University of Virginia Library

Annotations by Coleridge in a Copy of The Friend (1818)
by
Peter Mann

In Barbara E. Rooke's edition of The Friend for the Collected Coleridge,[1] Appendix C provides the reader with a descriptive list of all known annotated copies of The Friend in its three-volume edition of 1818. Item 10 on this list is "Thomas Fanshaw Middleton's copy", concerning which Miss Rooke writes:

We now know, however, that Coleridge did in fact intend an annotated copy of The Friend (1818) for Bishop Middleton though it is not clear whether he received it or not, or what subsequently happened to it. On December 31, 1820, Coleridge wrote to the Rev. H. F. Carey that he was about to prepare a packet containing "a corrected Copy of my Friend and of the Lay Sermons". Carey's son, William, who was about to embark for India with his regiment, was to deliver the packet to Middleton, along with a letter of introduction from Coleridge which had been particularly requested by Mrs. Carey. Coleridge would have liked to send Middleton a copy of Biographia Literaria as well, but it was out of print and he had no copy available.[3] It is uncertain whether William Carey was able to receive the packet before embarkation, for on January 8, 1821, Coleridge wrote again to H. F. Carey expressing his anxiety about its fate. "I am left uncertain whether the Parcel sent from here on Wednesday last and inclosing the Books and Letter reached you in time for Mr William to have it. I need not say, that this has caused & causes me no little anxiety—I shall wish my corrections at the (Printer's) Devil, if the Delay occasioned by them & which with the search for a Messenger put off their final departure from our House till past One o/clock, should have belated the Letter & Books. — Pray, give me one Line just to say — Yea or No."[4] I am unaware whether Carey replied with a Yea or a No, and the subsequent history of the annotated copy of The Friend (and of the Lay Sermons) remains, for the time being at least, a mystery.

However, though the annotated copy of The Friend (1818) intended for Middleton remains unlocated, there is in my possession the copy of the edition of 1818 described in the Blackwell catalogue as containing notes transcribed from Middleton's copy, and this does in fact contain a small number of manuscript emendations and corrections (some with the initials "STC"), including a marginal note of considerable interest that is not to be found, so far as I have been able to discover, in any other edition or annotated copy. The notes appear in volume III on pages 255-57 and 262-64. They are mostly in a clear blue ink of uncertain age, but a few are in pencil. I have been unable either to identify the copyist or to determine what the history of this copy was before it appeared on Blackwell's shelves in 1951. Coleridge annotated or corrected several copies of The Friend (1818) and Miss Rooke has incorporated in her textual notes the emendations in the known surviving copies.[5] It is impossible to determine whether the notes in the present copy were transcribed directly from the corrected copy prepared for Middleton (now lost or unlocated), or whether they had

some other source. Coleridge's annotations were much prized by his admirers and friends, who made a practice of enriching their personal copies of his works by transcribing his marginalia into them, often placing Coleridge's initials by them to indicate their authenticity.[6] Very shortly after publication of The Friend (1818) Coleridge sent to a few of his friends various corrections, at least some of which he anticipated would be transcribed into still other copies,[7] and it is not impossible that the notes in Middleton's copy were transcribed in this way or that some other record of them was made. Whatever uncertainty there may be, however, about the mode of transmission in the case of the notes in the present copy, there can be no doubt, I believe, about their authenticity or about their Coleridgian origin.

The emendations are as follows. In volume III, page 255, line 11, after the words "to the giant tree of the forest," a manuscript note inserts "from the mole that burrows at its roots"; the initials STC stand in the margin. On the same page, line 20, "and by which" is deleted and the words "Hence too it is that" substituted; the comma after "class" is converted into a period. On line 22 "then" is inserted after "if we". On line 25 after the words "shall we not hold it probable that" a note inserts "by some analogous intervention". On lines 25 and 26 of the same page and on line 1 of the next page (256) these words are deleted: "of universal and general laws by an adequate intervention of appropriate agency, will have been effected"; in their place is supplied: "will have been effected for the rational and moral? Are we not entitled to expect some appropriate agency in behalf of the presiding and alone progressive creature? To presume some especial provision".

On page 256, line 3, "progressively" is deleted and "and grow" substituted, and on line 4 "idea" is deleted and replaced by "Humanity". On line 5 "all" is underlined. Before "outward relations of matter" on line 15, the word "changes" is inserted.[8] On line 16 "them" is substituted for "these", and the phrase "phenomena in time and space" is deleted.[9] On page 262, line 21, after the words "instrument of the former —" a manuscript addition (initialed "STC") reads: "when it would itself be its own Life and Verity".[10]

In Copies A, D, H, and L a long additional paragraph has been inserted on page 263 after the paragraph ending at line 7 with the words "whose

transparency hath no vacuum."[11] A similar passage may have been inserted in Middleton's copy also for in the margin of the copy in my possession, at line 7, are the words: "Here insert the ms paragraphs below." At the foot of the page, however, the copyist has gone no further than to write the abbreviation §§.

A few emendations appear in pencil on page 264. On line 9 in the sentence ending "of which it had been the quarry and remains the foundation", the words "had been" and "remains" are underlined and the initials "STC" stand in the margin. In the passage "this life in the idea, even in the supreme and godlike, which alone merits the name of life," the word "idea" (line 12) is underlined twice and after "godlike" (line 13) is inserted the word "life". These small variations do not appear in Friend (1837) or in other annotated copies of the 1818 edition.

The most interesting of these emendations is a note written across the foot of pages 256 and 257 (of Volume III) apparently intended to illustrate part of the lengthy argument which begins on page 254 at the point where Coleridge recapitulates the traditional argument from design—"Look round you and you behold everywhere an adaptation of means to ends . . . the material world must have been made for the sake of man." More particularly the note relates to the passage on page 255 where Coleridge affirms that "in all inferior things from the grass on the house top to the giant tree of the forest, to the eagle which builds in its summit, and the elephant which browses on its branches, we behold—first, a subjection to universal laws by which each thing belongs to the Whole, as interpenetrated by the powers of the Whole; and, secondly, the intervention of particular laws by which the universal laws are suspended or tempered for the weal and sustenance of each particular class." This passage, especially the words I have placed in italics, marks an important turning point in Coleridge's argument in this section of The Friend, for he goes on to argue that there is an analogous "intervention" in the case of a fundamental law of human nature, without which man's intellectual and spiritual progression would have been impaired. It would have been helpful if at this point Coleridge had supplied the reader with some instances, drawn from the non-human creation, of universal laws "suspended or tempered", as he states, by the "intervention of particular laws . . . for the weal and sustenance" of each particular class. The omission is to some extent remedied, however, by the following note in the copy of The Friend which is the subject of this article:

Though not itself lacking in obscurity this note serves to illustrate his argument at a point where it needs illustration; it also provides further evidence of the range of Coleridge's reading and some insight into his processes of mind.

In the background to Coleridge's allusion to the extra days of light enjoyed by the Greenlanders lies the common eighteenth-century belief that the laws of nature and the physical geography of the countries of the far north had been so disposed by the divine wisdom as to mitigate the rigours of life there for their inhabitants. Coleridge was familiar with David Crantz's History of Greenland, which first appeared in English translation in 1767.[12] Livingston Lowes long ago pointed out how deeply Coleridge's reading of this work affected the poetic atmosphere and imagery of The Ancient Mariner and of other poems by Coleridge,[13] but Crantz's History also forms part of the intellectual background to Coleridge's note to The Friend. Crantz found that in Greenland the nature of the atmosphere in such high latitudes brought certain benefits to the Greenlanders. "In summer there is no night at all in this country . . . In June and July it is so light here all night long, that a person may read or write the smallest characters in a room without a candle . . . This is of great benefit to the Greenlanders, who in their short summer can hunt and fish all the night through; and also to the sailors, who would otherwise run great hazard from the quantities of ice. . . . On the other hand the winter-nights are so much the longer . . . the face of the sun is never seen above the horizon from Nov. 30 to Jan. 12. During that period the inhabitants enjoy but a moderate twilight . . . And yet there are never such quite dark nights here, as there are in other countries . . . people can do very well out of doors without a lanthorn, and can see plainly to read print . . . And even if the moon does not shine in the winter, the northern lights, with their sportive streams of variegated colours, often supply its place still better."[14] The theological implications of Crantz's observations were brought out by the translator in his footnotes to a new edition of Crantz's work which appeared in 1820. "It is a strong argument in favour of the infinite wisdom of Him who planned the system of Nature, that even those results which seem necessarily to follow from the consistent operation of the different elements, in various circumstances, upon each other, generally answer some particular

end in the wide economy of the Universe."[15] Hans Egede, too, in his A Description of Greenland noted that "the Almighty God and good God, who has not in vain created the vast globe of the Earth, has also not intended, that any part or province of it should lie buried in eternal oblivion, useless to mankind." Egede, like Crantz, points to the beneficent effects of the kind of light to be found in Greenland.[16]

An explanation of Coleridge's allusion to the 16 + 16 = 32 extra days of light granted to the Greenlanders may be found in one of the works of Bernhard Varenius (1622-1650), the most celebrated of the geographers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whose Geographia generalis; in qua affectiones generales telluris explicantur was first published in Amsterdam in 1650.[17] Like later works of its kind it included not only a systematic account of physical geography and astronomy, but also much information and technical matter about meteorology, the climates of the world, navigation and mathematics. Many topics of particular interest to Coleridge are discussed with much learning, including subterranean fires, the polar regions, the air, winds, water and other elements, the sun and moon, the aurora borealis, rainbows, and atmospheric phenomena of all kinds. Of particular relevance to The Friend is Varenius's account (in Section VI, chapter xix) of the primary laws relating to the refraction of light in different media. "Experience testifies, that the Rays coming from any Object out of one Medium into another more gross, or more fine, do refract or turn aside" (I, 445). "Mathematicians . . . have by Observations found the Laws of Refraction of all oblique Rays, and that in every Medium there is a constant fixed Proportion between the Sine of the Angle of Incidence and of the refracted Angle" (I, 446). One effect of refraction caused by the earth's atmosphere is to cause "the Sun and other Stars to appear before they come to the Horizon at rising, or after they are passed it, at setting; and appear higher than they really are, while they are under twenty Degrees of Elevation." (I, 448). Thus in high latitudes the length of the day and the period of twilight are sensibly lengthened. In the very highest latitudes the fundamental laws of refraction undergo some modification. The degree of refraction is in proportion to the density of the atmosphere, and by experiment it had been found that the "refractive Power exactly answered to the Proportion of the different Densities of the Air thro' which the Ray passed, so as to be twice or thrice as large when the Air had twice

or thrice the Density" (I, 447). In the frigid zone, where the air becomes much colder and denser, the greater refraction lengthens the twilight period a great deal and allows the sun to be seen when it is in fact considerably below the horizon when rising and setting. In the far north where in winter there is no sun at all and in summer no night, atmospheric refraction has the effect of delaying the disappearance of the sun at the onset of winter and of hastening its reappearance at the approach of spring. On occasion these consequences of refraction could be quite remarkable, and Varenius several times refers to the extraordinary observations of a party of Dutch voyagers who had been forced to pass the winter of 1596-7 in Nova Zembla (Novaya Zemlya). "When the Dutch wintered in Nova Zembla, the Sun appeared to them sixteen Days before it came to the Horizon, that is, when under the Horizon four Degrees, and that in a clear Sky" (I, 448). When the Dutchmen later reported their experiences the unusual amount of refraction necessary for so early a sighting of the sun stimulated much scientific speculation and some initial incredulity (as being opposed to nature and to the known laws of refraction) and references to the observations of the Dutch voyagers in Nova Zembla may be found in scientific publications and in the transactions of learned societies from the seventeenth century onwards. It is very probable, in my view, that an early reading of Varenius, whose work was a text book of long standing at both Cambridge and Oxford, lies behind Coleridge's allusion to the 16+16 = 32 extra days of light made available to the Greenlanders by the secondary laws of refraction. Coleridge refers in his marginal note to Greenland and not to Nova Zembla (a lapse of memory perhaps) and in other respects his recollection of the observations of the Dutchmen was imperfect. His equation "16+16 = 32 days of Light" was obtained by assuming that sixteen extra days were also gained at the beginning of winter when in November the sun made its last appearance above the horizon, as well as at the end of the long winter night in February. Varenius says merely that "the sun left them the second of November, which by Refraction . . . should not have been so soon" (II, 618). Coleridge seems also to have been under the impression that the early reappearance of the sun by as much as sixteen days was a permanent, providential feature of the climate in such latitudes, whereas Varenius suggests that although the refraction so far north is considerable, the remarkable degree of refraction observed in the winter of 1596-7 was rare and was possibly due to some unusual and temporary condition of the atmosphere (I, 453, 461-4). Nevertheless, the experiences of the Dutch sailors form part of the background to Coleridge's note and I believe it is likely that it was Varenius's account of how the laws of refraction are modified in high latitudes that provided Coleridge with one of his illustrations ("among hundreds less obvious") of the way in which nature's "universal laws are suspended or tempered" by the "intervention of particular laws".

Coleridge's statement in his marginal note that "Ice is the one exception to the General Law of Contraction by cold" recalls a notable scientific

essay, "Of the propagation of heat in fluids", by Count Rumford (Sir Benjamin Thompson, 1753-1814), which appeared in two parts in 1797 and 1798.[18] Rumford's essay is of particular interest here, partly because it provided Coleridge (when writing his marginal note) with another pertinent example of a universal law modified in particular circumstances with beneficial effects, partly because the pronounced teleological character of Rumford's thinking in this essay affected Coleridge's own presentation of the argument from design throughout this important section of The Friend.

In Chapters 1 and 2 of Part I of Essay VII Rumford gave a detailed account of the experiments he had conducted in order to demonstrate that water (with other fluids) was intrinsically a non-conductor of heat and that heat was propagated in it only by the motion of its individual particles. When this motion was inhibited by the addition of solid matter, such as feathers or fur, the propagation of heat in it was much reduced. The more viscous a fluid is, the less is its ability to propagate heat. When water is condensed to a solid form as ice, it is a very poor conductor indeed. "The discovery of this fact opens to our view one of the most interesting scenes in the economy of Nature," Rumford writes, since "the manner in which Heat is propagated in liquids . . . must act a most important part in the preservation of Heat, and consequently of animal and vegetable life, in cold climates" (II, 280, 231). "As liquid water is the vehicle of Heat and nourishment, and consequently of life, in every living thing; and as water, left to itself, freezes with a degree of cold much less than that which frequently prevails in cold climates, it is agreeable to the ideas we have of the wisdom of the Creator of the world, to expect that effectual measures would be taken to preserve a sufficient quantity of that liquid in its fluid state, to maintain life during the cold season: and this we find has actually been done" (II, 226). Trees in the far north, for example, are found to have sap that is thick and viscous and which consequently gives off its heat very slowly and freezes with difficulty. "Is there not the strongest reason to think, that this was so contrived for the express purpose of preventing their being deprived of all their Heat, and killed by the cold during winter?" (II, 228).

The most remarkable properties of water are discussed in Chapter 3. "Though it is one of the most general laws of nature with which we are acquainted, that all bodies, solids as well as fluids, are condensed by cold: yet, in regard to water, there appears to be a very remarkable exception to

this law" (II, 252). In temperatures above blood-heat the expansion of water is very considerable, but "in the neighbourhood of the freezing point it is almost nothing. And what is still more remarkable,—as it is an exception to one of the most general laws of Nature with which we are acquainted,—when, in cooling, it comes within eight or nine degrees of Fahrenheit's scale of the freezing point, instead of going on to be farther condensed as it loses more of its Heat, it actually expands, as it grows colder, and continues to expand more and more, as it is more cooled" (II, 283). When water becomes ice, "it expands even still more, and the ice floats on the surface of the uncongealed part of the Fluid" (II, 290). The consequences of this exception to "one of the most general Laws of Nature" offer to Rumford "a striking Proof of CONTRIVANCE in the Arrangement of the Universe", for the exceptional behaviour of water affects the whole economy of nature in a variety of ways and serves to make the globe habitable (II, 281). Were it not for the fact that water cools less and less rapidly as it nears freezing point and that a covering of ice still further inhibits the loss of heat, "the greatest part of the Heat accumulated during the summer in the earth on which the water reposes would be carried off and lost, before the water began to freeze; and when ice was once formed, its thickness would increase with great rapidity, and would continue increasing during the whole winter; and it seems very probable that, in climates which are now temperate, the water in the large lakes would be frozen to such a depth in the course of a severe winter that the Heat of the ensuing summer would not be sufficient to thaw them; and should this once happen, the following winter could hardly fail to change the whole mass of its waters to one solid body of ice, which never more could recover its liquid form, but must remain immovable till the end of time" (II, 299-300). "Let us see what must have happened if things had been left to what might be called their natural course;—if the condensation of water on being deprived of its Heat had followed the law which we find obtains in other fluids . . . Had not Providence interfered on this occasion in a manner which may well be considered as miraculous, — all the fresh water within the polar circle must inevitably have been frozen to a very great depth in one winter, and every plant and tree destroyed; and it is more than probable, that the regions of eternal frost would have spread on every side from the poles, and, advancing towards the equator, would have extended its dreary and solitary reign over a great part of what are now the most fertile and most inhabited climates of the world!" (II, 288). Again, all life depends on those seasonal changes in temperature which are produced "in a manner at the same time the most simple and the most stupendous (by the inclination of the axis of the earth to the plane of the ecliptic); yet this mechanical contrivance alone would not have been sufficient . . . to produce that gradual change of temperature in the various climates which we find to exist, and which doubtless is indispensably necessary to the preservation of animal and vegetable life" (II, 285-6). In high latitudes particularly, "in order to render those regions habitable, some contrivance was necessary to prevent the consequences which [the] great inequality of the Heat generated by the sun in summer and in winter would naturally tend to produce" (II, 286). The exceptional characteristics of salt water, "the vast extent of the ocean, and its great depth,—but still more its numerous currents, and the power of water to absorb a vast quantity of Heat, render it peculiarly well adapted to serve as an equalizer of Heat", moderating extremes of temperature in all parts of the globe. The oceans give off the heat they have acquired, warming the cold polar air as it flows away from the poles, yet the falling rate of heat loss near freezing point, and the lower freezing point of salt water, prevent the oceans from totally losing their heat as well as inhibiting the excessive formation of ice (II, 287).

When Rumford contemplated the diverse consequences for the economy of nature in thus making water an exception to one of the most universal of natural laws, he was overtaken by feelings of astonishment and gratitude. In a passage that is particularly relevant to Coleridge's argument in The Friend, Rumford remarks: "It does not appear to me that there is any thing which human sagacity can fathom, within the wide-extended bounds of the visible creation, which affords a more striking, or more palpable proof of the wisdom of the Creator, and of the special care he has taken in the general arrangement of the universe to preserve animal life, than this wonderful contrivance:—for though the extensiveness and immutability of the general laws of Nature impress our minds with awe and reverence for the Creator of the universe, yet, exceptions to those laws, or particular modifications of them, from which we are able to trace effects evidently salutary, or advantageous to ourselves and our fellow-creatures, afford still more striking proofs of contrivance, and ought certainly to awaken in us the most lively sentiments of admiration, love, and gratitude" (II, 282-3).

Coleridge's own presentation of the argument from design in this section of The Friend owes something to Rumford's Essay VII, as both his text and his marginal note seem to indicate, but the argument in The Friend is extended to become an integral part of a more complex and ambitious argument of a very Coleridgian kind. "If we then behold this economy everywhere in the irrational creation, shall we not hold it probable that by some analogous intervention, a similar temperament will have been effected for the rational and moral? Are we not entitled to expect some appropriate agency in behalf of the presiding, and alone progressive creature? To presume some especial provision for the permanent interest of the creature destined to move and grow towards that divine Humanity which we have learnt to contemplate as the final cause of all creation. . . ."[19] Just as in the economy of nature certain universal laws are suspended or tempered by the beneficial intervention of particular laws, so too in man's nature we

may find a fundamental law, "the untempered and uncounteracted action" of which would prevent his development and progression, and this law we discover "in that law of his understanding and fancy, by which he is impelled to abstract the changes and outward relations of matter and to arrange them under the form of causes and effects. And this was necessary, as being the condition under which alone experience and intellectual growth are possible."[20] This law of his understanding, left "untempered and uncounteracted", inevitably tempts man to the superstitious worship of his own abstractions, to a blind materialism and slavery to his senses, and to a fragmentation of the "one divine and invisible life of nature". But by the intervention and "appropriate agency" of miracles and prophecies and by listening to the voices of inspiration, men can be "compelled, by a more impressive experience, to seek in the invisible life alone for the true cause and invisible Nexus of the things that are seen".[21] So the development of knowledge and spiritual insight in man is made possible by an "intervention" in, or exception to, a fundamental law of his nature analogous to that providential exception to universal law discovered by Rumford in his researches into the laws of the propagation of heat in water and other fluids, and analogous, too, to that modification of the primary laws of refraction observable in the lands of the far north, thanks to which life is made more tolerable there.[22] By invoking exceptions to the otherwise universal laws of nature as additional evidence for contrivance and design in the universe, Rumford gives a sophistication to the argument from design that is lacking in Paley's Natural Theology (1802), where Paley's treatment of natural law, and consequently of miracles, is particularly unsuitable to the needs of Coleridge's argument in this part of The Friend.

I do not know when or by what means Coleridge became acquainted with the contents of Rumford's Essay VII, but Rumford's essays and articles were frequently reviewed, abstracted or reprinted in William Nicholson's Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, and the Arts (of which Coleridge was a reader), and Volume II (containing Essay VII) of Essays, political, economical, and philosophical (1798) was reviewed in The Critical Review 30 (1800), 143-153. Having praised so highly the first volume of Rumford's Essays in 1796, it is not unlikely that Coleridge looked out for or noticed the appearance of the second volume in 1798 (containing Essay VII) or noted the earlier separate publication of the essay in 1797 and 1798. A notebook entry, which is itself relevant to Coleridge's marginal note to The Friend (1818), suggests that he was thinking about Rumford's views on heat round about March 1804:

This is one of the rare occasions on which Miss Coburn does not provide a reference, but Rumford's Essay VII clearly forms part of the intellectual background to Coleridge's allusions here to ice and fluids. The notebook entry does not suggest a recent or close reading of Rumford's essay for Rumford clearly says in Essay VII that air is a poor, not an efficient conductor of heat.

Notes