Still more emphatic is this passage from the poem, 'Frost at Midnight':
'My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart With tender gladness thus to look at thee, And think that thou shalt learn far other lore, And in far other scenes! For I was reared In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim, And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars. But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze By lakes and sandy shores beneath the crags Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds, Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores And mountain crags; so shalt thou see and hear The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Of that eternal language, which thy God Utters, who from eternity doth teach Himself in all and all things in Himself. Great Universal Teacher! he shall mould Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.'
In another place, when speaking of the love of mother for child and that of child for mother, awakened into life by the very impress of that love in voice and touch, he concludes with the line:
'Why was I made for Love and Love denied to me?'
And, most significant of all, is that Dedication in 1803 of his Early Poems to his brother, the Rev. George Coleridge of Ottery St. Mary, when he writes, after having dwelt on the bliss this brother had enjoyed in never having been really removed from the place of his early nurture:
'To me the Eternal Wisdom hath dispensed A different fortune, and more different mind-- Me, from the spot where first I sprang to light Too soon transplanted, ere my soul had fixed Its first domestic loves; and hence, through life Chasing chance-started friendships. A brief while Some have preserved me from life's pelting ills, But like a tree with leaves of feeble stem, If the clouds lasted, and a sudden breeze Ruffled the boughs, they on my head at once Dropped the collected shower: and some most false, False and fair-foliaged as the manchineel, Have tempted me to slumber in their shade E'en 'mid the storm; then breathing subtlest damps Mixed their own venom with the rain from Heaven, That I woke poisoned! But (all praise to Him Who gives us all things) more have yielded me Permanent shelter: and beside one friend, Beneath the impervious covert of one oak I've raised a lowly shed and know the name Of husband and of father; not unhearing Of that divine and nightly-whispering voice, Which from my childhood to maturer years Spake to me of predestinated wreaths, Bright with no fading colours! Yet, at times, My soul is sad, that I have roamed through life Still most a stranger, most with naked heart, At mine own home and birthplace: chiefly then When I remember thee, my earliest friend! Thee, who didst watch my boyhood and my youth; Did'st trace my wanderings with a father's eye; And, boding evil yet still hoping good, Rebuked each fault and over all my woes Sorrowed in silence!'