In one of his letters to Alaric Watts Coleridge gives the best account of the lack of voluntary power to open letters sent him; and counsels Watts if he wishes an immediate answer to his letters to send them under cover to Mrs. Gillman, who is his "outward conscience." In another letter, sending contributions for the Annual, he encloses his poem entitled _Limbo_, which he says is a pretended fragment of the poet Lee.]
[142] [The error "Ellen" in line 91 may have arisen from Coleridge having called the heroine Ellen, after that of Lewis's _Ellen of Eglantine_, but afterwards having changed that name for Alice in the other stanzas forgetting to alter the word in line 91.]
THE RHINE TOUR, AND LAST COLLECTED EDITIONS OF THE POEMS
[Coleridge and Wordsworth, who, as we have seen, had had a serious estrangement in 1810, but gradually drew together again with the softening of the years, went on tour to the Rhine in 1828; and this was Coleridge's third time on the Continent. On their way they met Thomas Colley Grattan, novelist and miscellaneous writer. He gave in his _Beaten Paths_ some account of the two poets as they appeared at the time--partly reproduced in Knight's _Life of Wordsworth_. This passage is the best description of the two poets in their later period and the most reliable, along with Clement Carlyon's description of Coleridge in Germany. There is no attempt in Grattan to spin rhetoric out of Coleridge, such as we find in De Quincey, Hazlitt, and Carlyle. Another diarist gave a picture of the poets during the Rhine Tour, Julian Charles Young, who wrote the memoir of his brother, Charles Mayne Young, an actor of the time. This account is also partly reproduced in Knight's _Life of Wordsworth_. Grattan says: "He was about five feet five[143] inches in height, of a full and lazy appearance but not actually stout. He was dressed in black, and wore short breeches, buttoned and tied at the knees, and black silk stockings. And in his costume (the same that he describes to have been worn in his earliest voyages and travels in the year 1798), he worked along, in public coaches or barges, giving the idea of his original profession, an itinerant preacher. His face was extremely handsome, its expression placid and benevolent. His mouth was particularly pleasing, and his grey eyes, neither large nor prominent, were full of intelligent softness. His hair, of which he had plenty, was entirely white. His forehead and cheeks were unfurrowed and the latter showed a healthy bloom" (_Beaten Paths_, ii, 108-109). On all topics touched by Coleridge he said something to be remembered. "In almost everything that fell from Coleridge there was a dash of deep philosophy--even in the outpourings of his egotism--touches not to be given without the whole of what they illustrated" (_Beaten Paths_, ii, 113). "Coleridge took evident delight in rural scenes. He was in ecstasies at a group of haymakers in a field we passed. He said the little girls, standing with their rakes, the handles resting on the ground, 'looked like little saints.' Half-a-dozen dust-covered children going by the roadside, with a garland of roses raised above their heads, threw him into raptures" (_Beaten Paths_, ii, 115).