Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge Samuel Taylor

it mentally, and said aloud what was sufficient to enable his followers to do the same. Even at this day to repeat in the same manner but the first line of a common hymn would be understood as a reference to the whole. Above all, I am thankful for the thought which suggested itself to my mind, whilst I was reading this beautiful psalm, namely, that we should not exclusively think of Christ as the Logos united to human nature, but likewise as a perfect man united to the Logos. This distinction is most important in order to conceive, much more, appropriately to feel, the conduct and exertions of Jesus."—ED.

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"There he found, at the foot of a great walnut-tree, a fountain of a very clear running water, and alighting, tied his horse to a branch of a tree, and sitting clown by the fountain, took some biscuits and dates out of his portmanteau, and, as he ate his dates, threw the shells about on both sides of him. When he had done eating, being a good Mussulman, he washed his hands, his face, and his feet, and said his prayers. He had not made an end, but was still on his knees, when he saw a genie appear, all white with age, and of a monstrous bulk; who, advancing towards him with a cimetar in his hand, spoke to him in a terrible voice thus:—'Rise up, that I may kill thee with this cimetar as you have killed my son!' and accompanied these words with a frightful cry. The merchant being as much frightened at the hideous shape of the monster as at these threatening words, answered him trembling:—'Alas! my good lord, of what crime can I be guilty towards you that you should take away my life?'—'I will,' replies the genie, 'kill thee, as thou hast killed my son!'—'O heaven!' says the merchant, 'how should I kill your son? I did not know him, nor ever saw him.'—'Did not you sit down when you came hither?' replies the genie. 'Did not you take dates out of your portmanteau, and, as you ate them, did not you throw the shells about on both sides?'—'I did all that you say,' answers the merchant, 'I cannot deny it.'—'If it be so,' replied the genie, 'I tell thee that thou hast killed my son; and the way was thus: when you threw the nutshells about, my son was passing by, and you threw one of them into his eye, which killed him, therefore I must kill thee.'—'Ah! my good lord, pardon me!' cried the merchant.—'No pardon,' answers the genie, 'no mercy! Is it not just to kill him that has killed another?'—'I agree to it,' says the merchant, 'but certainly I never killed your son, and if I have, it was unknown to me, and I did it innocently; therefore I beg you to pardon me, and suffer me to live.'—'No, no,' says the genie, persisting in his resolution, 'I must kill thee, since thou hast killed my son;' and then taking the merchant by the arm, threw him with his face upon the ground, and lifted up his cimetar to cut off his head!"—The Merchant and the Genie. First night.—Ed.

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Mr. Coleridge's admiration of this little romance was unbounded. He read it several times in German, and once in the English translation, made in America, I believe; the latter he thought inadequately done. Mr. C. said that there was something in Undine even beyond Scott,—that Scott's best characters and conceptions were composed; by which I understood him to mean that Baillie Nicol Jarvie, for example, was made up of old particulars, and received its individuality from the author's power of fusion, being in the result an admirable product, as Corinthian brass was said to be the conflux of the spoils of a city. But Undine, he said, was one and single in projection, and had presented to his imagination, what Scott had never done, an absolutely new idea—ED.

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Mr. Coleridge said this, after looking at the engravings of Mr. Martin's two pictures of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and the Celestial City, published in the beautiful edition of the Pilgrim's Progress by Messrs. Murray and Major, in 1830. I wish Mr. Martin could have heard the poet's lecture: he would have been flattered, and at the same time, I believe, instructed; for in the philosophy of painting Coleridge was a master.—ED.

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P. 350., by S. Mosses from a design by Mr. W. Harvey. "When they came to the place where he was, they found him with one Feeble-mind in his hand, whom his servants had brought unto him, having taken him in the way. Now the giant was rifling him, with a purpose, after that, to pick his bones; for he was of the nature of flesh eaters."—ED.

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I find written on a blank leaf of my copy of this edition of the P.'s P. the following note by Mr. C.:—"I know of no book, the Bible excepted as above all comparison, which I, according to my judgment and experience, could so safely recommend as teaching and enforcing the whole saving truth according to the mind that was in Christ Jesus, as the Pilgrim's Progress. It is, in my conviction, incomparably the best summa theologiae evangalicae ever produced by a writer not miraculously inspired." June 14. 1830.—ED.

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"I will add, at the risk of appearing to dwell too long on religious topics, that on this my first introduction to Coleridge he reverted with strong compunction to a sentiment which he had expressed in earlier days upon prayer. In one of his youthful poems, speaking of God, he had said—

—'Of whose all-seeing eyeAught to demand were impotence of mind.'

This sentiment he now so utterly condemned, that, on the contrary, he told me, as his own peculiar opinion, that the act of praying was the very highest energy of which the human heart was capable, praying, that is, with the total concentration of the faculties; and the great mass of worldly men and of learned men he pronounced absolutely incapable of prayer."—Tait's Magazine, September, 1834, p. 515.

Mr. Coleridge within two years of his death very solemnly declared to me his conviction upon the same subject. I was sitting by his bedside one afternoon, and he fell, an unusual thing for him, into a long account of many passages of his past life, lamenting some things, condemning others, but complaining withal, though very gently, of the way in which many of his most innocent acts had been cruelly misrepresented. "But I have no difficulty," said he, "in forgiveness; indeed, I know not how to say with sincerity the clause in the Lord's Prayer, which asks forgiveness as we forgive. I feel nothing answering to it in my heart. Neither do I find, or reckon, the most solemn faith in God as a real object, the most arduous act of the reason and will. O no, my dear, it is to pray, to pray as God would have us; this is what at times makes me turn cold to my soul. Believe me, to pray with all your heart and strength, with the reason and the will, to believe vividly that God will listen to your voice through Christ, and verily do the thing he pleaseth thereupon—this is the last, the greatest achievement of the Christian's warfare upon earth. Teach us to pray, O Lord!" And then he burst into a flood of tears, and begged me to pray for him. O what a sight was there!—ED.

64

Mr. Coleridge placed Jeremy Taylor amongst the four great geniuses of old English literature. I think he used to reckon Shakspeare and Bacon, Milton and Taylor, four-square, each against each. In mere eloquence, he thought the Bishop without any fellow. He called him Chrysostom. Further, he loved the man, and was anxious to find excuses for some weak parts in his character. But Mr. Coleridge's assent to Taylor's views of many of the fundamental positions of Christianity was very limited; and, indeed, he considered him as the least sound in point of doctrine of any of the old divines, comprehending, within that designation, the writers to the middle of Charles II.'s reign. He speaks of Taylor in "The Friend" in the following terms:—"Among the numerous examples with which I might enforce this warning, I refer, not without reluctance, to the most eloquent, and one of the most learned, of our divines; a rigorist, indeed, concerning the authority of the church, but a latitudinarian in the articles of its faith; who stretched the latter almost to the advanced posts of Socinianism, and strained the former to a hazardous conformity with the assumptions of the Roman hierarchy." Vol. ii. p. 108.—ED.

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Why not, indeed! It is really quite unaccountable that the sermons of this great divine of the English church should be so little known as they are, even to very literary clergymen of the present day. It might have been expected, that the sermons of the greatest preacher of his age, the admired of Ben Jonson, Selden, and all that splendid band of poets and scholars, would even as curiosities have been reprinted, when works, which are curious for nothing, are every year sent forth afresh under the most authoritative auspices. Dr. Donne was educated at both universities, at Hart Hall, Oxford, first, and afterwards at Cambridge, but at what college Walton does not mention—ED.

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"The imperative and oracular form of the inspired Scripture is the form of reason itself, in all things purely rational