* COLERIDGE FILLE: A BIOGRAPHY OF SARA COLERIDGE. By Earl Leslie Griggs.
“Send me the very feel of her sweet Flesh, the very look and motion of that mouth — O, I could drive myself mad about her,” Coleridge wrote when she was a baby. She was a lovely child, delicate, large-eyed, musing5 but active, very still but always in motion, like one of her father’s poems. She remembered how he took her as a child to stay with the Wordsworths at Allan Bank.
The rough farmhouse6 life was distasteful to her, and to her shame they bathed her in a room where men came in and out. Delicately dressed in lace and muslin, for her father liked white for girls, she was a contrast to Dora, with her wild eyes and floating yellow hair and frock of deep Prussian blue or purple — for Wordsworth liked clothes to be coloured. The visit was full of such contrasts and conflicts. Her father cherished her and petted her. “I slept with him and he would tell me fairy stories when he came to bed at twelve or one o’clock. . . .” Then her mother, Mrs. Coleridge, arrived, and Sara flew to that honest, homely7, motherly woman and “wished never to be separated from her.” At that — the memory was still bitter —“my father showed displeasure and accused me of want of affection. I could not understand why. . . . I think my father’s motive,” she reflected later, “must have been a wish to fasten my affections on him. . . . I slunk away and hid myself in the wood behind the house.”
But it was her father who, when she lay awake terrified by a horse with eyes of flame, gave her a candle. He, too, had been afraid of the dark. With his candle beside her, she lost her fear, and lay awake, listening to the sound of the river, to the thud of the forge hammer, and to the cries of stray animals in the fields. The sounds haunted her all her life. No country, no garden, no house ever compared with the Fells and the horse-shoe lawn and the room with three windows looking over the lake to the mountains. She sat there while her father, Wordsworth and De Quincey paced up and down talking. What they said she could not understand, but she “used to note the handkerchief hanging out of the pocket and long to clutch it.” When she was a child the handkerchief vanished and her father with it. After that, “I never lived with him for more than a few weeks at a time,” she wrote. A room at Greta Hall was always kept ready for him but he never came. Then the brothers, Hartley and Derwent, vanished, too; and Mrs. Coleridge and Sara stayed on with Uncle Southey, feeling their dependence8 and resenting it. “A house of bondage9 Greta Hall was to her,” Hartley wrote. Yet there was Uncle Southey’s library; and thanks to that admirable, erudite and indefatigable10 man, Sara became mistress of six languages, translated Dobritzhoffer from the Latin, to help pay for Hartley’s education, and qualified11 herself, should the worst come, to earn her living. “Should it be necessary,” Wordsworth wrote, “she will be well fitted to become a governess in a nobleman’s or gentleman’s family. . . . She is remarkably12 clever.”
But it was her beauty that took her father by surprise when at last at the age of twenty she visited him at Highgate. She was learned he knew, and he was proud of it; but he was unprepared, Mr. Griggs says, “for the dazzling vision of loveliness which stepped across the threshold one cold December day.” People rose in a public hall when she came in. “I have seen Miss Coleridge,” Lamb wrote, “and I wish I had just such a — daughter.” Did Coleridge wish to keep such a daughter? Was a father’s jealousy13 roused in that will-less man of inordinate14 susceptibility when Sara met her cousin Henry up at Highgate and almost instantly, but secretly, gave him her coral necklace in exchange for a ring with his hair? What right had a father who could not offer his daughter even a room to be told of the engagement or to object to it? He could only quiver with innumerable conflicting sensations at the thought that his nephew, whose book on the West Indies had impressed him unfavourably, was taking from him the daughter who, like Christabel, was his masterpiece, but, like Christabel, was unfinished. All he could do was to cast his magic spell. He talked. For the first time since she was a woman, Sara heard him talk. She could not remember a word of it afterwards. And she was penitent15. It was partly thatmy father generally discoursed16 on such a very extensive scale. . . . Henry could sometimes bring him down to narrower topics, but when alone with me he was almost always on the star-paved road, taking in the whole heavens in his circuit.
She was a heaven-haunter, too; but at the moment “I was anxious about my brothers and their prospects17 — about Henry’s health, and upon the subject of my engagement generally.” Her father ignored such things. Sara’s mind wandered.
The young couple, however, made ample amends18 for that momentary19 inattention. They listened to his voice for the rest of their lives. At the christening of their first child Coleridge talked for six hours without stopping. Hard-worked as Henry was, and delicate, sociable20 and pleasure-loving, the spell of Uncle Sam was on him, and so long as he lived he helped his wife. He annotated21, he edited, he set down what he could remember of the wonderful voice. But the main labour fell on Sara. She made herself, she said, the housekeeper22 in that littered palace. She followed his reading; verified his quotations23; defended his character; traced notes on innumerable margins24; ransacked25 bundles; pieced beginnings together and supplied them not with ends but with continuations. A whole day’s work would result in one erasure26. Cab fares to newspaper offices mounted; eyes, for she could not afford a secretary, felt the strain; but so long as a page remained obscure, a date doubtful, a reference unverified, an aspersion27 not disproved, “poor, dear, indefatigable Sara,” as Mrs. Wordsworth called her, worked on. And much of her work was done lastingly28; editors still stand on the foundations she truly laid.
Much of it was not self-sacrifice, but self-realization. She found her father, in those blurred29 pages, as she had not found him in the flesh; and she found that he was herself. She did not copy him, she insisted; she was him. Often she continued his thoughts as if they had been her own. Did she not even shuffle30 a little in her walk, as he did, from side to side? Yet though she spent half her time in reflecting that vanished radiance, the other half was spent in the light of common day — at Chester Place, Regents Park. Children were born and children died. Her health broke down; she had her father’s legacy31 of harassed32 nerves; and, like her farther, had need of opium33. Pathetically she wished that she could be given “three years’ respite34 from child bearing.” But she wished in vain. Then Henry, whose gaiety had so often dragged her from the dark abyss, died young; leaving his notes unfinished, and two children also, and very little money, and many apartments in Uncle Sam’s great house still unswept.
She worked on. In her desolation it was her solace35, her opium perhaps. “Things of the mind and intellect give me intense pleasure; they delight and amuse me as they are in themselves . . . and sometimes I think, the result has been too large, the harvest too abundant, in inward satisfaction. This is dangerous. . . .” Thoughts proliferated36. Like her father she had a Surinam toad37 in her head, breeding other toads38. But his were jewelled; hers were plain. She was diffuse39, unable to conclude, and without the magic that does instead of a conclusion. She would have liked, had she been able to make an end, to have written — on metaphysics, on theology, some book of criticism. Or again, politics interested her intensely, and Turner’s pictures. But “whatever subject I commence, I feel discomfort40 unless I could pursue it in every direction to the farthest bounds of thought. . . . This was the reason why my father wrote by snatches. He could not bear to complete incompletely.” So, book in hand, pen suspended, large eyes filled with a dreamy haze41, she mused42 —“picking flowers, and finding nests, and exploring some particular nook, as I used to be when a child walking with my Uncle Southey. . . .”
Then her children interrupted. With her son, the brilliant Herbert, she read, straight through the classics. Were there not, Mr. Justice Coleridge objected, passages in Aristophanes that they had better skip? Perhaps. . . . Still, Herbert took all the prizes, won all the scholarships, almost drove her to distraction43 with his horn-playing and, like his father, loved parties. Sara went to balls, and watched him dance waltz after waltz. She had the old lovely clothes that Henry had given her altered for her daughter, Edith. She found herself eating supper twice, she was so bored. She preferred dinner parties where she held her own with Macaulay, who was so like her father in the face, and with Carlyle —“A precious Arch-charlatan,” she called him. The young poets, like Aubrey de Vere, sought her out. She was one of those, he said, “whose thoughts are growing while they speak.” After he had gone, her thoughts followed him, in long, long letters, rambling44 over baptism, regenerations, metaphysics, theology, and poetry, past, present and to come. As a critic she never, like her father, grazed paths of light; she was a fertilizer, not a creator, a burrowing45, tunnelling reader, throwing up molehills as she read her way through Dante, Virgil, Aristophanes, Crashaw, Jane Austen, Crabbe, to emerge suddenly, unafraid, in the very face of Keats and Shelley. “Fain would mine eyes,” she wrote, “discern the Future in the past.”
Past, present, future dappled her with a strange light. She was mixed in herself, still divided, as in the wood behind the house, between two loyalties46, to the father who told her fairy stories in bed; and to the mother — Frettikins she called her — to whom she clung in the flesh. “Dear mother,” she exclaimed, “what an honest, simple, lively minded affectionate woman she was, how free from disguise or artifice47. . . .” Why, even her wig48 — she had cut her hair off as a girl —” was as dry and rough and dull as a piece of stubble, and as short and stumpy.” The wig and the brow — she understood them both. Could she have skipped the moral she could have told us much about that strange marriage. She meant to write her life. But she was interrupted. There was a lump on her breast. Mr. Gilman, consulted, detected cancer. She did not want to die. She had not finished editing her father’s works, she had not written her own, for she did not like to complete incompletely. But she died at forty-eight, leaving, like her father, a blank page covered with dots, and two lines:Father, no amaranths e’er shall wreathe my brow —Enough that round thy grave they flourish now.
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1
temperament
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| n.气质，性格，性情 | |
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2
remains
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| n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹 | |
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autobiography
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| n.自传 | |
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4
tempt
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| vt.引诱，勾引，吸引，引起…的兴趣 | |
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musing
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| n. 沉思，冥想 adj. 沉思的, 冥想的 动词muse的现在分词形式 | |
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6
farmhouse
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| n.农场住宅（尤指主要住房） | |
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homely
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| adj.家常的，简朴的；不漂亮的 | |
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8
dependence
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| n.依靠，依赖；信任，信赖；隶属 | |
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bondage
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| n.奴役，束缚 | |
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indefatigable
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| adj.不知疲倦的，不屈不挠的 | |
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11
qualified
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| adj.合格的，有资格的，胜任的，有限制的 | |
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12
remarkably
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| ad.不同寻常地，相当地 | |
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13
jealousy
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| n.妒忌，嫉妒，猜忌 | |
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14
inordinate
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| adj.无节制的；过度的 | |
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15
penitent
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| adj.后悔的；n.后悔者；忏悔者 | |
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16
discoursed
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| 演说（discourse的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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17
prospects
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| n.希望，前途(恒为复数) | |
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18
amends
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| n. 赔偿 | |
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19
momentary
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| adj.片刻的，瞬息的；短暂的 | |
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20
sociable
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| adj.好交际的，友好的，合群的 | |
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21
annotated
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| v.注解，注释( annotate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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22
housekeeper
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| n.管理家务的主妇，女管家 | |
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23
quotations
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| n.引用( quotation的名词复数 )；[商业]行情（报告）；（货物或股票的）市价；时价 | |
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24
margins
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| 边( margin的名词复数 )； 利润； 页边空白； 差数 | |
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25
ransacked
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| v.彻底搜查( ransack的过去式和过去分词 )；抢劫，掠夺 | |
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26
erasure
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| n.擦掉，删去；删掉的词；消音；抹音 | |
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27
aspersion
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| n.诽谤，中伤 | |
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28
lastingly
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| [医]有残留性，持久地，耐久地 | |
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29
blurred
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| v.（使）变模糊( blur的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）难以区分；模模糊糊；迷离 | |
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30
shuffle
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| n.拖著脚走，洗纸牌；v.拖曳，慢吞吞地走 | |
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31
legacy
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| n.遗产，遗赠；先人(或过去)留下的东西 | |
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32
harassed
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| adj. 疲倦的，厌烦的 动词harass的过去式和过去分词 | |
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33
opium
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| n.鸦片；adj.鸦片的 | |
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34
respite
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| n.休息，中止，暂缓 | |
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35
solace
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| n.安慰；v.使快乐；vt.安慰(物)，缓和 | |
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36
proliferated
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| 激增( proliferate的过去式和过去分词 )； （迅速）繁殖； 增生； 扩散 | |
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37
toad
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| n.蟾蜍，癞蛤蟆 | |
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toads
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| n.蟾蜍，癞蛤蟆( toad的名词复数 ) | |
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39
diffuse
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| v.扩散；传播；adj.冗长的；四散的，弥漫的 | |
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40
discomfort
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| n.不舒服，不安，难过，困难，不方便 | |
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41
haze
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| n.霾，烟雾；懵懂，迷糊；vi.(over)变模糊 | |
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42
mused
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| v.沉思，冥想( muse的过去式和过去分词 )；沉思自语说（某事） | |
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43
distraction
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| n.精神涣散，精神不集中，消遣，娱乐 | |
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44
rambling
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| adj.[建]凌乱的，杂乱的 | |
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45
burrowing
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| v.挖掘（洞穴），挖洞( burrow的现在分词 )；翻寻 | |
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46
loyalties
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| n.忠诚( loyalty的名词复数 )；忠心；忠于…感情；要忠于…的强烈感情 | |
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47
artifice
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| n.妙计，高明的手段；狡诈，诡计 | |
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48
wig
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| n.假发 | |
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