"Properer for a Sermon": Particularities of Dissent and Coleridge's Conversational Mode.

WHITE, DANIEL E.

... Once I saw (Hallowing his Sabbath-day by quietness) A wealthy son of commerce saunter by, Bristowa's citizen: methought, it calmed His thirst of idle gold, and made him muse With wiser feelings.

--"Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement" (9-14)(1)

A WELL-KNOWN TURNING POINT IN COLERIDGE'S EARLY CAREER IS JANUary 1798, when the young poet, lecturer, journalist, and preacher received the offer of a 150 [pounds sterling] annuity from the Wedgwood family. At the time, Coleridge was preparing to accept the position of minister to the Unitarian chapel at Shrewsbury, which came with a salary of 120 [pounds sterling] and a house worth 30 [pounds sterling] rent. Coleridge's acceptance of the ministry there, I suggest, would have placed him physically and symbolically within the network of commercial Dissenters who dominated the economic and intellectual lire of Northern England. This essay fin& a fresh history of early romanticism in Coleridge's vexed relationship to nonconformist religion during the 1790s. Throughout the first hall of the eighteenth century, "old Dissent" comprised three major sects: Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists.(2) By the end of the century, however, Unitarianism and "new Dissent," Methodism, had augmented the ranks of nonconformity. Overlooking the tensions between older and newer forms of Dissent, literary critics interested in Coleridge's Unitarianism have too often treated Dissenters as a uniform body distinct from the established Church of England. Coleridge's early career, however, manifests a dissidence foreign to the interests of old Dissent. His lectures and conversation poems anticipate the early romantic figure of Coleridge we associate with his later self-representations in his letters and the Biographia; in the 1790s, however, the disinterested persona and community imagined by Coleridge in his political, religious, and poetic writings emerge hot from a latent German idealism awaiting the discovery of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling after 1801, but from Coleridge's rejection of that nexus of middle-class interests, values, and believes that constitute the culture of old Dissent.(3)

To this culture, the Wedgwoods' annuity seemed to offer an alternative. On January 16, 1798, Coleridge reported to his friend John Prior Estlin, the Unitarian minister of Lewin's Mead chapel in Bristol: "In a letter full of elevated sentiments Mr Josiah Wedgwood offers me from himself & his brother Thomas Wedgwood `an annuity of 150 [pounds sterling] for life, legally secured to me, no condition whatever being annexed.'"(4) Although based in Bristol, Estlin well understood the nature of Coleridge's situation, for Estlin himself had been a student at the nonconformist Warrington Academy from 1764-70. Coleridge thus turns to Estlin for assistance, writing, it is "clear to me, that as two distinct & incompatible objects are proposed to me, I ought to chuse between them" (CL 1.371). These "incompatible objects" are the Unitarian ministry as a profession and the more independent and disinterested lire of a Unitarian philosopher and poet.

The terms in which Coleridge solicits Estlin's advice capture the definition of "interest" that informs Coleridge's political and poetic thought in the 1790s: "Shall I refuse 150 [pounds sterling] a year for lire, as certain, as any fortune can be, for (I will call it) another 150 [pounds sterling] a year, the attainment of which is not yet certain, and the duration of which is precarious?--" You answer--"Yes!--the cause of Christianity & practical Religion demands your exertions. The powers of intellect, which God has given you, are given for this very purpose, that they may be employed in promoting the best interests of mankind." (CL 1.371)

For Coleridge's Estlin, religion is a trade to which the practitioner should devote his powers and talents and thereby promote the "best interests" of the whole. Estlin's imagined advice, Coleridge writes, "should be decisive on my conduct, if I could see any reason why my exertions for Christianity & practical Religion depend ... on my becoming a stipendiary & regular minister" (CL 1.371). Opposed to the interested employment of "a stipendiary & regular minister" in Northern England is the disinterested and innocent intellectual lire Coleridge envisions as made possible by the annuity.

Although Coleridge claimed in July 1796 that "local and temporary Politics are my aversion" (CL 1.222), from 1794 to 1798, the period to which we owe his early poetry, Coleridge hardly rejected explicitly political and religious discourses in favor of the poetic and hermeneutic writings for which he is most often remembered. Numerous studies have examined Coleridge's political,(5) religious,(6) and philosophical(7) development during the 1790S, and these are the terms I accordingly wish to keep in play.(8) After the Bristol political lectures of February 1795 and the religious lectures of May to June, after the publication of The Watchman ceased in May 1796, and especially after the trip to Germany from September 1798 to July 1799, Coleridge's aversion to "local and temporary Politics" seems to accord well with his proclaimed "love of `the Great', & `the Whole'" (CL 1.354), his devotion to the vast and universal: "My mind feels as if it ached to behold & know something great--something one & indivisible" (CL 1.349). Opposed to the universal is the particular, the "local and temporary," what Coleridge refers to as "parts--and all parts are necessarily little" (CL 1.354). Following Jerome McGann's influential study of 1983 and the work of historicist critics such as Marjorie Levinson and Alan Liu, many readers of romantic poetry have seen this rejection of the particular in favor of the universal as a defining moment of "Romantic Ideology," the celebration of the private, internal, and ideal and, conversely, the repression of the public, external, and material.(9) The paradigm of the romantic poet is thus shaped by the disinterested aesthetic judgment of Kant's third critique, and Coleridge's growth away from his early associationism, Unitarianism, and radicalism comes to represent the triumph of romantic ideology over the material interests and political particularities of late-eighteenth-century life.

I argue, however, that what Coleridge rejects is, to a significant degree, the legacy of old middle-class Dissent, the commercialist culture of Arminian and Arian nonconformity.(10) Whereas many critics discuss Coleridge's nonconformist religion in the 1790s, they frequently fail to distinguish between Unitarianism, to which Coleridge came from the Church of England at age 21, and the old Dissent of Presbyterian and General Baptist families, especially in the north of England. A clear distinction between the Dissenting beliefs of Coleridge and the Dissenting culture of provincial nonconformity explains how the disinterested community imagined by Coleridge in his political and religious writings of the mid 1790s informs the conversation poems of 1796-1802. Coleridge's resistance to the commercial interests of Northern old Dissent, I propose, corresponds to his opposition to property in the Bristol lectures, which I discuss in order to demonstrate the connection between Coleridge's religion and his vision of an ideal community, the "small but glorious band ... of thinking and disinterested Patriots" (CC 1.40) in Conciones ad Populum (1795).(11) These political and religious writings of the mid-1790s, then, serve as the primary context for the conversation poems, providing the opportunity for a reevaluation of "Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement," in relation, especially, to "The Eolian Harp" and "Frost at Midnight."

1. Coleridge's Unitarianism, Dissent, and Commerce

Coleridge's Unitarianism represents a relatively late development in eighteenth-century Dissenting sectarianism. Whereas the Socinian doctrine survives from the sixteenth century, the English sect in its Enlightenment form becomes recognizable in the 1770s, with Joseph Priestley's defenses of Socinianism in pamphlets and sermons and with the foundation of the Essex Street congregation by Theophilus Lindsey in 1774.(12) Although late eighteenth-century Unitarianism represents a discrete phenomenon, it has often been indiscriminately described along with the other branches of Dissent. One salient example of this failure to discriminate between distinct communities is Burke's scornful attack in the Reflections on Richard Price for encouraging Dissent for its own sake: Let the noble teachers but dissent, it is no matter from whom or from what. This great point once secured, it is taken for granted their religion will be rational and manly. I doubt whether religion would reap all the benefits which the calculating divine computes from this "great company of preachers." It would certainly be a valuable addition of nondescripts to the ample collection of known classes, genera and species, which at present beautify the hortus siccus of dissent.(13)

Burke's famous reduction of Dissent to a hortus siccus in the eighteenth century, echoed by Hazlitt in the nineteenth, represents an early moment in a long tradition that has affected both those hostile and sympathetic to religious dissidence. For many writers before and since Burke, Dissent has been divided into various classes, genera, and species, but essentially these have too often conformed to one unified image of Enlightenment rationality and Whiggish opposition to the establishment in Church and State. The "great point" of their Dissent from the Church of England homogenizes the collective identities of Dissenters and flattens the very real cultural and social distinctions that accompany their theological differences.

Especially in idiosyncratic cases such as Coleridge, however, Dissent needs to be understood with a particularity seldom afforded in critical treatments of religion in late-eighteenth-century and romantic literature and culture. The case of Coleridge in the 1790s demands that we treat Dissent in precise terms if it is to tell us anything new about his early positions and productions, for several strands of Dissenting religion come together in the history of Coleridge's early romanticism. More extreme in its rationalist creed of Christ's humanity than Arminian and Arian Presbyterianism was the outright Socinianism of the Unitarians, the group with which Coleridge is commonly identified from his undergraduate experience at Cambridge in early 1794 until his dramatic return to Orthodoxy in Malta in February 1805. Converts to Unitarianism in the late eighteenth century generally came out of Puritan Calvinism through the moderate Arminian Presbyterian tradition, of the Warrington Academy, for instance, or from the Church of England. Many, like Richard Price and Joseph Priestley, were born and raised as Calvinists but were acculturated by the Arminian communities of middle-class Dissent and the nonconformist academies through which they passed to Arianism and finally Socinianism. Some members of the Church of England, such as Gilbert Wakefield and Estlin, became Unitarians after a similarly long process of acculturation atone of the academies. Others, like Coleridge and Robert Southey, left the Church of England directly for the more rational and politically appealing religion of Unitarian Dissent. The primary cultural distinctions within the Unitarian community, then, were between Arminian Dissent and the Church of England, with Coleridge of course emerging from the latter.

The late eighteenth century was a period in which the cultural associations of religious groups were particularly strong and pervasive. Dissent was often accompanied by a broad political identity beyond the specifically partisan issue of the Corporation and Test Acts: parliamentary reform for a more equal representation, "Wilkes and Liberty" in the late 1760s, support for Corsican independence and the American colonies in the 1760s and 70s, "Wyvill and Reform" in the early 1780s, abolition of the slave trade and the boycott on sugar in the 1780s and 90s, and opposition to the war with revolutionary France in the mid 1790s. These positions over three decades contributed to the widespread association of Dissent with political dissidence, and, as Charles James Fox among others pointed out, in the heated atmosphere of the early 1790s this dissidence could all too easily be branded sedition. In his popular pamphlet, A Letter ... to the Worthy and Independent Electors of the City and Liberty of Westminster (1793), Fox sought to restrain the spirit of intolerance directed against Dissenters especially following the Birmingham Riots of July 1791: In such a state ... we extend the prejudices which we have conceived against individuals to the political party or even to the religious `sect of which they are members. In this spirit a judge declared from the bench, in the last century, that poisoning was a Popish trick, and I should not be surprised if Bishops were not to preach from the pulpit that sedition is a Presbyterian or a Unitarian vice.(14)

It was perhaps this seditious edge of Unitarianism that attracted Coleridge, for whom William Frend's trial at Cambridge in May 1793 for sedition and defamation of the Church served as an introduction to political activism. In the first issue of The Watchman, dated March 1, 1796, Coleridge writes, "... the very act of dissenting from established opinions must generate habits precursive to the love of freedom."(15) For Coleridge, whose upbringing under his father John Coleridge, vicar of Ottery St. Mary in Devon, was, as J. Robert Barth puts it, "unexceptionably Anglican" (Barth 291), Unitarianism could represent the general "habits" of dissidence without bearing the "habitus," to recall Bourdieu's term, of Dissent.(16) Unlike those who came to Unitarianism through Dissenting culture, Coleridge can embrace "the very act of dissenting" in practically the same terms as those in which Burke rejects it: "Let the noble teachers but dissent...." In the absence of the material habitus of old Dissent, Coleridge's Unitarian Christianity represents a language of dissidence removed from and opposed to, particularly with respect to his rejection of commerce and property, the language of Dissent with which it is too readily identified. Whereas the middle-class alliance of Arminian religion with commerce can be traced to the families of old liberal Dissent--an education at the Presbyterian Warrington Academy was advertised to be "well calculated for those that are to be engag'd in a commercial Lire, as well as the Learned Professions"(17)--Coleridge and other intellectual Unitarians who grew up in the Church of England and were not associated with the nonconformist academies generally reject the bourgeois Whig celebration of trade as central to English identity.

What Barth dismissively calls Coleridge's "flirtation with Unitarianism" (291) thus represents a formative stage in his self-construction as a philosopher and poet. This early romantic figure might be described as a minister with an unconditional annuity instead of a regular stipend, and it would be easy to see in such a pastoral but vocationless calling an early anticipation of what Coleridge will later refer to as the "Clerisy" in On the Constitution of the Church and State 0830). But, as Kelvin Everest has argued, Coleridge's ideal community in the 1790s, although it resembles the clerisy in terms of its longing for a small intellectual elite, challenges fundamental aspects of establishment power and culture, whereas the clerisy will invariably support the status quo (Everest 90). The transition from Coleridge's "small but glorious band ... of thinking and disinterested Patriots" (CC 1.40) in Conciones ad Populum (1795), discussed in the next section, to the conservative clerisy, from Hartleian materialism to Kantian idealism, and from Unitarianism to Orthodoxy (Everest 86), has been taken to represent various versions of romantic apostasy, disenchantment, reversal, disillusionment, and retreat. Although readers of Coleridge have benefitted from critical assessments of this tell-tale romantic narrative, aptly named "the Bishop of Llandaff's slide" by E. P. Thompson (179),(18) my present purpose is to understand Coleridge's Unitarianism in the 1790s on its own terms, and these are the terms of his Socinian, Hartleian, and egalitarian nonconformity.

2. The Bristol Lectures: Domestic Affections and Perfect Equality

For Coleridge in the mid-1790s, the abolition of property was intended to transform familial lire into the model community first articulated in the Pantisocracy scheme but most fully developed in the Bristol Lectures. His interest in domesticity was indebted to Hartley's concept of "Sociality." For Hartley, sociality is "the Pleasure which we take in the mere Company and Conversation of others, particularly of our Friends and Acquaintance, and which is attended with mutual Affability, Complaisance, and Candour."(19) Children associate the presence of " Parents, Attendants, or Playfellows" with pleasure, and thus "according to the Doctrine of Association, Children ought to be pleased, in general, with the Sight and Company of all their Acquaintance" (Hartley 1: 472). The "Affections by which we rejoice at the Happiness of others" (Hartley 1: 472), and thereby associate the pleasures of others with our own, lead us to equate self-interest with benevolence, or as Coleridge sometimes calls it, "Philanthropy." Coleridge memorably borrows from this Hartleian process in an early letter to Southey, written in July 1794: The ardour of private Attachments makes Philanthropy a necessary habit of the Soul. I love my Friend--such as he is, all mankind are or might be! The deduction is evident--Philanthropy (and indeed every other Virtue) is a thing of Concretion--Some home-born Feeling is the center of the Ball, that, rolling on thro' Life collects and assimilates every congenial Affection. (CL 1.86)

Philanthropy is a "thing of Concretion," and the process of concretion depends on the rolling energy generated by the "home-born Feeling" at the center of the ball. As for Hartley, familial relations in the home provide the origin and engine of benevolence.

In his fifth lecture on revealed religion, delivered in early June 1795 in Bristol, Coleridge presents his Christianity in unequivocally Socinian and radical terms that bring together familial affections and "perfect Equality": That there is one God infinitely wise, powerful and good, and that a future state of Retribution is made certain by the Resurrection of Jesus who is the Messiah--are all the doctrines of the Gospel. That Christians must behave towards the majority with loving kindness and submission preserving among themselves a perfect Equality is a Synopsis of its Precepts. (CC 1.195)

Coleridge rejects "the pernicious dogma of Redemption" (CC 1.212), general or particular, and dismisses establishmentarian attempts to make the Trinity palatable to rational Christians as "the mysterious cookery of the Orthodox" (CC 1.207-8). Thus far Coleridge's Unitarianism corresponds to that of Priestley and the majority of Socinian Dissenters, but Coleridge means his audience to take him literally in his determination that, in addition to "loving kindness," Christians must preserve among themselves a "perfect Equality." Although Godwin and Priestley both favor the redistribution of goods through the progressive enlightening of the populace, neither is interested in the abolition of property. Priestley grounds his hopes for material equality in equality of rights, but, as Patton and Mann put it, "equality of goods he thought impracticable and unnecessary and of course an idea contrary to the spirit of commerce" (CC 1.lxiv). Godwin, who rejects positive rights for moral duties, assumes in Political Justice that inequality of property will gradually diminish "not by law, [or] regulation of public institution, but only through the private conviction of individuals."(20) Coleridge, on the other hand, whose Christian beliefs diverged from both the commercialist culture of Priestley's Unitarianism and the secular rationalism of Godwin's atheism, sees no reason not to accept the words of Acts 2:44-45 literally as gospel: "And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need." Coleridge's sixth lecture thus concludes, "Our Saviour by no means authorizes an Equalization of Property," but rather an abolition of property and the common possession of goods: "While I possess anything exclusively mine, the selfish Passions will have full play" (CC 1.227-28).

Coleridge's opposition to property and commerce, furthermore, informs his Jacobin hopes for the French Revolution throughout the 1790s, up to the French invasion of Switzerland in February 1798. In the eighth number of The Watchman, dated April 27, 1796, Coleridge describes the American and French Revolutions in terms of the major distinction I have been tracing between middle-class Dissenting culture and his Unitarian beliefs. In American emancipation, Coleridge writes, "we beheld an instructive speculation on the probable Loss and Gain of ... Independence; and considered the Congress as a respectable body of Tradesmen, deeply versed in the ledgers of Commerce, who well understood their own worldly concerns, and adventurously improved them" (CC 2.269). France, on the other hand, "presented a more interesting spectacle. Her great men with a profound philosophy investigated the interests common to all intellectual beings, and legislated for the WORLD.... Each heart proudly expatriated itself, and we heard with transport of the victories of Frenchmen, as the victories of Human Nature" (CC 2.269-70). The American victories of commerce were exceeded by the French "victories of Human Nature," and the French example might have led all interested individuals to "expatriate" themselves into a world of natural human beings. France presented a more interesting spectacle precisely because it appeared disinterested; to evoke Habermas' categories, the French Revolution for Coleridge potentially represented the triumph of intellectual beings, hommes, rather than a mere victory for respectable tradesmen, bourgeois.(21) But as the aftermath of the two revolutions demonstrates, if in America the adventurous protection of trade led to the limited improvement of worldly concerns, trade itself also provided a stability absent from the sanguinary progress of human nature in France. For Coleridge, then, if England was to follow France in the revolutionary liberation of human nature, another system would have to be established in order to produce a world of disinterested human beings that would be benevolent, nonviolent, and stable.

Whereas many liberals and radicals such as Southey, Wordsworth, and Thelwall for a time round this system in Political Justice--"The philosophy / That promised to abstract the hopes of man / Out of his feelings, to be fixed thenceforth / For ever in a purer element" (The Prelude, 1805)(22)--Coleridge turned to Christianity for the foundation of feeling absent from Godwin's proud philosophy of rational perfectibility. Political Justice, Coleridge writes in the third lecture on revealed religion, is insufficient and dangerous because it "discovers a total ignorance of that obvious human Fact in human nature that in virtue and in knowledge we must be infants and be nourished with milk in order that we may be men and eat strong meat" (CC 1.164). The end of perfect equality must be accompanied by the means of loving kindness, the milk that will prepare men for the consumption of stronger meat. The figure of Jesus as a domestic human being, a son and friend, not a God to be worshipped, constitutes the object of Coleridge's Unitarian faith. In the third religious lecture, this same Jesus who preaches loving kindness and perfect equality consequently emerges as the Hartleian principle of concretion at the center of the ball: "We find in Jesus nothing of that Pride which affects to inculcate benevolence while it does away every home-born Feeling, by which it is produced and nurtured .... Jesus was a Son, and he cast the Eye of Tenderness and careful regard on his Mother Mary, even while agonizing on the Cross. Jesus was a Friend, and he wept at the Tomb of Lazarus" (CC 1162-63). Coleridge returns to the "home-born Feeling" and explicitly describes his faith in terms of Hartleian associationism. Jesus is the son, parent, and friend, the man of sensibility who pays the passing tribute of a sigh at the tomb of Lazarus. He is the essence of sociality: "Jesus knew our Nature--and that expands like the circles of a Lake--the Love of our Friends, parents and neighbours lead[s] us to the love of our Country to the love of all Mankind" (CC 1.163). Familial and social life, then, made disinterested by the abolition of property--"perfect equality"--constitutes the Unitarian foundation of that philanthropic community of Christian disciples conceived by Coleridge in the Bristol lectures, the "deeply principled Minority, which gradually absorbing kindred minds shall at last become the whole" (CC 1.218).

The clearest statement of this ideal community comes in Coleridge's political lecture delivered in late January or early February 1795. There Coleridge divides "the professed Friends of Liberty" (CC 1.37) into four classes.(23) The first class is composed of "dough-baked Patriots" who unreflectingly "give an indolent Vote in favour of Reform" (CC 1.37-38). The next refers to the working-class members of the corresponding societies and the audiences at Thelwall's lectures: "Wilder features characterize the second class ... they listen only to the inflammatory harangues of some mad-headed Enthusiast, and imbibe from them Poison, not Food; Rage, not Liberty" (CC 1.38). The third, considerably less wild, is composed of Dissenting middle-class reformers: They pursue the interests of Freedom steadily, but with narrow and self-centering views: they anticipate with exultation the abolition of privileged orders, and of Acts that persecute by exclusion from the right of citizenship.... Whatever is above them they are most willing to drag down; but every proposed alteration, that would elevate the ranks of our poorer brethren, they regard with suspicious jealousy, as the dreams of the visionary. (CC 1.39)

The "Acts that persecute by exclusion" are the Corporation and Test Acts, and the "narrow and self-centering views" are the values of middle-class culture that Coleridge would have known from the Dissenting circles opened to him by his Unitarianism. Like "Gunpowder Priestley," these reformers are radical with respect to the establishment, but the "interests of Freedom" for them often coincide with their own commercial interests.

The fourth class, however, contains the potential to absorb the previous three into a new social order. This community incorporates Coleridge's philosophical, political, and religious ideals: "We turn with pleasure to the contemplation of that small but glorious band, whom we may truly distinguish by the name of thinking and disinterested Patriots. These are the men who have encouraged the sympathetic passions till they have become irresistible habits, and made their duty a necessary part of their self-interest" (CC 1.40). Hartleian in terms of their associationist progress from sympathy to benevolence, Godwinian in their equation of duty and self-interest, these patriots provide a model of equality that will gradually make kindred minds of the wavering reformers, the incendiary working-classes, and the narrow and self-centered Dissenting tradesmen. The political and philosophical process of absorbing these kindred minds, furthermore, resonates with the vocabulary of nature that for Coleridge always opens out to religious experience: Accustomed to regard all the affairs of man as a progress, they never hurry and they never pause. Theirs is not that twilight of political knowledge which gives us just light enough to place one foot before the other; as they advance the scene still opens upon them, and they press right onward with a vast and various landscape of existence around them. (CC 1.40)

This "vast and various landscape" provides the setting for the affairs of men regarded not as the competitive dealings of the bourgeois but as the disinterested actions of human beings pure and simple, as the steady process through which, in the conversation poems, God's love can express itself as enlightenment, benevolence, and omnipresence.

3. Early Romanticism and

"Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement"

The rhetorical mode perfected in the conversation poems has justly received much critical attention, for it has come to represent the evolution of the prospect poetry of Denham, Pope, and Gray and the informal style of Cowper and Akenside into the romantic lyric. The early romantic quality of this lyric poetry, then, is its attempt to bridge the gap between thought and nature, subject and object, in order to produce the third and higher term of the romantic imagination.(24) This dialectic of interior mind and external world, "the Romantic interfusion of subject and object" (Abrams 550), is of course the defining feature of M. H. Abrams' greater romantic lyric. For Abrams, the sonnets of Bowles provide Coleridge with an important but ultimately insufficient fusion of the mind and nature. Bowles' sonnets, writes Coleridge, "create a sweet and indissoluble union between the intellectual and the material world,"(25) but in the conversation poems, according to Abrams, Coleridge creates what he calls the art of "coadunating Imagination" (549), an art that transcends the mere fancy of Bowles' sonnets. The imaginative dialectic of mind and nature absent from Bowles leads Coleridge to the higher assertion of "one life within us and abroad," as famously expressed in "The Eolian Harp" when revised for Sibylline Leaves (1817).(26) The philosophical correlate of Coleridge's unified "one life" theory is the post-Kantian project of German idealism, the rejection of the materialist duality between elemental mind and nature. For Abrams the first glimpse of this romantic imagination comes in the earliest conversation poems: "Even in 1797, while Coleridge was still a Hartleian associationist ... he had expressed his recoil from elementarist thinking" (545). Abrams' seminal argument, persuasive as it is, transports post-Kantian philosophy and Coleridge's definition of fancy and imagination in the Biographia Literaria (1817) back onto the conversation poems of 1796-1802. In addition to looking forward, however, "Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement" represents an astonishing contemporary synthesis of Coleridge's responses, in the 1790s, to the culture of old Dissent. I examine "Reflections" in relation to "The Eolian Harp," its companion piece, and conclude with a brief discussion of "Frost at Midnight," Coleridge's most celebrated accomplishment in the conversational form.(27)

The community imagined by Coleridge in these poems depends on a mode of religious conversation. So many rhetorical traditions--the Horatian ode, the pastoral lyric, the loco-descriptive poem, the elegiac meditation--contribute to the conversational genre that its status as a religious form bears further examination. Whereas the term "conversation" is generally applied retrospectively from the subtitle of"The Nightingale" in Lyrical Ballads (1798), the Horatian motto to "Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement," the second of Coleridge's meditative poems in blank verse, suggests an important association of the conversational mode with religious discourse. Written in November 1795 and first published in the Monthly Magazine in October 1796, the poem was originally titled "Reflections on entering into active life. A Poem which affects not to be Poetry." In the second edition of Poems (1797) and thereafter, the title is "Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement," and the motto from Horace, "Sermoni propriora," is added. Keach translates this as "more akin to prose" in his notes to the poem (Keach 466), and given the 1796 subtitle, "A Poem which affects not to be Poetry," and Horace's original "propiora" ("nearer to"), such a translation is acceptable.(28) Coleridge's punning corruption, "propriora," however, gives the sense of "properer for," and his translation of the uncorrupted form in his disappointed assessment of Bowles' second volume of poems (1802) confirms the inescapable sense of a religious sermon: "They are `Sermoni propiora' which I once translated--`Properer for a Sermon'" (CL 2.864).(29) The Latin sermo, furthermore, the word that describes Horace's Satires, means literally not simply "prose" but more precisely "conversation." Horace's Satires, then, like Coleridge's poems, are "sermoni prop(r)iora," closer to or more proper for a Coleridgean "sermon" or "conversation."

The mainstream of English romantic poetry, in this sense, emerges not just from Wordsworth's "far more philosophical ... real language of men,"(30) but from the "real language" of sermons and religious lectures--Coleridge later refers to Conciones as "the first of my `Lay-sermons'" (CC 1.25n)--as they merge, for Coleridge, with conversation. A revised fair copy of "Fears in Solitude," signed "S.T.C.," contains the following note: "N.B. The above is perhaps hot Poetry,--but rather a sort of middle thing between Poetry and Oratory--sermoni propriora" (Keach 466). The conversation poems are composed, then, on the middle ground between poetry and oratory--sermons--not between poetry and prose. Whereas the later Coleridge will substitute metaphysics as the counterbalance to poetry, in the 1790s this role is played by the ideas and values that inform Coleridge's religious oratory, his lay-sermons, which I have been discussing. The lectures in which Coleridge conceives his egalitarian Christian community thus convey the religious discourse most nearly akin to Coleridge's conversational language in these early romantic lyrics.

Clearly companion pieces, "The Eolian Harp" and "Reflections" were written three months apart in 1795 and were published back-to-back in Poems (1797) and all subsequent editions during Coleridge's lifetime. Both begin with synesthetic descriptions of the cottage in Clevedon and its surrounding smells, sights, and sounds. Jasmine, myrtle, and the murmuring sea initiate processes of interior reflection--philosophical in "The Eolian Harp," social and political in "Reflections"--that lead to statements of piety before the poems complete the rondo form, ending again at the cottage. More overtly than "The Eolian Harp," "Reflections" is about the social and political world in which Unitarian Christianity might reconcile the actual and the ideal.

Both poems initiate their distinctive patterns of expansion and contraction (Gerard 311) by internal full stops that separate the first two sections. Having described the external world of the cottage and its surroundings, the "white-flower'd Jasmin, and the broad-leav'd Myrtle" (4), "The Eolian Harp" contracts in the break within line 12 to the definite object, "that simplest Lute": "The stilly murmur of the distant Sea / Tells us of Silence. And that simplest Lute / Plac'd length-ways in the clasping casement, hark!" (11-13). Marked by a line break in Sibylline Leaves, the contraction to the harp allows the speaker's perspective to expand to the visionary imagery of "twilight Elfins" and "Faery Land" (21-22). This interaction between the mind and the immediate exterior world then contracts the perspective into philosophical reflection upon the process itself, in the second verse paragraph, where the poet considers how the previous "idle and flitting phantasies" (32) traversed his "indolent and passive brain" (33). The philosophical association of his mind with the lute--the two objects of contraction--then culminates in the famous second expansion from nature to God: And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversly fram'd, That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all? (36-40)

"Reflections" follows this pattern as well, but the internal full stop in line 9 between the opening scene of external nature and the first contraction leads to a different object of immediate perception in place of the harp: Low was our pretty Cot: our tallest rose Peeped at the chamber-window. We could hear At silent noon, and eve, and early morn, The sea's faint murmur. In the open air Our Myrtles blossomed; and across the porch Thick jasmins twined: the little landscape round Was green and woody, and refreshed the eye. It was a spot which you might aptly call The Valley of Seclusion! Once I saw (Hallowing his Sabbath-day by quietness) A wealthy son of commerce saunter by, Bristowa's citizen ... (1-12)

Whereas the lute leads the poet to reflect upon the processes of perception and reflection, and these Reflections produce the philosophical statement of similitude between the wind-swept harp and the "organic" harp (37) of the poet's mind, "Reflections" replaces the lute with another responsive object, Bristol's "wealthy son of commerce" (11). Line 12 continues: methought, it calmed His thirst of idle gold, and made him muse With wiser feelings: for he paused, and looked With a pleased sadness, and gazed all round, Then eyed our Cottage, and gazed round again, And sighed, and said, it was a Blessed Place. And we were blessed. (12-18)

If the harp responds to the wind by producing "long sequacious notes" (19), the "wealthy son of commerce" responds to "The Valley of Seclusion" (9) and its "little landscape" (6) with both an internal adjustment of values, "wiser feelings" (14), and a benediction (17-18). Because he will return to his propertied existence as "Bristowa's citizen," the adjustment will not last. But, like the Ancient Mariner, he "blesse[s] them unaware," and for the moment he does so, he is transformed. These sequacious notes, the sigh and blessing elicited from Bristol's citizen by the spot of natural beauty and domestic love before him, then expand the poet's consciousness to a visionary apprehension of the "viewless sky-lark's note" (19), which the poet translates to his "beloved" (22): "Such, sweet Girl! The inobtrusive song of happiness, Unearthly minstrelsy! then only heard When the soul seeks to hear; when all is hushed, And the heart listens!" (22-26)

In place of the "soft floating witchery of sound" made by the "twilight Elfins" (20-21) in "The Eolian Harp," the "Unearthly minstrelsy" (24) here concludes the out-in-out progression from external nature to immediate object to visionary experience.

But what precisely is the visionary experience in "Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement"? It is the result of the poet's perceptions of a "son of commerce" as he views the poet's familial community of loving kindness in surroundings of natural beauty. The scene's beauty calms the citizen's "thirst of idle gold," transforming him temporarily from the interested bourgeois of Bristol's bustling commercial society into the disinterested and philosophical "Eolian" human being who muses wisely and sighs. And these sighs, as they merge with the skylark's song, produce in the poet a reciprocal movement between the inner self and the exterior world: the soul actively "seeks to hear" and the heart "listens," but the external "song of happiness" can only be apprehended if the skylark sings and if "all is hushed." Every moment of communal transformation in the opening of the poem, indeed, is enabled by a form of silence: the poet first mentions himself and his beloved as able to hear "At silent noon ... / The sea's faint murmur" (3-4); the son of commerce is introduced as "Hallowing his Sabbath-day by quietness" (10); and the unearthly minstrelsy of the skylark's "inobtrusive song of happiness" (23) is only heard "when all is hushed" (25). The visionary experience, then, is a simple statement of contentment spoken to the poet's beloved and enabled by both the internal action of the mind and the external song of nature, an "inobtrusive" song only heard because the world is silent.

Unlike "The Eolian Harp," which proceeds from its first expansion (1725) to philosophical reflection (26-44), "Reflections" inserts another verse paragraph between the "Unearthly minstrelsy" and the poem's major reflective passage (43-62). In the second paragraph the poet leaves the Valley of Seclusion with its dell and cottage, but before entering active lire he climbs "up the stony mount" (27) and looks out upon a scene of sublimity. Again, the perception of definite objects, the sheep, clouds, and rocks of "the goodly scene" (29-32), produces an expansion of perspective. Whereas beauty in the first stanza acts on the son of commerce, causing him momentarily to forego the interests of commerce for the blessings of rural domestic life, sublimity in the second stanza moves the poet to a vision of the divine. Now looking down from the top of the mount on the same "little landscape" (6) and its environs, he exclaims: It seemed like Omnipresence! God, methought, Had built him there a Temple: the whole World Seemed imaged in its vast circumference, No wish profaned my overwhelmed heart. Blest hour! It was a luxury,--to be! (38-42)

From this distant and high perspective, opposed to the near landscape of the "low dell" (27) is the "vast circumference" (40) of a world in which God is omnipresent. As in the beautiful dell where the son of commerce renounces his thirst for gold, in such a sublime world there can be no wish, no interest, to profane the heart.

The poet's community, before he leaves it to enter active life in the third paragraph, thus unfolds in two stages, the beautiful and the sublime. The "green and woody" (7) landscape figures forth the domestic love that moves the son of commerce momentarily to relinquish self-interest for benevolence. The "mount sublime" (43) then inspires the poet with a vision of God's omnipresence and another renunciation of interest. The small community of the poet, the beloved, and, for so long as he is transformed, the son of commerce, represents a domestic sphere of love whose members can apprehend the language of God because the drone of business has ceased for this silent sabbath day. "Reflections," the least read of the conversation poems, provides perhaps the most precise poetic statement of Coleridge's ideal community: rural, egalitarian, domestic, affective, and enabled by disinterested lire that apprehends the omnipresence of God.

But as with Christ's disciples in the religious lectures and the glorious band of Conciones ad Populum, this community represents not a retreat from the world but rather a progressive agent of social and political transformation. The poem, after all, is about leaving the Valley of Seclusion and entering active lire. The central reflective paragraph begins, "Ah! quiet Dell! dear Cot, and mount sublime! / I was constrained to quit you" (43-44). "Reflections," it should be recalled, was written upon Coleridge's return from retirement in Clevedon to active life in Bristol. Specifically, the active lire to which Coleridge returned was that of November 1795, the same month in which Conciones ad Populum was published and one month before the conception of The Watchman. Both were considered by Coleridge to be vehicles for religious as well as political discourse: just as Coleridge considered Conciones to be a "Lay-sermon," The Watchman, begun to finance the Pantisocracy scheme, was intended to imitate England's principal Unitarian journal, Benjamin Flower's The Cambridge Intelligencer.(31) Akin to these lay-sermon forms, the conversation poem does not renounce "retirement in favour of humanitarian activity," as a common reading would have it,(32) but rather insists that the community imagined in retirement must provide the model that will absorb kindred spirits through useful participation in active life: "retirement was a complement, rather than an alternative, to political intervention in the 1790s" (Leask 13).

Coleridge's transition to this active lire evokes a well-known Dissenting figure embodying both humanitarian benevolence and genuine sensibility. The poet reflects: Was it right, While my unnumbered brethren toiled and bled, That I should dream away the entrusted hours On rose-leaf beds, pampering the coward heart With feelings all too delicate for use? Sweet is the tear that from some Howard's eye Drops on the cheek of one he lifts from earth ... (44-50)

To "dream away" the hours in the Valley of Seclusion or on the mountain-top is certainly not "right," according to the paragraph's ethos of utility, but this is not to say that the community of retirement is simply to be rejected once the poet arrives among his "unnumbered brethren." The prison reformer John Howard here represents a figure of sensibility whose feelings are not "too delicate for use," an active man of feeling who sheds a tear as he assists the infirm and oppressed. Unlike the tears of those "Who sigh for wretchedness, yet shun the wretched, / Nursing in some delicious solitude / Their slothful loves and dainty sympathies!" (57-59), Howard's pious drops portray an affective utility. Love is active, not "slothful"; in retirement it moves the son of commerce to sigh and bless, and so too will it act in public life. The paragraph ends: "I therefore go, and join head, heart, and hand, / Active and firm, to fight the bloodless fight / Of Science, Freedom, and the Truth in Christ" (60-62). The juxtaposition of the two parallel sets of triple terms is telling: the head and science, the heart and freedom, the hand and truth in Christ. The critique of Godwin implicit in Coleridge's call to join head and heart is clear. The association of the hand with Christian truth, however, moves beyond opposition to Godwin's rational atheism to a summation of Coleridge's activist and disinterested community. Unlike the French Revolution, this fight will be "bloodless" not because it will end in the stability of commercial life, but because its utility will be informed by the benevolent society of retirement. The community that joins science, freedom, and the truth in Christ is conceived through reflection on retirement, but it only exists in active life, metonymically as the head, heart, and hand of "some Howard" who thinks and feels as he does works of good.

Like the humble statement of praise with which "The Eolian Harp" concludes, the last paragraph of "Reflections" pulls back from its overly bold rhetoric to end, back at the cottage, with a simple prayer: Yet oft when after honourable toil Rests the tired mind, and waking loves to dream, My spirit shall revisit thee, dear Cot! Thy jasmin and thy window-peeping rose, And myrtles fearless of the mild sea-air. And I shall sigh fond wishes--sweet abode! Ah!--had none greater! And that all had such! It might be so--but the time is not yet. Speed it, O Father! Let thy kingdom come! (63-71)

Even though "honourable toil" has removed the poet from the peaceful dell, as in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" (1798) the memory of retirement produces both "tranquil restoration" and that blessed mood "of aspect more sublime ... / While with an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, / We see into the life of things" (LB 114). On the one hand, the poet's sighs and fond wishes revive the fatigued mind, but the memory of the dell also culminates in the "visionary" statement and millenarian prayer of the last two lines. I qualify "visionary" because, whereas Wordsworth's ability to "see into the life of things" and Coleridge's apprehension of "one life within us and abroad" in "The Eolian Harp" can correspond to the philosophical-idealist visions of romantic perception to which our tastes are accustomed, "Reflections" presents a social and political vision in Coleridge's idiosyncratic religious terms. "The dreams of the visionary" dismissed by self-interested Dissenters and acted upon by the glorious band in Conciones ad Populum are somewhat alien to readers of our more secular era because they represent another kind of early romantic vision, but one which is nonetheless central to Coleridge's thought as he writes and delivers his lectures and composes the conversation poems, his sermones. "It might be so--but the time is not yet," begins the transition to the closing prayer. In the present time the memory of the cottage revives the spirit of the poet for usefulness, but in the contemporary world of competition and interest all do not have such reflections to join head, heart, and hand. However, it might be so, and this is the actual visionary and millennial state for which the poet prays in the last line: "Speed it, O Father! Let thy kingdom come." The kingdom of God, the unitary and loving father, will exist in the actual truth of Christ, the human son of Mary and friend of Lazarus, whose disciples in the late eighteenth century will act in public life not as the interested and selfish bourgeois sons of commerce, but as the disinterested and benevolent human sons of God.

If in "Reflections" the poet translates the skylark's song for his beloved, "Frost at Midnight" is an extended translation of "that eternal language, which thy God / Utters, who from eternity doth teach / Himself in all, and all things in himself" (60-62). "Frost at Midnight" maintains the community and language of retirement imagined three years earlier but sheds explicit reference to the nexus of social and political values that all the conversation poems navigate. Indeed, the poem that articulates the language of God was composed precisely after Coleridge had weighed his future in the decision, with which I began, to accept the Wedgwoods' annuity. On January 14, 1798, Coleridge preached a sermon at the Unitarian chapel at Shrewsbury; on January 16 he wrote from Shrewsbury to Estlin, requesting his advice; on January 17 he wrote Josiah Wedgwood Jr., again from Shrewsbury, in order to accept the annuity; on January 30 he returned to Bristol and spent a week at Cote House with the Wedgwoods; "Frost at Midnight" was then composed during February 1798.(33) The opening line of the poem, "The frost performs its secret ministry," was thus written immediately following Coleridge's decision not to perform the Unitarian ministry himself in a small commercial town in Northern England.

The "abstruser musings" (6) of" Frost at Midnight" take place in specific surroundings: "Sea, hill, and wood, / This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood, / With all the numberless goings-on of life, / Inaudible as dreams!" (10--13). The populous village is Nether Stowey in Somerset, but it very well might have been Shrewsbury in Shropshire: it is worth asking how inaudible the numberless goings-on of life would have been in a northern commercial town on the Ellesmere Canal rather than in this rural village near Coleridge's native Devon. In the sixth lecture on revealed religion, Coleridge writes, "in Cities God is everywhere removed from our Sight and Man obtruded upon us--not Man, the work of God, but the debased offspring of Luxury and Want" (CC 1.224-25). On the one hand, the language of God, like the vision of God, is something external to be perceived, and thus commercial cities block the sight just as they drown out the sound. But on the other, "we receive but what we give," and the language of God is thus as much to be passively heard as actively spoken. If the din of cities interferes with our passive perception, the interested lives we lead in cities equally inhibit our active speech.

The ability to speak over the commotion of urban commerce and its interior correlate, self-interest, is the principal consequence of Coleridge's ideal community. In "Frost at Midnight," this initially seems to be a community of one: The inmates of my cottage, all at rest, Have left me to that solitude, which suits Abstruser musings: save that at my side My cradled infant slumbers peacefully. (4-7)

The infant at first seems to sleep like every other inmate of the cottage, and the transition "save that" seems slightly peculiar. The infant is asleep, and besides the inanimate movement of the frost, the poet's is the only active presence. His solitude leads him to reflect on the extreme silence of the populous village (10-13), and his sight then fills on his fireplace: "Only that film, which fluttered on the grate, / Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing" (15-16). The motion of the film, the poet thinks, "Gives it dim sympathies with me who live, / Making it a companionable form" (18-19). The poet thus seems to have two active or "unquiet" companions, the frost that performs its ministry and the film that flutters on the grate, but there is of course a third, more intimate presence, revealed at the outset of the philosophical paragraph in which the poet apprehends the "eternal language" of God: Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side, Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm, Fill up the interspersed vacancies And momentary pauses of the thought! (44-47)

The passage elicits the sudden and arresting realization that over the "extreme silentness" of the entire poem has been and can still be heard the out-in-out sound of an infant's gentle breathings. This movement of expansion and contraction, the systolic and diastolic act of human respiration, the muscular motion that drives life, is the same involuntary motion that allows conversation itself, and, on a formal level, that produces the conversation poems. The ability to speak the language of God is as involuntary as the spreading frost "unhelped by any wind," the heated gases shimmering in the grate, or the contractions and expansions of human lungs. For that matter, it is also as involuntary as Hartleian sociality: "Jesus knew our Nature--and that expands like the circles of a Lake" (CC 1.163). The language of God is not just the secret ministry of the frost, the fluttering film, and the breath of the babe; it is the involuntary social principle of concretion, the circular ripples expanding in a lake, the home-born feeling that in the absence of property could permanently transform sons of commerce into human beings pure and simple. Only when no interest profanes the heart can the systolic and diastolic movements that enable life and structure the conversation poems fuse nature and humanity into one higher language.

God thus speaks through the human body and mind, and that voice is apprehended and materialized in the acts of a disinterested and loving community in natural surroundings. "Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement" speaks this language in the socio-political terms of Unitarian Dissent. The Coleridgean language that became early romanticism, then, was that in which he defined his dissident Unitarian beliefs against middle-class Dissenting culture. "The Eolian Lyre" and "Frost at Midnight" express this dialectical language in the philosophical-religious vocabulary that came to define the early romantic voice. But, as "Reflections" affirms, that conversational language--properer for a sermon--emerged in no small degree from the particularities of late-eighteenth-century Dissent.

I would like to thank Stuart Curran, once more, for his generosity and learning, and my colleagues at the University of Puget Sound and University of Washington who offered valuable comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this essay.

(1.) All quotations of Coleridge's poetry are from Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (London: Penguin, 1997). References to the notes from this edition are cited Keach, and line numbers are given parenthetically.

(2.) The Quakers, the fourth considerable body of Protestants outside the Church of England, were not generally included under the term "Dissenters."

(3.) For an extended analysis of this culture, see my "The `Joineriana': Anna Barbauld, the Aikin Family Circle, and the Dissenting Public Sphere," Eighteenth-Century Studios 32.4 (Summer 1999): 511-33.

(4.) S. T. Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956-71) 1.370. These volumes are hereafter cited CL.

(5.) Nicholas Roe, "Coleridge and John Thelwall: the Road to Nether Stowey," The Coleridge Connection: Essays for Thomas McFarland, ed. Richard Gravil and Molly Lefebure (New York: St. Martin's P, 1990) 60-80, The Politics of Nature: Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries (New York: St. Martin's P, 1992), Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988); Carl Ray Woodring, Politics in English Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1970), Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1961). See as well John Beer, "The `revolutionary youth' of Wordsworth and Coleridge: Another View," Critical Quarterly 19.2 (Summer 1977): 79-87; John Colmer, Coleridge: Critic of Society (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), "Coleridge and Politics," S. T. Coleridge, ed. R. L. Brett (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1971) 244-70; John Cornwell, Coleridge, Poet and Revolutionary, 1772-1804; A Critical Biography (London: A. Lane, 1973); Kelvin Everest, Coleridge's Secret Ministry: The Context of the Conversation Poems 1795-98 (Sussex: Harvester P, 1979); Paul Hamilton, Coleridge's Poetics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983); Nigel Leask, The Politics q[ Imagination in Coleridge's Critical Thought (London: Macmillan, 1988); John Morrow, Coleridge's Political Thought: Property, Morality and the Limits of Traditional Discourse (London: Macmillan, 1990); E. P. Thompson, "Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon," Power & Consciousness, ed. Conor Cruise O'Brien and William Dean Vanech (London: U of London P, 1969) 149-81.

(6.) H. W. Piper, "Coleridge and the Unitarian Consensus," The Coleridge Connection 27390; Basil Willey, "Coleridge and Religion," S. T. Coleridge 221-43, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York: Norton, 1972). See as well J. Robert Barth SJ, "Coleridge and the Church of England," The Coleridge Connection 291-307; David Jasper, Coleridge as Poet and Religious Thinker: Inspiration and Revelation (London: Macmillan, 1985); Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969); Stephen Prickett, Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976); Ronald C. Wendling, Coleridge's Progress to Christianity: Experience and Authority in Religious Faith (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1995).

(7.) M. H. Abrams, "Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric," From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, ed. F. W. Hilles and H. Bloom (New York: Oxford UP, 1965) 527-60; J. A. Appleyard, Coleridge's Philosophy of Literature: The Development of a Concept of Poetry, 1791-1819 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1965); Jerome Christensen, Coleridge's Blessed Machine of Language (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981), and "Philosophy/Literature: The Associationist Precedent for Coleridge's Late Poems," Philosophical Approaches to Literature: New Essays on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Texts, ed. William E. Cain (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1984) 27-50; Leonard W. Deen, "Coleridge and the Sources of Pantisocracy: Godwin, the Bible, and Hartley," Boston University Studies in English 5 0960: 232-45; A. C. Goodson, "Coleridge on Language: A Poetic Paradigm," Philological Quarterly 62.1 (Winter 1983): 45-68; James C. McKusick, Coleridge's Philosophy of Language (New Haven: Yale UP, 1986).

(8.) I take the following as models of criticism that have integrated these categories of Coleridge's early development: Paul Hamilton, "Coleridge and Godwin in the 1790s," The Coleridge Connection 41-59; Terence Allan Hoagwood, Politics, Philosophy, and the Production of Romantic Texts (DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 1996); Jon P. Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832 (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987); Lewis Patton and Peter Mann, "Editor's Introduction," Lectures 1795: On Politics and Religion, ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann, vol. 1 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series, no. 75 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971) xxiii-lxxx. References to the Bollingen editions are hereafter cited CC.

(9.) Marjorie Levinson, "The New Historicism: Back to the Future," Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History, ed. Marjorie Levinson (London: Blackwell, 1989) 18-63; Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989); Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983).

(10.) Arminianism opposed or qualified each of the rive points of Calvinist doctrine. The core of Arianism was the belief in Christ's pre-existence as a divine but subordinate and created being.

(11.) Isaac Kramnick writes that although Dissenters "made up 7% of the population (90% were Anglican) these nonconformists contributed some 47% of the important entrepreneurs between 1760 and 1830." Kramnick, "Religion and Radicalism: English Political Theory in the Age of Revolution," Political Theory 5.4 (November 1977): 506. Kramnick takes his figures from Everett Hagen, On the Theory of Social Change (Homewood: Dorsey P, 1962) 294-309. For a challenge to Hagen's analysis of the 92 entrepreneurs and inventors described in T. S. Ashton's The Industrial Revolution 1760-1830 (London: Oxford UP, 1948), see W. D. Rubinstein, Men of Property (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1981) 145-75. I am primarily concerned with the cultural associations of Northern Dissent with commerce during the late eighteenth century.

(12.) Socinianism, the Unitarian theology of which Priestley became the champion during the early 1780s, stressed the complete humanity of Christ; Socinians believed in his divine mission but not in his divine nature.

(13.) Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London, 1790) 15.

(14.) Charles James Fox, A Letter from the Right Honourable Charles James Fox to the Worthy and Independent Electors of the City and Liberty of Westminster (London, 1793) 13-14; qtd. in Roe (1998) 100.

(15.) S. T. Coleridge, The Watchman, ed. Patton and Mann, vol. 2 of The Collected Works 12-13.

(16.) Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984) 101-2, 123. See Moishe Postone, Edward LiPuma, and Craig Calhoun, "Introduction: Bourdieu and Social Theory," Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, ed. Calhoun et al. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993) 4: "The habitus is ... a system of dispositions that is both objective and subjective. So conceived, the habitus is the dynamic intersection of structure and action, society and the individual."

(17.) From John Seddon's circular, issued on July 11, 1754, describing the education to be offered by the proposed Academy. Qtd. in Betsy Rodgers, Georgian Chronicle: Mrs Barbauld and Her Family (London: Methuen, 1958) 33-34.

(18.) For a fascinating reassessment, see Hoagwood.

(19.) David Hartley, Observations on Man, 2 vols. (London, 1749) 1: 472.

(20.) William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 2 vols. (London, 1793) 2: 888.

(21.) Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT P, 1989) 55-56.

(22.) Bk. 10, lines 806-9. William Wordsworth, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979) 402.

(23.) First published as A Moral and Political Lecture, the essay was revised over the summer for the "Introductory Address" to Condones ad Populum, which appeared in early December. I quote from the "Introductory Address," the last revised version in the 1790s.

(24.) For the first study of the conversation poems as a discrete body, see George Maclean Harper, "Coleridge's Conversation Poems," Quarterly Review 244 (1925): 284-98. In addition to Abrams and Everest, see Richard Harter Fogle, "Coleridge's Conversation Poems," Tulane Studies in English 5 (1955): 103-10; Albert Gerard, "The Systolic Rhythm: The Structure of Coleridge's Conversation Poems," Essays in Criticism 10.3 (July 1960): 307-19; A. R. Jones, "The Conversational and other Poems," S. T. Coleridge 91-122; Max F. Schulz, "The Conversation Voice," The Poetic Voices of Coleridge: A Study of His Desire for Spontaneity and Passion for Order (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1963) 73-99; and George Watson, "The Conversation Poems," Coleridge the Poet (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966) 61-84.

(25.) Poems, by S. T. Coleridge, Second Edition (Bristol, 1797) 72. The first edition is titled Poems on various Subjects, By S. T. Coleridge (London, 1796).

(26.) The passage first appears in the Errata, following the "Preface."

(27.) "The Eolian Harp" was first published in Poems (1796) under the title "Effusion xxxv." I will continue to call the poem "The Eolian Harp," but for historical accuracy I will quote from the 1796 version (Keach 85-86).

(28.) From Horace's Satires 1.iv.42 (Keach 466).

(29.) See Richard T. Martin, "Coleridge's Use of `sermoni propriora,'" The Wordsworth Circle 3 (1972): 71-75.

(30.) William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1991) 241-45. References to this edition are hereafter cited LB.

(31.) Flower published some of Coleridge's poems in The Cambridge Intelligencer and printed Coleridge and Southey's The Fall of Robespierre (Cambridge, 1794). Coleridge praises Flower's journal in the last number of The Watchman (CC 2.374).

(32.) John Spencer Hill, A Coleridge Companion (London: Macmillan, 1983) (30).

(33.) Valerie Purton, A Coleridge Chronology (London: Macmillan, 1993) 31-32. DANIEL E. WHITE University of Toronto, Canada

DANIEL E. WHITE is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto, Erindale College. He has published essays on Anna Barbauld, Mary Shelley, and Charlotte Smith, and he is currently writing about Robert Southey and representations of Islam while completing a book entitled Religious Dissent and the Poetics of Nonconformity in the Early Romantic Period.