COLERIDGE'S LECTURES
dential warning that Coleridge's habits did not conduce to domestic comfort. Both poets suffered deeply from the misunderstanding, but Coleridge, as was natural in his isolation and well-grounded dissatisfaction with himself and his own failures, far more profoundly than Wordsworth. Coleridge knew himself only too well when he wrote
To be beloved is all I need,
And whom I love, I love indeed.
Frail is my soul, yea, strengthless wholly[1]
Unequal, restless, melancholy;[1]
and he never recovered from the shock of Wordsworth's apparent betrayal. The treachery was much more apparent than real, and at worst Wordsworth was guilty of nothing more than imprudence in discussing his friend's shortcomings with such a man as Montagu, but it was natural enough for him to try and spare Montagu the discomfort entailed by Coleridge's presence as a house-mate.
Moreover, Wordsworth, as he himself told Robinson in 1812 à propos of another subject, but before a reconciliation had been effected, was "one of the happiest of men" nor had he Coleridge's cause for self-castigation. He could not guess what agony—the word is no exaggeration—his careless statement caused when repeated with embroideries and without the context. The misunderstanding deepened as time went on, and it was not until May 1812, when Wordsworth was in London, that Crabb Robinson successfully acted as intermediary between the friends and the quarrel was patched up to the infinite satisfaction of both, though it was "never glad confident morning again" for either of them. A full account of the whole affair and of Crabb Robinson's action[2] will be found in the diary for that month (printed
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 [These lines were omitted when the poem was published in 1816.]
- ↑ [See also Dorothy Wordsworth's Letter to Mrs. Clarkson, May 12, 1812; William Wordsworth's Letters to Mrs. Clarkson, May 6 and June 4, 1812 (Knight: Letters of the Wordsworth Family, vol. 2, pp. 3, 4, 8. Nos. 243, 244, 245.)]
94
