two sets of women that he had pointed out to Dorothy: “Two dear, dear Sisters, prized all price above,/ Sisters, like you, with more than sisters’ love…” In the younger Morgan household, “My best-beloved regain’d their youth in you”. He ends by imagining all four sitting together round the same peaceful firelit hearth, while he remains apart “in solitude” content to dream of them – “ah: dream and pine!” in proud renunciation of all worldly happiness.
The sentimentality of the poem, flooded with pain and self-pity, is so powerful that it almost disguises its strange metaphysical argument about the nature of love. The two pairs of sisters are presented as almost literal reincarnations of each other, in “statures, tempers, looks, and mien”. The memory of the one imposes itself, physically, on the vision of the other:
Sight seem’d a sort of memory, and amaze
Mingled a trouble with affection’s gaze.
For Coleridge at this moment, all hopes of love and acceptance seem caught up in a fatal cycle of repetition, the past doomed to re-enact itself in the present.* This pattern, both soothing and imprisoning, suggests some original childlike state of emotional dependence from which he cannot escape. So the undertone of the poem is fretful, reproachful, even angry. One wonders, most of all, what Asra would have made of it, for her love still seems Coleridge’s hidden theme. As he confided to his Notebooks at this time: “It is not the Wordsworths’ knowledge of my frailties that prevents my entire Love of them: No! it is their Ignorance of the Deep place of my Being – and O! the cruel misconception of that which is purest in me, which alone is indeed pure – My Love of Asra…”20
If this publication was intended as a signal of reproach, or even defiance, to those in the Lake District, it did not go unnoticed. Mrs Coleridge and Southey (who knew Morgan) were indignant; while Dorothy was resigned to his “very unsteady” behaviour in all things.21 The Wordsworths at this very moment were planning their move to Allan Bank, a larger house west of Grasmere around the margins of the lake, partly so Coleridge and his children could be accommodated. But Dorothy did not now think he would have “the resolution” to come north again. Yet she still recognized his incalculable powers of self-renewal: “how Coleridge does rise up, as it were, almost from the dead!”. She hoped his lectures would be of service to him, “especially as his exertions for the cause of human nature (such I may call them) will be animated by his strong sentiments of friendship and veneration for my Brother”.22
4
Coleridge was due to begin his weekly lectures on Friday 15 January 1808. He made one more dash to Bristol, came back to attend the noisy celebrations of “a sort of Glee or Catch Club, composed wholly of professional singers – and was much delighted”, and sailed into the Royal Institution the following afternoon at 2 p.m. But there was some bravado in this.
The Royal Institution, founded by private subscription in 1799, had quickly achieved a prestige second only to the Royal Society’s. Its splendid buildings, with a frontage of fourteen Doric columns, dominated the top end of Albemarle Street with John Murray’s publishing house at the other (Piccadilly end). Its lecture programmes, originally dedicated to both arts and sciences, achieved international status when Davy began his demonstrations there in 1802, with an increasingly spectacular series of chemical experiments. “The globules often burnt at the moment of their formation, and sometimes violently exploded and separated into smaller globules, which flew with great velocity through the air in a state of vivid combustion, producing a beautiful effect of continued jets of fire.”23 Coleridge hoped to do something similar with verbal pyrotechnics.
The popularity of the Institution’s lectures so often jammed Albemarle Street with carriages that it eventually became the first one-way thoroughfare in London. The programme of 1808 included Davy on chemistry, Coleridge on poetry, and other experts on botany, architecture, German music, mechanics, and Persian literature.24
Though dogged by financial difficulties, the Institution’s founder Count Rumford had entirely refurbished the Great Lecture Room in 1802, to become “the most beautiful and convenient in Europe”, with superb acoustics so that even “a whisper may be distinctly heard”. It held up to 500 people in a hemisphere of steeply tiered seats, with a gallery above and a circle of gas lamps, creating an atmosphere both intimate and intensely theatrical. It was a setting that demanded the speakers not merely to lecture, but to perform. (When Sydney Smith lectured on moral philosophy the previous year, it was said that the laughter could be heard outside in the street.) The attention of the audience was sustained by various creature comforts: green cushioned seating, green baize floor coverings, and the latest in central heating systems using copper pipes.
Albemarle Street was crowded with carriages, and the seats were packed. Coleridge launched into the concept of “Taste” in poetry before a large and attentive audience: “What is there in the primary sense of the word, which may give to its metaphorical meaning an import different from that of Sight or Hearing on the one hand, and of Touch or Feeling on the other?”25 It went well, Coleridge felt, and “made an impression far beyond its worth or my expectation”.
But on returning to his lodgings in the Strand, he immediately collapsed with sickness and continuous agonizing pain “of Stomach & Bowels”. He postponed the next two lectures – “I disappoint hundreds” – and tried again on Friday, 5 February, but again collapsed with “acrid scalding evacuations, and if possible worse Vomitings”.26
It was this lecture that De Quincey witnessed, when he came down to London on business for Wordsworth. He reported that Mr Coleridge was “exceedingly ill” and gave only “one extempore illustration” in his talk. But twenty years later his memories of Coleridge at the dais had ripened. “His appearance was generally that of a person struggling with pain and overmastering illness. His lips were baked with feverish heat, and often black in colour; and, in spite of water which he continued drinking through the whole course of the lecture, he often seemed to labour under an almost paralytic inability to raise the upper jaw from the lower.”
There was “no heart, no soul” in anything he said. When he failed to appear for any of the remaining lectures in February, Albemarle Street was blocked each Friday with smart carriages and scurrying footmen, as the news of his continued illness first excited “concern” and then increasing “disgust”. The whole series, concluded De Quincey, was an inevitable disaster: ill-prepared, badly illustrated with quotations (except for “two or three, which I put ready marked into his hands”) and unevenly delivered. He later thought no written record of it survived, and implied that Coleridge had offended the Institution managers and did not fulfil his contract.27
The original contract had specified twenty-five lectures, twice weekly in the winter season, from January to March, for a fee of £140 with a £60 advance. In fact Coleridge eventually delivered twenty lectures, largely postponed to the spring season from 30 March to 30 May, and these De Quincey did not attend. The disaster lay at the beginning, as was perhaps inevitable, for Coleridge had to establish a form of public address which was appropriate to his gifts.
Coleridge treated the management with great respect and always tried to warn them of impending disruptions to his series through illness. At least one unpublished letter survives in the Institution’s archives, informing the Secretary of his
