Abstract
The residence negotiated by the Wordsworths for the Coleridge family was the front half of a substantial place called Greta Hall, whose owner occupied the rear. Atop a small hill that nestled in a moat-like horse-shoe curve of the River Greta, it looked out over Lake Keswick and Bassenthwaite Water and up into ‘the most fantastic mountains, that ever Earthquakes made in sport’ (CL I, 615). Behind it, ‘ & entering into all our views’, rose the mountain known as Skiddaw (CL I, 610). ‘I question if there be a room in England which commands a view of Mountains & Lakes & Woods & Vales superior to that, in which I am now sitting’, Coleridge wrote to Godwin from his study in Greta Hall (CL I, 620); and, earlier: ‘If, according to you & Hume, impressions & ideas constitute our Being, I shall have a tendency to become a God’ (CL I, 588).
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Notes
Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Mary Moorman (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 43.
Lyrical Ballads: Wordsworth and Coleridge, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones, second edition (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 276.
To quote Wordsworth’s letter to John Wilson, June 1801, Wordsworth Letters: The Early Years, p. 355.
David Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations, 2 vols (London, 1749), I, 315.
In his 1811 review of Southey’s The Curse of Kehama, Edinburgh Review XVII (February 1811), p. 436.
Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), II, 213–15.
Meeting Coleridge on Hampstead Heath 19 years later, the poet Keats ‘walked with him at his alderman-after dinner pace’; see the letter of Keats to George and Georgiana Keats, 15 April 1819, in Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 237.
William Hazlitt: Selected Writings, ed. Jon Cook (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 225.
For a recent consideration of Coleridge’s addiction by a medical historian, see Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason (New York and London: Norton, 2003), pp. 402–12.
Donald Sultana, Coleridge in Malta and Italy (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969), pp. 1–29 (p. 10).
Basil Willey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Chatto & Windus, 1972), p. 115.
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© 2007 William Christie
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Christie, W. (2007). ‘To Rust Away’: The Lost Years 1800–6. In: Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230627857_7
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