appropriate this word inadvertently. I, therefore, greatly understated the case against Coleridge, instead of giving to it an undue emphasis. Secondly, in stating it at all, I did so (as at the time I explained) in pure kindness. Well I knew that, from the direction in which English philosophic studies were now travelling, sooner or later these appropriations of Coleridge must be detected; and I felt that it would break the force of the discovery, as an unmitigated sort of police detection, if first of all it had been announced by one who, in the same breath, was professing an unshaken faith in Coleridge's philosophic power. It could not be argued that one of those who most fervently admired Coleridge had professed such feelings only because he was ignorant of Coleridge's obligations to others. Here was a man who had actually for himself, unguided and unwarned, discovered these obligations; and yet, in the very act of making that discovery, this man clung to his original feelings and faith. But, thirdly, I must inform the reader that I was not, nor ever had been, the "friend" of Coleridge in any sense which could have a right to restrain my frankest opinions upon his merits. I never had lived in such intercourse with Coleridge as to give me an opportunity of becoming his friend. To him I owed nothing at all; but to the public, to the body of his own readers, every writer owes the truth, and especially on a subject so important as that which was then before me.

With respect to the comparatively trivial case of Pythagoras, an author of great distinction in literature and in the Anglican Church has professed himself unable to understand what room there could be

through the most impracticable of metaphysical thickets (what Coleridge elsewhere calls "the holy jungle of metaphysics "). Meantime I had not overlooked the case of esemplastic; I had it in my memory, but hurry of the press and want of room obliged me to omit a good deal. Indeed, if such omissions constituted any reproach, then the critic in "Blackwood" was liable to his own censure. For I remember to this hour several Latin quotations made by Schelling, and repeated by Coleridge as his own, which neither I nor my too rigorous reviewer had drawn out for public exposure. As regarded myself, it was quite sufficient that I had indicated the grounds, and opened the paths, on which the game must be sought; that I left the rest of the chase to others, was no subject for blame, but part of my purpose; and, under the circumstances, very much a matter of necessity.-In taking leave of this affair, I ought to point out a ground of complaint against my reviewer under his present form of expression, which I am sure could not have been designed. It happened that I had forgotten the particular title of Schelling's work; naturally enough, in a situation where no foreign books could be had, I quoted it under a false one. And this inevitable error of mine on a matter so entirely irrelevant is so described that the neutral reader might suppose me to have committed against Coleridge the crime of Lauder against Milton-that is, taxing him with plagiarism by referring, not to real works of Schelling, but to pretended works, of which the very titles were forgeries of my own. This, I am sure, my unknown critic never could have meant. The plagiarisms were really there; more and worse in circumstances than any denounced by myself; and, of all men, the "Blackwood" critic was the most bound to proclaim this; or else what became of his own clamorous outcry? Being, therefore, such as I had represented, of what consequence was the special title of the German volume to which these plagiarisms were referred?- [The reference in this footnote, written by De Quincey in 1854, is to an article on "The Plagiarisms of S. T. Coleridge," which had appeared in Blackwood for March 1840, the writer of which had animadverted on De Quincey's previous disclosures on the subject in his Tait papers of 1834-5.-M.]

228

NOTE ON COLERIDGE'S PLAGIARISMS

for plagiarism in a case where the solution ascribed to Coleridge was amongst the commonplaces of ordinary English academic tuition. Locally this may have been so ; but hardly, I conceive, in so large an extent as to make that solution publici juris. Yet, however this may be, no help is given to Coleridge; since, according to Mr. Poole's story, whether the interpretation of the riddle were or were not generally diffused, Coleridge claimed it for his own.-[In Mrs. Sandford's Thomas Poole and his Friends (1888), vol. ii. pp. 304-6, there is printed a letter of Mr. Poole's, dated June 1835, doubting the accuracy of De Quincey's story of their discourse in 1807 respecting Coleridge's plagiarisms.-M.]

Finally-for distance from the press and other inconveniences of unusual pressure oblige me to wind up suddenly-the whole spirit of my record at the time (twenty years ago), and in particular the special allusion to the last Duke of Ancaster's case, as one which ran parallel to Coleridge's, involving the same propensity to appropriate what generally were trifles in the midst of enormous and redundant wealth, survives as an indication of the animus with which I approached this subject, starting even from the assumption that I was bound to consider myself under the restraints of friendship-which, for the second time let me repeat, I was not. In reality, the notes contributed to the Aldine edition of the "Biographia Literaria," by Coleridge's admirable daughter, have placed this whole subject in a new light; and, in doing this, have unavoidably reflected some degree of justification upon myself. Too much so, I understand to be the feeling in some quarters. This lamented lady is thought to have shown partialities in her distributions of praise and blame upon this subject. I will not here enter into that discussion. But, as respects the justification of her father, I regard her mode of argument as unassailable. Filial piety the most tender never was so finely reconciled with candour towards the fiercest of his antagonists. Wherever the plagiarism was undeniable, she has allowed it; whilst palliating its faultiness by showing the circumstances under which it arose. But she has also opened a new view of other circumstances under which an apparent plagiarism arose that was not real. I myself, for instance, knew cases where Coleridge gave to young ladies a copy of verses, headed thus"Lines on, from the German of Hölty." Other young ladies made transcripts of these lines; and, caring nothing for the German authorship, naturally fathered them upon Coleridge, the translator. These lines were subsequently circulated as Coleridge's, and as if on Coleridge's own authority. Thus arose many cases of apparent plagiarism. And, lastly, as his daughter most truly reports, if he took-he gave. Continually he fancied other men's thoughts his own; but such were the confusions of his memory that continually, and with even greater liberality, he ascribed his own thoughts to others.

CHAPTER III

THE LAKE POETS: WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

1

IN 1807 it was, at the beginning of winter, that I first saw William Wordsworth. I have already mentioned 2 that I had introduced myself to his notice by letter as early as the spring of 1803. To this hour it has continued, I believe, a mystery to Wordsworth why it was that I suffered an interval of four and a half years to slip away before availing myself of the standing invitation with which I had been honoured to the poet's house. Very probably he accounted for this delay by supposing that the new-born liberty of an Oxford life, with its multiplied enjoyments, acting upon a boy just emancipated from the restraints of a school, and, in one hour, elevated into what we Oxonians so proudly and so exclusively denominate " a man," 3 might have tempted me into pursuits alien from the pure intellectual passions which had so powerfully mastered my youthful heart some years before. Extinguished such a passion could not be; nor could he think so, if remembering the fervour with which I had expressed it, the sort of "nympholepsy" which had

1 Composed of articles in Tait's Magazine for January, February, and April 1839, as revised and recast by De Quincey, published, with some additions, for the second volume of the Collective Edinburgh Edition of his writings in 1854.-M.

2 Ante, p. 59.-M.

3 At the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where the town is viewed as a mere ministerial appendage to the numerous colleges-the civic Oxford, for instance, existing for the sake of the academic Oxford, and not vice versa--it has naturally happened that the students honour with the name of "a man " him only who wears a cap and gown.

seized upon me, and which, in some imperfect way, I had avowed with reference to the very lakes and mountains amongst which the scenery of this most original poetry had chiefly grown up and moved. The very names of the ancient hills-Fairfield, Seat Sandal, Helvellyn, Blencathara, Glaramara; the names of the sequestered glens—such as Borrowdale, Martindale, Mardale, Wasdale, and Ennerdale; but, above all, the shy pastoral recesses, not garishly in the world's eye, like Windermere or Derwentwater, but lurking half unknown to the traveller of that day-Grasmere, for instance, the lovely abode of the poet himself, solitary, and yet sowed, as it were, with a thin diffusion of humble dwellings here a scattering, and there a clustering, as in the starry heavens-sufficient to afford, at every turn and angle, human remembrances and memorials of timehonoured affections, or of passions (as the Churchyard amongst the Mountains will amply demonstrate) not wanting even in scenic and tragical interest: these were so many local spells upon me, equally poetic and elevating with the Miltonic names of Valdarno and Vallombrosa.

66

Deep are the voices which seem to call, deep is the lesson which would be taught, even to the most thoughtless of men,

"Could field, or grove, or any spot of earth,
Show to his eye an image of the pangs

Which it hath witnessed; render back an echo
Of the sad steps by which it hath been trod." 1

Meantime, my delay was due to anything rather than to waning interest. On the contrary, the real cause of my delay was the too great profundity, and the increasing profundity, of my interest in this regeneration of our national poetry, and the increasing awe, in due proportion to the decaying thoughtlessness of boyhood, which possessed me for the character of its author. So far from neglecting Wordsworth, it is a fact that twice I had undertaken a long journey expressly for the purpose of paying my respects to Wordsworth; twice I came so far as the little rustic inn (then the

1 See the divine passage (in the Sixth Book of “The Excursion") beginning

"Ah, what a lesson to a thoughtless man," &c.

sole inn of the neighbourhood) at Church Coniston; and on neither occasion could I summon confidence enough to present myself before him. It was not that I had any want of proper boldness for facing the most numerous company of a mixed or ordinary character: reserved, indeed, I was, perhaps even shy-from the character of my mind, so profoundly meditative, and the character of my life, so profoundly sequestered-but still, from counteracting causes, I was not deficient in a reasonable self-confidence towards the world generally. But the very image of Wordsworth, as I prefigured it to my own planet-struck eye, crushed my faculties as before Elijah or St. Paul. Twice, as I have said, did I advance as far as the Lake of Coniston; which is about eight miles from the church of Grasmere, and once I absolutely went forwards from Coniston to the very gorge of Hammerscar, from which the whole Vale of Grasmere suddenly breaks upon the view in a style of almost theatrical surprise, with its lovely valley stretching before the eye in the distance, the lake lying immediately below, with its solemn ark-like island of four and a half acres in size seemingly floating on its surface, and its exquisite outline on the opposite shore, revealing all its little bays and wild sylvan margin, feathered to the edge with wild flowers and ferns. In one quarter, a little wood, stretching for about half a mile towards the outlet of the lake; more directly in opposition to the spectator, a few green fields; and beyond them, just two bowshots from the water, a little white cottage gleaming from the midst of trees, with a vast and seemingly never-ending series of ascents rising above it to the height of more than three thousand feet. That little cottage was Wordsworth's from the time of his marriage, and earlier; in fact, from the beginning of the century to the year 1808. Afterwards, for many a year, it was mine. Catching one hasty glimpse of this loveliest of landscapes, I retreated like a guilty thing, for fear I might be surprised by Wordsworth, and then returned faintheartedly to Coniston, and so to Oxford, re infecta.

1 All which inimitable graces of nature have, by the hands of mechanic art, by solid masonry, by whitewashing, &c., been exterminated, as a growth of weeds and nuisances, for thirty years.-August 17, 1853.