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8 THE BLUE-COAT BOY [1772come
back, with its church, and trees, and faces! How I would wake
weeping, and in the anguish of my heart exclaim upon sweet Calne in
Wiltshire!
For Lamb's 'Calne' we must of course read Ottery. 1 Here
come in the well-known lines of Frost at Midnight:
I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
and those of Dejection:
At eve, sky-gazing in 'ecstatic fit'
(Alas! for cloister'd in a city School
The Sky was all, I knew, of Beautiful)
At the barr'd window often did I sit,
And oft upon the leaded School-roof lay.
and the amplification oRhe theme in Wordsworth's Prelude:
Of Rivers, Fields,
And Groves, I speak to Thee, my Friend; to Thee,
Who, yet a liveried School-Boy, in the depths
Of the huge City, on the leaded Roof
Of that wide Edifice, thy Home and School,
Wast used to lie and gaze upon the clouds
Moving in Heaven; or haply, tired of this,
To shut thine eyes, and by internal light
See trees, and meadows, and thy native Stream
Far distant, thus beheld from year to year
Of thy long exile. 2
Perhaps Coleridge was not quite so friendless as Lamb
thought. Sir Francis Buller invited him to his house on
Sundays, but on one occasion, when there was company, he
was sent to dine at the second table, and the silly boy would
not go again. His brothers are said to have refused to see
him in his school dress and he to visit them in any other.
It is not clear, however, what brother can have been in
London during these early days. William had been a master
in Newcome's School at Hackney, but he died in 1780.
There were, however, John Bowdon and his daughter Betsy,
and a Miss Cabriere, who lived with her, and apparently also
1 C. 5; Gillman, 13; Lamb, Works, ii. 13; Leigh Hunt, ch. 111; Studies, 55.
2 P.W. 242, Essays and Studies (English Association), xxiL 17; Prelude, vi. 274.