by Jim Bernhard
On his return to England, he took up residence at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, with his solicitous sister Dorothy, and wrote copious amounts of poetry extolling nature and the common man. When he was thirty-two, he married Mary Hutchinson, with whom he had five children, two of whom died in childhood. Wordsworth landed a job as an official distributor of postage stamps in his district, a sinecure that gave him a comfortable living. With both his wife and his sister, he moved to a larger home in nearby Rydal, called Rydal Mount. He continued to write poetry and received many honors, including an honorary doctorate from Oxford and an appointment as Britain’s Poet Laureate.
In his youth, Wordsworth’s religious views were grounded in a virtually pantheistic belief in the universal presence in nature of an ethereal God, the spirit of love, and in his conviction of the goodness of all mankind. He also had a mystical side, in which he experienced sudden flashes of insight. In “Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” written when he was twenty-eight, he says:
I have learned
To look on Nature not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime,
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
In the ode “Intimations of Immortality,” completed when he was thirty-four, he characterizes the spiritual realm from which human life emerged:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
At the age of forty, in his essay “Upon Epitaphs,” he suggested that “. . . without the consciousness of a principle of Immortality in the human soul, Man could never have had awakened in him the desire to live in the remembrance of his fellows.”
By the time he wrote the final version of The Prelude, an autobiographical poem published after his death by his widow, his views had modified to more closely reflect Christian orthodoxy. In words that suggest belief in the conventional idea of immortality, he speaks, for example, of:
Faith in life endless, the sustaining thought
Of human Being, Eternity and God.
Whatever Wordsworth may have ultimately thought about the afterlife, he was able to discover it for himself at the age of eighty, when a cold turned into pleurisy. The lung infection worsened, and he died at Rydal Mount on April 23, 1850. He was buried in St. Oswald’s Churchyard in Grasmere, and a monument to his memory was erected in Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
When Samuel Taylor Coleridge sought inspiration, the three poetic Muses—Calliope, Erato, and Euterpe—didn’t stand a chance against opium, laudanum, and brandy. One of the founders of the English Romantic movement in poetry, Coleridge was born on October 21, 1772, in the village of Ottery St. Mary in Devonshire, youngest of ten children of an Anglican vicar and his second wife. Samuel’s father died when he was eight, and he was sent to Christ’s Hospital, a charity school in London. There he met Charles Lamb, who would become a lifelong friend. Coleridge later attended Jesus College in Cambridge, where he won prizes for his poetry and accumulated large debts, but received no degree.
Rejected by the object of his affection, Mary Evans, he joined the Royal Dragoons under the false name Simon Tomkyn Comberbache. He was discharged on grounds of “insanity”—more likely depression caused by bipolar disorder—and returned to Cambridge, but never finished his studies. He befriended fellow poets Robert Southey and William Wordsworth, launched his own career as a writer, and married Southey’s wife’s sister, Sarah Fricker. It was an unhappy marriage, and they spent much time apart before finally separating permanently.
In 1798 Coleridge and Wordsworth jointly published Lyrical Ballads, which is regarded as the genesis of the Romantic movement in literature. It included Coleridge’s most famous poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which, along with other hallucinatory poems like “Kubla Khan,” “Christabel,” and “The Pains of Sleep,” are generally thought to have been written under the influence of drugs. Coleridge’s other principal writings are a major work of criticism called Biographia Literaria, commentaries on Kant and Shakespeare, numerous translations, and essays on political theory. Coleridge coined the term “willing suspension of disbelief,” still much cited in literary criticism.
In addition to his severe mental depression, Coleridge suffered from lifelong heart and lung disorders, stemming from childhood rheumatic fever. Treatment with laudanum led to his addiction to opium. Always plagued by financial problems, he lived for a time in the Lake District and then on the island of Malta.
Seeking a cure for his addiction, he moved into rooms in the home of a physician friend in Highgate, north of London, where he planned to stay a few weeks. He remained a bit longer—for eighteen years, entertaining literary lights like Carlyle and Emerson, and, despite efforts to kick his addictions, continuing to indulge in opium and brandy until he died. He started many grand projects, but finished few of them, often chiding himself for “indolence.”
His eldest son, Hartley, was a ne’er-do-well who was expelled from Oxford for drunkenness. One day in 1822, he asked his father if he could borrow some money. Soft-hearted Coleridge agreed, and Hartley was to return that evening to collect it. Instead he skipped town, and although he later carved out a lackluster career as a schoolmaster and a critic, Coleridge never saw him again.
At various times in his life, Coleridge espoused Unitarianism, pantheism, neo-Platonism, and other philosophical systems, but in his later years, he returned to the Christian orthodoxy of his youth. Just a few days before his death, he wrote in a letter to his godchild, Adam Steinmetz Kinnaird:
The greatest of all blessings, as it is the most ennobling of all privileges, is to be indeed a Christian. . . . And I, thus on the brink of the grave, solemnly bear witness to you, that the Almighty Redeemer, most gracious in his promises to them that truly seek Him, is faithful to perform what He has promised; and has reserved, under all pains and infirmities, the peace that passeth all understanding, with the supporting assurances of a reconciled God, who will not withdraw His Spirit from the conflict, and in His own good time will deliver me from the evil one.
Heart and lung failure, aggravated by drugs and drink, was the cause of Coleridge’s death on July 25, 1834, at the age of sixty-one. An autopsy disclosed he had an enlarged heart.
His friend, Charles Lamb, delivered the eulogy at his funeral, saying: “When I heard of the death of Coleridge, it was without grief. It seemed to me that he long had been on the confines of the next world,—that he had a hunger for eternity.”
Coleridge was buried in Old Highgate Chapel, London, now part of St. Michael’s Church. His epitaph, which he wrote in the last year of his life, reads:
Stop, Christian Passer-by!–Stop, child of God,
And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod
A poet lies, or that which once seem’d he.–
O, lift one thought in prayer for S.T.C.;
That he who many a year with toil of breath
Found death in life, may here find life in death!
Mercy for praise–to be forgiven for fame
He ask’d, and hoped, through Christ.
Do thou the same.
A bust in C
oleridge’s memory was erected in Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey in 1885, near the memorials for his friends Wordsworth and Southey.
JANE AUSTEN
Jane Austen, who has been called the Stephen Colbert of her generation, was a sharp observer and deft satirist of society’s foibles. She is known for six novels, only four of which were published during her lifetime—and those were anonymous, attributed merely to “A Lady.”
Born December 16, 1775, in Steventon, Hampshire, England, she was the daughter of an Anglican rector and part-time farmer and his wife, who came from a prominent family. Jane had six brothers and an older sister, Cassandra, who was her lifelong confidante. The two of them were privately educated together in Oxford and later at home, learning French, spelling, music, drama—and dancing, which Jane took great delight in as an adult. From age twelve, Jane began writing poems, plays, and stories.
The Austen family moved to Bath, where Jane received a marriage proposal from a well-to-do landowner named Harris Bigg-Wither. She accepted, but on the following day changed her mind. As she later observed, “Anything is to be endured rather than marrying without Affection.” She never came so close to marrying again.
After her father’s death, Jane, Cassandra, and their mother moved to Worthing in Sussex, then to Southampton, and finally to a house provided for them by Jane’s brother Edward in Chawton, East Hampshire. With the help of her brother Henry, who acted as her agent, Jane published Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park. They were well received, and their fans included the prince regent, who discovered the author’s identity and made it known that she had “permission” to dedicate her next novel to him. Austen, who despised the future King George IV’s vanity and licentiousness, bit her tongue and honored him with the dedication of Emma, the final novel published during her lifetime.
Jane Austen remained a devout Christian throughout her life. Her religion was of a rational and cheerful kind, with practical emphasis on living morally in the here and now, and with scant speculation about the afterlife. In her religion, as in her novels, illness and death were treated lightly and without sentimentality. She often composed prayers for her private devotions, one of which reads:
Look with Mercy on the Sins we have this day committed, and in Mercy make us feel them deeply, that our Repentance may be sincere, and our resolutions steadfast of endeavouring against the commission of such in future. Teach us to understand the sinfulness of our own Hearts, and bring to our knowledge every fault of Temper and every evil Habit in which we have indulged to the discomfort of our fellow-creatures, and the danger of our own Souls. May we now, and on each return of night, consider how the past day has been spent by us, and what have been our prevailing Thoughts, Words, and Actions during it, and how far we can acquit ourselves of Evil. Have we thought irreverently of Thee, have we disobeyed thy Commandments, have we neglected any known Duty, or willingly given pain to any human being? – Incline us to ask our Hearts these questions Oh! God, and save us from deceiving ourselves by Pride or Vanity.
In early 1816, Austen began to suffer from skin discoloration, exhaustion, recurrent fever, bilious attacks, and rheumatic pains. In typical fashion, she first ignored and then made light of her illness, while she continued to write and to participate in the usual family activities. Undiagnosed at the time, her trouble may have been Addison’s disease, an insufficiency of adrenalin. Other experts who have studied her symptoms believe she suffered from lymphoma, a form of blood cancer. More recent theories suggest she had bovine tuberculosis, acquired from drinking unpasteurized milk, possibly aggravated by a recurrence of an illness related to the typhus she had had as a child.
Whatever it was that ailed her, she finally went to Winchester for treatment, but to no avail. It was there that she died, at dawn on Friday July 18, 1817, at the age of forty-one, her head cradled on a pillow in Cassandra’s lap.
Austen’s brother Henry arranged for her burial in the north aisle of the nave of Winchester Cathedral. The inscription on her tombstone by her brother James reads in part:
She departed this Life . . . after a long illness supported with the patience and the hopes of a Christian. The benevolence of her heart, the sweetness of her temper, and the extraordinary endowments of her mind obtained the regard of all who knew her and the warmest love of her intimate connections. Their grief is in proportion to their affection, they know their loss to be irreparable, but in their deepest affliction they are consoled by a firm though humble hope that her charity, devotion, faith and purity have rendered her soul acceptable in the sight of her REDEEMER.
Almost as an afterthought, James later added a brass plaque that briefly acknowledged that Jane was a writer:
Known to many by her writings, endeared to her family by the varied charms of her character and ennobled by her Christian faith and piety. . . . “She openeth her mouth with wisdom and in her tongue is the law of kindness.”
Henry arranged for the posthumous publications of Persuasion and Northanger Abbey—which, for the first time, identified Jane Austen as the author. All of her novels have remained in print since their first publication.
LORD BYRON
“Mad, bad, and dangerous to know” was the description of Lord Byron by Lady Caroline Lamb, who, as one of his many mistresses, would have had an expert opinion. Flamboyant, sexually voracious, and immensely popular as a poet—a virtual rock star with the literary public—Byron had a brief, tumultuous life, and is regarded as the embodiment of Romanticism.
He was born George Byron on January 22, 1788, in London, to a fortune-hunting ne’er-do-well, Captain “Mad Jack” Byron, and his wife, Catherine Gordon, whose family was Scottish aristocracy. “Mad Jack,” who died when George was three, had taken the name Gordon in order to claim his wife’s estate, and his son was known by that name for a while. But when he was ten, George inherited his great-uncle’s title as sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale, and thereafter was known simply as Lord Byron.
Afflicted with a clubfoot from birth, he moved with his mother to Scotland, where he attended Aberdeen Grammar School, and then was enrolled in Harrow and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he ran up large debts while earning an M.A. He was known as something of a dandy, and, despite his disability, excelled at boxing, swimming, and horseback riding.
He began to publish his writings, and he was prolific in turning out lyric verse, satire, dramas, long narratives, odes, and voluminous correspondence, much of it in verse. His most notable works include the satirical English Bards and Scotch Reviewers; heroic narratives like Don Juan, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and The Corsair; and hundreds of lyric and narrative poems such as “She Walks in Beauty,” “The Prisoner of Chillon,” and “The Destruction of Sennacherib.”
Byron’s infamous bisexual life titillated his countrymen. He was seduced when he was eleven by the family maid and seemed to take the experience to heart. At Cambridge, he had a number of liaisons with younger men and boys, and he continued such attachments throughout his life. He married Annabella Milbanke, had a daughter named Ada, and divorced after a year of marriage. Thereafter he had a succession of mistresses, including Lady Caroline Lamb, Lady Frances Webster, and Clair Clairmont, with whom he had a daughter. Byron also had an affair with his own half-sister, Augusta.
Largely to escape censure for his sexual proclivities, Byron went to the Continent, living for a while in Italy. There he became caught up in the Greek struggle for independence from the Ottoman Turks. He traveled to Greece, where he put money into refitting the Greek Navy for an assault on the Turks that he was planning to lead until his untimely death interrupted his plan.
In matters of religion, Byron remained influenced by the Presbyterian Calvinism of his youth, and he maintained a great affection for the Bible. He was a freethinker, however, and his own beliefs probably tended toward Deism tinged with nihilism.
Death for Byron was a release into an unconscious state from the sorrows of life. In an early poem called “
Euthanasia,” he wrote:
‘Ay, but to die and go,’ alas!
Where all have gone, and all must go!
To be the nothing that I was
Ere born to life and living woe!
Count o’er the joys thine hours have seen,
Count o’er thy days from anguish free,
And know, whatever thou hast been,
’Tis something better not to be.
Byron escaped that living woe in 1824. On April 9, in Missolonghi, Greece, while out riding, he was soaked by heavy rains and developed fever and rheumatic pains, which a physician treated with castor oil and by blood-letting—attaching a dozen leeches to his head. As a result of this treatment, Byron was infected with sepsis and lapsed into a coma on Easter Sunday, April 18. His utterances were limited to fragments of Italian and English. He regained consciousness Sunday night long enough to say, “Now I shall go to sleep.” He died during an electrical storm at six o’clock the next evening, April 19, at the age of thirty-six.
Byron’s body was embalmed by the Greeks, who allegedly kept his heart as a token, and shipped the rest of him to London, where it arrived on June 29 and lay in state for two days in a house on Great George Street. Westminster Abbey refused to allow his burial there, owing to his “questionable morality,” and on Friday, July 16, 1824, Lord Byron was interred in the family vault beneath the chancel of St. Mary Magdalene’s Church, Hucknall, Nottinghamshire. Almost a century and a half later, in 1969, a memorial was placed in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.
The Greeks proclaimed Byron a national hero, and his death galvanized them against the Turks, eliciting support from the British, French, and Russians, who destroyed the Turkish fleet in 1827, assuring Greek independence.