, has its Drummonds, who build on Darwin and use his citations as proof; and Drummond merely expressed what the many believe--no more.

The man who has dared to think for himself and voiced his thought--the emancipated man--has been as one in a million. What usually passes for thought is only the repetition of things we have heard or been told. We memorize, repeat by rote and call it thought.

With the Church and State in control of food and clothes, and with spears, clubs, knives and guns ready to suppress whatsoever seemed dangerous to their stability, it is a miracle that men have ever improved on anything--for progress has been for centuries a perilous performance. To question a priest was blasphemy. To reason with a judge was heinous. To think and decide for yourself was to invite torture and death.

And all this was very natural, simply because the superior class who monopolized the good things of earth were obliged, in order to enslave and tax men, to make them believe that their power was derived from God. And thus was taught the "divine right of kings," the duty of submission, the necessity of belief and the sinfulness of doubt. The source of all knowledge was declared to be a book, and the right of interpretation of this book was given to one class alone--those who sided with and were a part of the Superior Class.

The reason the race has progressed so slowly is because the strong, vigorous and independent have been suppressed, either by legal process, or exterminated through war, which reaps the best and lets the weak, the diseased and the cowards go.

Those who doubted and questioned have been deprived of food and clothes, disgraced, mobbed, robbed, lashed naked at the cart's tail, burned at the stake, or separated from their families and transported beyond the sea to be devoured by wild beasts, die in jungles, or toil out their lives in slavery.

But still there were always a few who would doubt and a few who would question; and in the early part of the Eighteenth Century in England the government was being put to severe straits to cope with the difficulty. Lying in the Thames were receiving-ships on which were crowded men and women to be transported. When the ship was full, crowded to her utmost, she sailed away with her living cargo. From Sixteen Hundred Fifty to Seventeen Hundred Fifty, over forty thousand people were sent away for their country's good. The hangman worked overtime, all prisons were crowded, and the walls of Newgate bulged with men and women, old and young, who were believed to be dangerous to the stability and well-being of the superior class--that is, those who had the right to tax others.

Finally, the enormity of bloodshed and woe involved caused a sort of concession on both sides to be agreed upon. Oppression continued will surely lead to a point where it cures itself, and the superior class in England, with a wise weather-eye, saw the reef on which they were in danger of striking. They heard the breakers, and began to grant concessions--unwillingly of course--concessions wrung from them. The censorship was abolished, reform bills introduced, the rights of free speech and a free press were partially recognized. The clergy, taking the cue, began to preach more love and less damnation; for the pew ever dictates to the pulpit what it shall preach. Thus general relaxation was in order to meet the competition of rival sects and independent preachers that were springing up; for although creeds never change, yet their interpretation does, and liberal sects do their work, not by growing strong, but by making all others more liberal.

Thus the latter part of the Eighteenth Century witnessed a weakening of both sides through compromise. The schools and colleges were pedantic, complacent, smug and self-satisfied; by giving in a few points they had absorbed the radicals, and the political protesters had been bought off with snug places in the excise. Pretended knowledge passed for wisdom, dignity paraded as worth, affectation and hypocrisy patronized virtue. And Coleridge appears upon the scene, a conservative, with a beautiful innocence and an indifference to all pretended authority and asks, "How do you know?"

* * * * *

The number of people who have written their names large in literature, who were the children of clergymen, is no mere coincidence. Tennyson, Addison, Goldsmith, Emerson, Lowell, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Coleridge--you can add to the list to suit. Young people follow example, and the habit of the father in writing out his thoughts causes others of the family to try it, too. Then there is an atmosphere of books in a rectory, and leisure to think, and best of all the income is not so great but that the practise of economy of time and money is duly enforced by necessity. To be launched into a library and learn by absorption is a great blessing.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Seventeen Hundred Seventy-two, the son of the Reverend John Coleridge, of Ottery Saint Mary, a small village of Devonshire. The rector was also a schoolmaster, just as all clergymen were before division of labor forced itself upon us. This worthy clergyman was twice married, his first wife bearing him three children, the second ten. Samuel was the last of the brood--the thirteenth--but his parents were not superstitious.