[In the following essay, Lefebure explores the experimentations of the English Romantics with opium.]

The Romantics experimented with many drugs, within the respective contexts of pharmacy and picturesque experience. Opium was the best known and most used because it was the most accessible and the most effective. Throughout history it has been the most valuable medicinal drug known to man; also throughout history opium has been resorted to for purposes other than the purely medicinal: "It is in the faculty of mental vision, it is in the increased power of dealing with the shadowy and the dark, that the characteristic virtue of opium lies," De Quincey assures us in his essay, Coleridge and Opium. While Coleridge himself says that opium has the power, "To bring forth Thoughts—hidden before . . . and to call forth the deepest feelings" (NB 3320 21½. 14).

Opium: the Milk of Paradise: the miraculous drug that, in its divine, first or honeymoon phase, can be physician, philosopher, companion; fund of inexhaustible invigoration, or source of dreams, profound and delicious consolations! So-called opium dreams occur not in true sleep, but under conditions of pleasurable morphine narcosis; De Quincey describes them as spectra rather than dreams and Coleridge too defines the experience of opium dreaming as a condition in which voluntary ideas pass before the eyes more or less transformed into vivid spectra.

These day dreams or visions (as the Romantics loved, euphemistically to call them) are founded on real events and situations, or at least ideas arising from real events and situations, around which (to quote Coleridge) are constructed a series of desirable, pleasure fulfilling variations which, to use his highly descriptive term, "stream" along, "yet with reason at the rudder" (NB 1718 16.105). He tells us what it was like, "When in a state of pleasurable & balmy Quietness I feel my Cheek and Temple on the nicely made up pillow . . . the fire gleam on my dear Books, that fill up one whole side from ceiling to floor of my Tall Study—& winds, perhaps are driving the rain, or whistling in frost, at my blessed Window, whence I see Borrodale, the Lake, Newlands—wood, water, mountains, omniform Beauty—O then as I . . . sink on the pillow . . . what visions have I had, what dreams—the Bark, the Sea; all the shapes & sounds & adventures made up of the Stuff of Sleep and Dreams, & yet my Reason at the Rudder / O what Visions . . . & I sink down the waters, thro' Seas & Seas—yet warm, yet a Spirit" (Ibid).

And all the time everything is expanding; the opium universe is literally an expanding one. "Space swelled," says De Quincey in Confessions, "and was amplified to an extent of unutterable and self-repeating infinity." Endless, bottomless oceans; fathoms measureless to man; vast deserts; giant cities. Time, likewise, holds no terrors; the opium eater feels in possession of eternity. The capacities too of the heart, the mind, appear to be miraculously limitless; again to quote De Quincey, "The moral affections are in a state of cloudless serenity, and high over all the great light of the majestic intellect." And he exults, "Thou has the keys to Paradise, O just, subtle, and mighty opium!"

A yearning to escape, a longing for distant unknown shores, not necessarily physical, permeated Romanticism. The dream, the dream world, afforded the very essence of escape. Opium produced dreams of particular beauty, nightmares of peculiarly gothic horror. Thus inevitably the dream-possessed Romantic imagination was also an opium impregnated imagination. Coleridge knew what he was doing when, in 1816, desperately short of money, he sold Murray Kubla Khan, The Pains of Sleep and Christabel, to be released to the world as a trio of opium dreams, or visions. To what extent these poems were influenced by opium is not our concern here; the point is that Romantic popular taste was overwhelmingly for socalled opium poems. Similarly, when De Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater appeared it was an instant stupendous success and remained the most successful work that he ever wrote.

What might be described as an elitist drug circle, based upon Clifton, Bristol, had sprung into flourishing existence by the close of 1798, centered upon the newly founded Pneumatic Institute which, financed by the Wedgwoods, was the brainchild of Dr. Thomas Beddoes, the founder and principal. Dr. Beddoes, a radical in politics as well as in his medicine, was dedicated to experimental modes of medical treatment: he was an ardent practitioner of what today we call "alternative medicine." Yet, fundamentally, his medical knowledge was sound and he was a brilliant diagnostician; nor was his experimentation in vain; we should not treat lightly the man who discovered digitalis and who, moreover, discovered and promoted the young Humphrey Davy.

The Pneumatic Institute (or Institution, we find it called both) consisted of a small hospital for patients, a laboratory for experimental chemical research and a lecture theatre. Of the entire enterprise Humphrey Davy was made superintendent, taking up the appointment in 1798. He was nineteen years of age and a newly fledged apothecary and surgeon, having just completed the two years of study, apprenticeship and assistantship, which in those days comprised the training of a medical man. He had also fallen in love with chemistry, which he had virtually been teaching himself over the past three years. Indeed the youth had come to Beddoes's notice because of his researches on heat and light and a new hypothesis on their nature, to which Beddoes became a convert. Davy was initially engaged as superintendent of the laboratory only, it being Beddoes's intention to treat his patients with a variety of drugs, acids, herbal remedies and, particularly, gases—these last referred to by Beddoes as "factitious airs." Cases of a wide variety of complaints were accepted in his hospital, but pulmonary disease cases above all.

Davy speedily made his impact upon the Pneumatic Institute; quickly being promoted, as aforesaid, to become superintendent of not only the laboratory but the entire complex. In April, 1799, he made his famous discovery of nitrous oxide, described by the Institute as "a pleasure producing air" but popularly known as "laughing gas." Davy officially used it to produce relaxation in his patients, especially those suffering from rheumatism and paralysis, and also for depression. His notebooks for the period abound with accounts of his experiments with nitrous oxide; there is an account of how he experimented with it upon himself and burst out laughing and stamped about the floor in glee. There are also accounts of the reactions of his patients; one paralytic, when asked how he felt after breathing the gas, said that "he felt like the sound of a hass" while another, rendered practically speechless by the novel treatment, could only gasp that "he felt he did not know how" (Royal Institution Lib., Box 20 20b). A rheumatic patient responded to the gas with wonderful "thrilling" in his lame leg (Ibid 20a).

But Davy's most dramatic successes with the gas were scored when he demonstrated its effects upon members of the enthusiastic audiences who flocked to hear him lecture on the subject of the new discovery. Many (Thomas Wedgwood was one such) responded to the gas by shouting and rocking with laughter and dancing wildly; others responded with sensations of thrill and sublimity. Others found that it left them unmoved. The Robert Southeys were among those who tried it; he laughed immoderately, but she, by nature apathetic, was "very little affected, only rendered giddy" (R.I., Box 20, 20b). As always with drugs, personal psychology played a large element in individual experience. Modern medicine recognises that some temperaments succumb to drug addiction more readily than others, though the reason for this is not yet fully understood. De Quincey, too, remarks upon this phenomenon. No one was a more interesting example than Davy himself.

In true Romantic vein Davy hurled himself at every new experience and sensation which presented itself. When he discovered a gas he unhesitatingly inhaled it (in 1799, he nearly killed himself inhaling carburetted hydrogen). When he produced a new acid, he swallowed it; some odd things happened to him. When he was experimenting with galvanic electricity he gave himself shocks. When he attempted to advance an hypothesis that the fixed alkalines and earths are metallic bases united to oxygen, and in their uncombined state are possessed of such powerful affinity for oxygen as to be capable of decomposing water, he visited Vesuvius when it was in eruption and took appalling risks with his life on the edge of the crater experimenting with fresh lava. When he was asked by the government to advise upon improving sanitation in Newgate prison he spent so much time in the prison applying himself firsthand to the problem that he contracted typhus, in the form of so-called gaol fever, and lay at death's door (and, he firmly believed, suffered as a result from ruined health in his later years).

Every drug that came within his reach he sampled; opium, marijuana (in those days known as "bhang"), hyoscyamine were all tried enthusiastically by him; he exchanged notes upon them with Coleridge. It is significant that when Tom Wedgwood wished Coleridge to procure some bhang for him the first person to whom Coleridge applied for the drug was Davy.

When Davy sampled a gas, acid, or drug he did so in style, with panache: here he is exploring the consolations to be found in nitrous oxide (the episode is described by him in a notebook entry for 1800—like Coleridge, he was a lifelong keeper of notebooks): "After eating a supper, drinking two glasses of brandy and water, and sitting for some time on the top of a wall by moonlight reading Condorcet's Life of Voltaire, I requested Mr Dewyer (his laboratory assistant) to give me a dose of air." The results, says Davy, were "thrilling." "I lost all connection with external things: trains of visible images passed rapidly through my mind, and were connected with words, in such a manner as to produce perceptions perfectly novel. I existed in a world of newly connected and newly modified ideas." He derived special pleasure from inhaling gas alone, in darkness and silence, occupied only by ideal existence, as he put it; the delight that he felt on these occasions was often "intense and sublime." One May night, in the moonlight, he respired six quarts of freshly prepared nitrous oxide and had pleasurable sensations "so intense and pure as to absorb existence" (Ibid).

For all his experimentation with drugs Davy never became addicted to any of them. He himself attributed his, so to speak, objectivity in this respect to the fact that his approach was that of "an experimental and inductive philosopher." "Philosophy, chemistry, and medicine are my professions," he wrote to his mother in 1800 (Davy, John, Coll. Works of Humphrey Davy: Vol I., Memoirs of his Life). It was natural that he should speak of himself as a philosopher, and that everyone who knew him, or knew of him, should refer to him as such: at that time "philosophy" was a broad term covering the methodical pursuit of almost any branch of knowledge; for instance, we find Thomas Poole speaking of a laboratory as "an extensive philosophical apparatus" (Works i 465). More exact names for specific fields of enquiry were "metaphysical philosophy" and "natural philosophy"; most of what we now call science came under this last heading. Davy, however, had too broad a spectrum of interests and too wide a vision to be confined within the single category of "natural philosopher"; that is to say, as a scientist pure and simple. He spilled over into the sphere of metaphysical philosophy. For that reason Southey, in a lighthearted but perceptive moment, coined for Davy the name "metapothecary," which delighted Davy who throughout his life was fired with immense enthusiasm for what he described as the "sublime" in chemistry, adding, "The most sublime and important part of chemistry is as yet unknown" (Works i 55).

Davy and Coleridge first met in Bristol in October, 1799. Coleridge's sojourn in Bristol on that occasion was but fleeting; he and Cottle departed on their famous visit to Wordsworth in the north and on his return Coleridge went straight to London to work in Fleet Street for Stuart. Davy was in London, visiting, late that autumn and during this time he and Coleridge cemented the foundation of what was to be a lifelong friendship based on mutual deep affection and intense intellectual stimulation. The young Davy had a breadth of interest and vision, a flexibility of mind and gift of imagination that delighted Coleridge, who declared, "Every subject in Davy's mind has the principle of vitality. Living thought springs up like turf under his feet" (CL 355). Twenty years later Coleridge still held Davy in highest esteem as "the father and Founder of philosophic Alchemy, the Man who born a Poet first converted Poetry into Science and realized what few men possessed Genius enough to fancy" (CL 1358).

Davy all his life wrote poetry, for which he had a passion. He was a Cornishman, and of markedly Celtic temperament; by the age of five he was composing and reciting verses. He was visionary by nature; his paternal grandmother had a reputation for the second sight. She lived in a haunted house and took ghosts absolutely for granted. These things she often discussed with her small grandson, and it was from her that Davy inherited his lifelong feeling of neighbouring the invisible. From her, too, he received many wild tales and anecdotes derived from ancient Cornish oral-tradition mythology. As a schoolboy he enjoyed a great reputation as a teller of tales; that is, as a story teller in the bardic tradition. In the evenings after school he would install himself in an announced place (for instance an empty cart outside the Star Inn at Penzance, the town where he was born in 1778, and where he grew up) and, before an "enraptured audience" of young contemporaries, would embark upon long stories of wonder and terror, many of them handed down over generations and passed on to Davy by his grandmother (Works i 5). His early poems, surviving in his adolescent notebooks, are bardic chaunts rather than verse and possess a naturally wild note. We find "The Death of Merlin" (R.I. notebook 13h), "The Spinosist," and an untitled chaunt "My eye is wet with tears" (Ibid 13c); all unfinished. The last is by far the most remarkable and is based on a theme to which Davy was to return repeatedly:

My eye is wet with tears
For I see the white stones
That are covered with names
The stones of my forefathers' graves

The grass grows upon them
For deep in the earth
In darkness and silence the organs of life
To their primitive atoms return

Through ages the air
Has been moist with their blood
Through ages the seeds of
  the thistle has fed
On what was once motion and form

The white land that floats
Through the heavens
Is pregnant with
that which was life
And the moonbeams
that whiten it came
From the breath and spirit of man

Thoughts roll not beneath the dust
No feeling is in the cold grave
Neither thought nor feeling can die
They have leaped to other worlds
They are far above the skies

They kindle in the stars
They dance in the light of suns
Or they live in the comet's white haze

These poor remains of frame
Were the source of the organs of flesh
That feed the control of my will
  That are active and mighty in me. . .

The poem then loses its way, stutters a few more fragmented lines and breaks off.

In his adult years Davy, in addition to writing conventional rhymed verse, also wrote a considerable amount of what might be called "poetic prose." This sounds untempting, but in fact he was a much finer writer of prose than of verse. Many of the poetic prose passages in his notebooks relate to what he himself described as dreams or visions; as a true Romantic he instinctively loved visions and daydreams and used them as vehicles for his poetic prose. Moreover in a man of his background, with his strong inherent strain of Celtic mysticism and gifts of imagination, a propensity to dream vivid dreams (without the aid of drugs) and a disposition to attach importance to them is scarcely surprising. However we know from the Coleridge-Davy correspondence that Davy experimented with opium and had experience of opium dreams; indeed the fact that Davy knew the pleasures of opium meant that he was able to share Coleridge's enthusiasm for pleasurable visionary drug experience and that Coleridge did not have to dissemble when speaking to Davy of opium. Some of the Davy notebook entries are obviously written while under the influence of some drug or gas; the handwriting sprawls, staggers and lopsidedly climbs up the page, to expire in scribble, or a blot. All in the cause of science!

His brother and biographer, John Davy, observes how interesting it is to compare Davy's early poems and reflections with those of a later period, particularly in notebooks and Consolations in Travel. "We may trace in the former the germs of many of the latter; and, indeed, the resemblance is often so marked, that the trains of thought have very much the character of recollections" (Works i 19). Opium, when working harmoniously, produces reticulative trains of thought which, like interminable skeins of seaweed, may float submerged, out of view, then surface to glisten in the light, then submerge again; always steadily carried forward by currents and tides and so never static, yet on reappearance fundamentally the same skein. Study of Coleridge's letters and notebooks (especially the letters) reveals this trait most markedly; reticulative skeins of ideas surfacing repeatedly, often phrased in almost the same words as were used years previously; indeed "trains of thought [which] have very much the character of recollections." It is an important factor to bear in mind when considering the plagiarisms and doubtless accounts for many—though by no means all—of them.

Fascinatingly we find the same reticulative skeins of ideas running through Davy's lifelong notebook entries relating to dreams or visions of spirits and celestial beings, and his exploration of boundless skies. In notebook 20a (probably dating to 1799-1800) there occurs a poetic prose passage which John Davy calls "a sketch of a reverie" allegedly experienced within view of the moonlit ruins of Tintern Abbey and embodying a development of the train of thought first met with in "My eye is wet with tears." Whether or not the prose passage is describing a dream resulting from actual opium, there is no gainsaying that it is tinctured with the essence of opium dreaming, particularly the theme of exploring vast distances: not, as in Coleridge's case, through fathomless seas, but above the stars, following "immeasurable paths of ether." To quote,

I awoke at midnight; the recollection of indistinct but painful visions passed across my mind; the spectre of horrible images still trembled in my eyes . . . Restless, and filled with vivid imagination, I was unable to sleep; I arose and stole to the window. The moon had just sunk beneath the ruins of the abbey, and her broken and trembling light shone through the west window upon the burying-ground . . . For a few minutes I was lost, and swallowed up in impression. No longer connected with the earth, I seemed to mingle with Nature; I pursued the dazzling of the moonbeams; I raised myself above the stars, and gave imaginary beings to the immeasurable paths of ether. But when I cast my eyes on the remains of mortality—when I considered, that in that deserted spot, where the song of the nightingale and the wings of the bat were the only signs of life, thousands of thoughts . . . had rolled through the minds of a hundred intelligent beings,—I was lost in a deep and intense social feeling. I began to think, to reason, What is existence? . . . Nothing remains of them but mouldering bones; their thoughts and their names have perished. Shall we, too, sink in the dust? shall we, too, like those beings, in the course of time be no more? shall that ever-modified consciousness be lost in the immensity of being? No, my friend, individuality can never cease to exist; that ideal self which exists in dreams and reveries, that ideal self which never slumbers, is the child of immortality, and those deep intense feelings, which man sometimes perceives in the bosom of Nature and Deity, are presentiments of a more sublime and energic state of existence.

Twenty-nine years later we find Davy jotting in his journal, "It is revealed to me that moons, which roll round the planets, are the places of expiation for offending spirits; and that the consummation of all things will be, when the moons rush to the planets, the planets to their suns, the suns to one great centre—when all will be light and joy, and all matter animated by one pure and undivided breath of Omnipotence" (Works i 440). This is yet a further variation on the original theme of "My eye is wet with tears." We should remind ourselves of De Quincey's observation, "It is in the faculty of mental vision, it is in the increased power of dealing with the shadowy and the dark, that the characteristic virtue of opium lies" and his further remark that opium calls "into sunny light the faces of long buried beauties" (Confessions). Opium aids, and indeed promotes, associative and reticulative memory.

In adulthood Davy wrote a considerable amount of verse, not without feeling and sincerity, but (considering his adolescent chaunts and the poetic prose visions which he continued to write throughout his life) disappointingly conventional both in style and content. Nonetheless he clearly prided himself on his accomplishments as a poet and gained quite a reputation as such. Though remaining largely unpublished during his lifetime (there was some posthumous publication), his poems were privately circulated and enthusiastically read and recited. In his early period at Bristol, Davy became friendly with Robert Southey and at Christmas, 1799, had two poems, The Tempest and The Sons of Genius, in the Annual Anthology which Southey at that time edited. Coleridge (we cannot but feel somewhat surprisingly) had no hesitation in sharing Southey's approbation of Davy's verse, particularly Lines Written after Recovery from a Dangerous Illness; the earlier draft was written in 1799; a later draft, (Works i 114-116) was written in 1807, following his attack of typhus. Coleridge assured Davy, "I will venture to affirm that there were never so many lines which so uninterruptedly combined natural and beautiful words with strict philosophical Truths, i.e. scientifically philosophic" (CL 356).

Coleridge, when he penned these lines, was in that dizzily enthusiastic state of adulation which always occurred in the opening phase of any friendship important to him. Instead of perplexing ourselves as to why Coleridge waxed so enthusiastic over Davy's verse, we should read the latter's scientific essays, lectures and notebooks. From these we receive an understanding of the quality which his contemporaries found so remarkable in his demonstrations and addresses—namely his "peculiar style of poetical illustration and his comprehensiveness of mind" (Works i 91-93). The actual notebooks, overflowing with scientific experiments described as they were performed (in several instances the notebook's pages are splashed and burned with acid), poems, essays, metaphysical observations, details of visions, poetic prose passages, notes of reading and reflecting, mathematical calculations, chemical data, and innumerable little fleeting sketches, give us a wonderful insight into the comprehensively varied creative processes of this extraordinary genius. And we fully understand Coleridge's maturely considered pronouncement that Davy was "the Man who born a Poet first converted Poetry into Science and realized what few men possessed Genius enough to Fancy."

Coleridge, all his life, revealed an extraordinary habit of travelling in and out of spheres of influence; not only did he himself magnetize, but he appeared to be cognizant of and to respond to powers of magnetism in certain others. Principally, during the years 1797 to 1810, Coleridge swung between Poole and Wordsworth; and in the spring and early summer of 1800, a battle of remarkable intensity went on between the conflicting magnetic pull of Nether Stowey on the one hand and Grasmere on the other. Coleridge's letters reveal how deeply he was torn between west and north, Poole and Wordsworth, and how close he came to abandoning a move to the Lakes and settling, instead, near Poole—and Davy, a new counter attraction to Wordsworth.

During this same period of autumn and spring, Coleridge was revealing an almost obsessive concern upon the subject of Wordsworth's progress with The Recluse, that immense philosophical poem, the brain child of Coleridge, which was to be the greatest and most comprehensive philosophical poem of all time, and dealing (we here need scarcely remind ourselves) with Nature, Man and Society.

With all opium addicts, as De Quincey observes and experience confirms, intellectual or creative ambition infinitely outruns capacity for achievement—hence the passion for projecting vast works which defy completion: it is part of the expanded universe of opium. In the case of De Quincey, he planned an (unrealised) magnum opus to which he gave the title of an unfinished work of Spinoza's, De Emandatione Humani Intellectus: in the case of Coleridge gigantic schemes flowed from him as from God in the beginning, creating a world of vast continents. Like God, too, Coleridge was confident that seven days, or at the most a fortnight, might see each project completed. Within the space of twelve months we find him outlining a magnum opus provisionally entitled Organum verè Organum, or an Instrument of practical Reasoning in the business of real Life: next a gargantuan study of Shakespeare; and hot on the heels of that a further enormous work, Consolations and Comforts from the exercise and right application of the Reason, the Imagination and the Moral Feelings. Whatever the consolations Coleridge was planning to derive from Reason and the Rest, we detect here, without a shadow of doubt, consolations from opium.

And Coleridge, of course, knew all this himself. In an opium impregnated notebook entry, written in Malta at the close of 1804, addressing himself, he jots, "One might make a very amusing Allegory of an embryo Soul up to birth!—Try! it is promising!—You have not above 300 volumes to write before you come to it—and as you write perhaps a volume once in ten years, you have ample Time, my dear Fellow!—Never be ashamed of schemeing—you can't think of living less than four thousand years, and that would nearly suffice for your present schemes—To be sure, if they go on in the same Ratio to the Performance, there is a small difficulty arises—but never mind! look at the bright side always—and die in a Dream! OH!" (NB 2373 21.553). The last is a groan of despair.

In a certain sense it may be said that Wordsworth, through Coleridge, also became a victim of opium impregnated ambition and its resultant conceptual folie de grandeur. As we all know, Coleridge persuaded Wordsworth that he was capable of unique achievement as a philosopher-poet who would write a Miltonic work, "the first and finest philosophical Poem"; the project originally having been discussed by the two poets at Alfoxden in the winter of 1797-98, and the scheme extending in scope and bulk as Coleridge advanced further into opium's grotesquely expanded landscape and loaded Wordsworth with concepts of an increasingly Piranesi-like structure: in 1804, Wordsworth was estimating that The Recluse would come to ten or twelve thousand lines, but in 1814 he was outlining an even vaster work which, if completed, might have comprised some 33,000 lines, 22,500 more than Paradise Lost. Wordsworth was seduced by Esteesian eloquence into believing that he had the powers to produce this immense work, a classic example of an opium eater's fantasy—with the difference that Wordsworth had embarked upon this impossible mammoth project at the urging of an opium eater, not as an opium eater himself.

Of course, we ourselves should be grateful, because as a result the world was given The Prelude; but for Wordsworth, without doubt, the burden which this vast project placed upon him proved of intolerable weight.

But, to repeat, in the autumn of 1799 and the spring of 1800, we find Coleridge revealing an almost obsessive interest in Wordsworth's progress with The Recluse. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that Coleridge pestered Wordsworth with enquiries as to how the work was going and revealed impatience at the thought of William wasting his time on short poems. "Of nothing but the Recluse can I hear patiently" is a typical growl from Coleridge, and "I grieve that the Recluse sleeps," he was sighing heavily in February, 1800.

During this period Coleridge was back in the west country and consolidating his friendship with Davy, the two men meeting daily, as Coleridge informed Southey, each stimulating the other with talk and ideas; chemistry and science, metaphysics and poetry. According to John Davy at some point round about this time Humphrey Davy received from "a distinguished poet . . . a close friend of Davy . . . a proposal that he and Davy should write a joint work, a philosophic epic" (Works i 71). It is difficult to think this distinguished poet could have been anyone else but Coleridge. It certainly wasn't Wordsworth, and Southey, though nursing a plan for a full length poem on Mahomet, was promised to write this with Coleridge; nor does any surviving evidence in correspondence concerning this projected joint work on Mahomet suggest that it was to be a philosophical poem dealing with the themes put forward by Coleridge to Wordsworth. To be sure, in one of Davy's notebooks (13c) there are some sketchy notes on "Mehomet" but there is no development of these, either in prose or poem form. But in this same notebook there does occur an outline plan of a lengthy epic poem in six books in blank verse, the subject of which was the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt, and to be entitled "Moses." The theme revealed by the outline plan is recognisably that of Coleridge's Nature, Man and Society, treating man as man in contact with external nature, man in the pastoral and other early stages of society, and man in a state of highly organized civilization (in this instance of ancient Egypt of the pyramids), with a picture of degeneracy and vice, terminating with the departure of the Israelites, and the march across the desert, "a redemptive process in operation" with "promised future glory and restoration," to quote from Coleridge's outline originally proposed to Wordsworth.

Davy's actual outline headings give Book One commencing with the meeting of Moses and Zipporah and the daughters of Jethro, and entailing a description of pastoral scenery and patriarchal manners. Book Two headings read, "The Great Festival of the God of Nature—Customs of the Midionites—Moonlight Scene, and the Reflections of Jethro on the System of the universe—History of Moses—His earliest impressions connected with Pharoah's daughter—The knowledge of his family etc. . . . " Book Three details the growing love of Moses for Zipporah and their happy pastoral life. Gradually Moses comes to believe himself under the immediate inspiration of the Deity. Headings continue, "His dreams—Theory of Jethro—Moses resolves to return to Egypt."

With Book Four the tranquil pastoral passage is over; we are now with civilization and decadence. Moses meets Aaron and is reunited with Pharoah, the companion of his youth. Continue the headings (rather unexpectedly), "Jacobinical sentiments" (presumably voiced by Moses—one cannot imagine them coming from Pharoah). As a result, "Pharoah calls the Magicians." Book Four concludes with the Plagues and Lamentation for the Death of the First Born.

Headings for Book V read: "March through the Desert—Miraculous appearance of the Son of God—Destruction of Pharoah and the Army—Moses' Song—Amalek overcome." Book Six: "Meeting of Jethro—his Counsels—Institution of Laws—Communion with God on Mount Sinai—Mosaic Account of Creation. End."

Then come some jotted notes on the leading characters: "Moses a great but enthusiastic Man . . . Zipporah his Superior in reasoning powers and sensibility—Pharoah a Despot—Jethro a Wonder, a philosophic Priest—Joshua a Hero, i.e. a Murderer—Miriam the Prophetess, the sister of Moses, a wonderful woman."

Accompanying this outline were several fragments of blank verse revealing that actual composition of this work had been commenced by Davy. The style is strongly reminiscent of Coleridge's Destiny of Nations (written in 1797 and intended as part of his own projected great philosophical poem—hence the reason why Coleridge referred to it as his "epic slice," a cutlet, so to speak, from the main body of the intended leviathan). Undoubtedly Davy had read The Destiny of Nations, attentively. It was not the best of Coleridge's blank verse—and Davy was not Coleridge. Yet Davy's exuberance, ebullience of attack, is wholly Coleridgean. We are, for instance, given a spirited Miriam:

'And loud she struck the harp, and raised the song,
Her ebon tresses waving in the wind;
Her dark eyes sparkling, and her bosom
Throbbing with transport high—'Thou, thou art he,
The chosen one of God—the man foretold,
The saviour of thy people!'

In another passage we see the infant Moses in his cradle among the bullrushes, symbolizing man in his natural beginning, in closest contact with Nature,

'Gently flowed on the waters, as the sun
Shone on them in full brightness; the tall plants,
Shadowing around the little cradle, grew
In full luxuriance. Fishes sported in the wave,
Myriads of lovely insects fill'd the air. . . '

Nonetheless, then Pharoah's daughter discovers the infant Moses, she knows at once that she must save him, not simply because he appeals to her as a helpless baby, but because she sees him as Man, the ultimate masterpiece of Creation,

'Shall all things live, and Thou, the masterpiece
Of all things living, perish?'

Other passages relate to communion with God on Mount Sinai, on the natural instincts of motherhood, Jethro's reflections upon the presence of mystery in Nature:

'But often in the heavens my wandering eye
Has seen the white cloud vanish into forms
Of strange unearthly lineaments.
And often in the midnight's peaceful calm
Have I been wakened by strange unearthly tones,
And often in the hour of sacrifice
Felt strange ideal pleasures.'

Further passages deal with the impact of Nature upon Man:

'In vain the aspiring spirit strives to pierce
The veil of Nature, dark in mystery;
In vain it strives, proud in the moving force
Of hopes and fears, to gain almighty power,
To form created intellectual worlds.'

Within the context of collaboration of Coleridge and Davy in the writing of a philosophic epic poem entitled "Moses," it may or may not be significant that, at the close of 1799, we find Coleridge writing to Southey from London, and mentioning Moses (passingly): "Spinosism (if Spinosism it be and i'faith 'tis very like it) disposed me to consider this big City as that part of the Supreme One, which the prophet Moses was aliowed to see" (CL 316). Coleridge's mind as aforesaid, was nothing if not reticulative and this introduction of Moses into the London scene is suggestive, if nothing more, that Coleridge at that time had Moses on his intellectual map.

Yet despite Davy's initial enthusiasm for Moses, Zipporah and Jethro, within the framework of a philosophic poem treating with Nature, Man and Society, the epic failed to find completion. As his biographer puts it, Davy's "genius was destinied for other efforts." In 1801, he became professor of chemistry at the Royal Institution and accordingly left Bristol for London. He went on to become one of the most famous men internationally of his day. His greatest achievement was undoubtedly the invention of the miners' safety lamp, which has been seen, at least by the mining industry, as of greater benefit to mankind than any philosophical epic in blank verse.

The Davy-Coleridge friendship survived twenty-five years, until seriously failing health forced Davy to spend the greater part of his remaining years of life abroad. He died at Geneva, at the age of fifty-one. During the final months before his death, a seriously sick man, he diverted himself by writing a small book entitled Consolations in Travel, or the Last Days of a Philosopher, dedicating it to Thomas Poole. It consisted of a series of dialogues, which he committed to paper quickly, in consecutive order; the final dialogues, virtually composed on his deathbed, were dictated. The characters were Ambrosio, a classical scholar and historian, a liberal Roman Catholic, based on Davy's friend and chief companion while in Rome, Monsignor Spada (Davy was not a Catholic, but admired the discipline and doctrines of Rome); next, Philalethes, based on Davy himself; next, The Unknown, Davy's notion of the ideal chemical philosopher; and finally Eubathes, who it is said bore a striking resemblance to a fellow scientist and secretary of the Royal Society, Dr Wollaston.

The first dialogue is entitled "The Vision," the basic theme of which is, in sum, that in the progress of society no useful discovery is ever lost, all great and real improvements are perpetuated and that, in consequence, the welfare of mankind is in continuous progression (this of course being the great nineteenth century creed). The setting is the Colosseum in Rome and, according to Davy, he based this episode on a vision experienced by him in the Colosseum and recorded by him in a notebook entry dated November 9, 1819: "One moonlight night, when the summer seemed to pass into the autumn . . . I was walking in the Colosseum full of sublime thoughts . . . when of a sudden I saw a bright mist in one of the arcades, so luminous that I thought a person must be advancing with a light. I approached towards it, when suddenly it enveloped me; an aromatic smell, like that of fresh orange flowers, seemed to penetrate . . . my respiratory organs, accompanied with sweet sounds, so low that they seemed almost ideal; and a sort of halo, of intense brilliancy, and of all the hues of the rainbow, above which appeared a female form of exquisite beauty . . . a voice, distinct, but like that of a flute, said, 'I am one of the Roman deities! You disbelieve all the ancient opinions, as dreams and fables; nevertheless they are founded in truth. Before the existence of man, and some time after, a race of beings who are independent of respiration and air occasionally dwelt on the globe . . . In the early stage of society we condescended to instruct man . . . The last time I was here—'"

Here the notebook entry breaks off and is immediately followed by the account of another dream:

I had on the 7th April, 1821, a very curious dream, which, because it has some analogy to the preceding day dream [Davy's italics, which, in conjunction with the words 'day dream' strongly suggests that the above was an opium dream], I shall detail:—I imagined myself in a place partially illuminated with a reddish hazy light; within, it was dark and obscure; but without, and opening upon the sky, very bright. I experienced a new kind of sensation, which it is impossible to describe. It seemed as if I became diffused in the atmosphere, and had a general sense of balmy warmth. [Compare with Coleridge's phrase (above), 'Yet warm, yet a Spirit']. Floating a little while in the atmosphere, I found that I had wings. . . I rose in the air; and . . . found myself in the sky, amidst bright clouds and galaxies of light. It seemed as if I was altogether entering a new state of existence . . . I seemed in communication with some intelligent being, to whom I stated . . . that I now knew what it was to have a purer and better existence, but that I hoped for something still more perfect . . . that I hoped to be, ultimately, in a world of intellectual light. . . After this my dream became confused; my fields of light changed to a sort of luminous wood filled with paths, and the bright vision degenerated into a common dream. (Works i 434-436)

In the first dialogue of Consolations, Philalethes-Davy is left alone in the Colosseum to ruminate among the moonlit ruins, and before long there appears a spirit, the genius of the place. This tutelary genius takes him soaring aloft above the earth, in an infinity of space, but first Philalethes-Davy is treated to a species of lengthy monologue upon the development of mankind, presented as a series of visions, or spectra, obviously inspired by Coleridgean concepts of Nature, Man and Society. We are, in fact, being regaled, through the soaring Philalethes-Davy, with an opium-type dream based, albeit loosely at times, on the original project for The Recluse, or, alternatively, Moses; yet in extraordinary, psychedelic terms, transposing The Recluse into something astounding indeed. Having traced suffering mankind through his various stages of progression, he is left behind entirely, and Philalethes-Davy is escorted by the genius higher and higher through the ether on a stage by stage exploration of the successive higher states of existence, approaching steadily nearer to the infinite and divine Mind. Incredible shapes and monsters are seen, miraculously and amazingly hued; they float and stream around the travellers, with weightless motion. Says the genius, "The universe is everywhere full of life, but the modes of this life are infinitely diversified, and yet every form of it must be enjoyed and known by every spiritual nature before the consummation of all things." Philalethes-Davy is then taken even higher, to the cometary world; much closer, indeed unpleasantly close, to the sun. All becomes hazy, crimson scarlet, and searing hot. Finally the genius can escort Philalethes-Davy no higher, because the genius herself, himself, itself, is not yet sufficiently highly developed to be capable of progressing nearer to the infinite and divine Mind. Finally Philalethes-Davy awakens from the dream, to find himself seated in the Colosseum, with his servant shaking his shoulder to rouse him. (In this vision-sequence we are reminded of Coleridge's prefix to the Ancient Mariner, which, translated from the Latin, reads: "I readily believe that in the sum of existing things there are more invisible beings than visible. But who will explain the great family to us—their ranks, their relationships, their differences, and their respective duties? What do they do, and where do they live? The human mind has always sought knowledge of these things, but has never attained it").

The second dialogue is entitled, "Discussions Connected with the Vision in the Colosseum," and is set on the summit of Vesuvius. This discussion treats upon dreams; there is discussion of man as an animal, man as a reasoning, developing intellectual being, and man as a religious being. There is concentration upon Christian religion: Ambrosio defends the Mosaic account of the creation of Man, maintaining "that man was created with a religious feeling, or instinct, or innate knowledge, as represented by Moses, which declining with the passage of time and the advance of man's progress, was supplanted by Revelation and the derivation of Christianity from Judaism"—a Coleridgean argument presented in highly Coleridgean vein.

In Dialogue Three, the Unknown joins the discussion and deals with the geological structure of the globe and surmised structural changes that it has undergone, including the latest scientific explanations of how living organisms came into being. The Unknown in this dialogue does most of the talking. He goes on to describe how he changed from a youth sceptic into a believer. And then something quite remarkable happens; the Unknown launches into the account of a dream he once had when in Palestine:

I was walking along that deserted shore which contains the ruins of Ptolemais, it was evening; the sun was sinking in the sea; I seated myself on a rock, lost in melancholy contemplations . . . The janissary, who was my guide, and my servant, were preparing some food for me . . . and whilst I was waiting for their summons to the repast, I continued my reveries. . . I fell asleep. I saw a man approaching me, whom at first I took for my janissary, but as he came nearer I found a very different figure; he was a very old man with a head as white as snow; his countenance was dark, but paler than that of an Arab, and his features stern, wild, and with a peculiar, savage expression; his form was gigantic, but his arms were withered, and there was a large scar on the left side of his face which seemed to have deprived him of an eye. He wore a black turban and black flowing robes, and there was a large chain round his waist which clanked as he moved . . . He called out, 'Fly not, stranger, fear me not, I will not harm you, you shall hear my story, it may be useful to you . . . You see before you a man who was educated a Christian, but who renounced the worship of the one supreme God for the superstitions of the pagans . . . I became an apostate in the reign of the emperor Julian, and I was employed by that sovereign to superintend the re-erection of the temple of Jerusalem, by which it was intended to belie the prophecies and give the death-blow to the holy religion. History has informed you of the result; my assistants were most of them destroyed in a tremendous storm, I was blasted by lightening from heaven' (he raised his withered hand to his face and eye) 'but suffered to life, and expiate my crime in the flesh. My life has been spent in constant and severe penance, and in that suffering of the spirit produced by guilt, and is to be continued as long as any part of the temple of Jupiter in which I renounced my faith, remains in this place. I have lived through fifteen tedious centuries . . . but I hope my atonement is completed . . . You have just thrown the last fragment of the temple over a rock. My time is arrived, I come!' As he spoke these last words, he rushed towards the sea, threw himself over the rock, and disappeared. I heard no struggling, and saw nothing but a gleam of light from the wave that closed above him.

Surely we have here a variation upon the Arab of Book Five of The Prelude, and the dream based on a dream dreamt by Descartes, as recorded in Baillet's Life: the Arab with the stone and the shell. We have "the glittering light" that is "The waters of the deep gathering upon us" as the Arab in The Prelude informs the enquiring stranger—the dreamer: in Consolations the gleam of light comes from the wave that closes over the Arab's head when he leaps into the sea. This dream sequence, if we accept the Prelude 1805 version, was Coleridge's dream; and though he may have taken it direct (with slight alteration) from Descartes, it is equally possible that it was an opium dream of Coleridge's, based on the reality of what he had read in the Life. Certainly Davy's Unknown, the dream of this dream in Consolations, makes it clear enough, in the euphemistic currency of the day, that his is an opium dream. And yet the Arab in Consolations, like the Ancient Mariner, has spent his extended life, fifteen centuries of it, in "constant and severe penance, and in that suffering of the spirit produced by guilt": which was not the case with the Arab in The Prelude.

Dialogue Four of the Consolations, called "The Proteus, or Immortality," deals with the pleasures of travel, a fishing adventure when Philalethes is nearly drowned, considers respiration and animal body heat and moves, discursively, into discussion of the soul: its immateriality and consequent immortality, founded on the postulate that sensibility and intelligence cannot result from any possible combination of any insensate unintelligent atoms. Dialogue Five, entitled "The Chemical Philosopher," attempts a definition of civilization and the attributes of the best type of chemical philosopher, who finally emerges as the apogee of all that civilized man stands for. Dialogue Six, entitled "Pola, or Time," discusses the destruction of civilizations and the operation of time, philosophically considered, and the certain and immutable laws of destruction, concluding with speculations on the infinite universe and the eternal mind by which the universe was created and is governed. And so Philalethes returns to his original theme of intelligences of a higher order than man, under the ultimate influence of a divine will. The dialogue ends with reference to the natural progression of successive rise and fall.

And with the conclusion of Dialogue Six, Davy succumbed to a fatal cerebral haemorrhage, and presumably soared upward on his own progression towards the ultimate influence of divine will. Dialogues seven and eight were cobbled together by his biographer and brother, John Davy, in the role of literary executor, and they need not be considered here.

The reader of Consolations emerges from the experience feeling bemused, confused, amazed. Indeed stunned, in the manner of the Wedding Guest when the Ancient Mariner had finished with him. No attempt is made to conceal the fact that much of the material in Consolations is drawn from opium dream sequences. Some of it sounds distinctly Coleridgean; some of it takes us back to hints we have been given in the outline for "Moses"; some of it stems, regressively through the series of visions described by Davy in his noteboks, from "My eye is wet with tears," the chaunt composed by Davy over a quarter of a century earlier.

Haunting visions flash before us as we read. The Ancient Mariner and The Recluse seem to have become inextricably mixed; the reticulative process of the opium dream! These Consolations are not all opium; but there is much, very much of opium in them, and we can never be certain when we are dreaming and when we are awake. And how much of it is Davy, and how much Coleridge, we shall never know. Perhaps Davy did not know either. He had had many many long and marvellous conversations with Coleridge over the years. In 1804, before Coleridge had left for Malta, Davy had told him, "Thoughts which you have nursed have been to me an eternal source of consolation . . . You will live with me as a recollection possessed of creative energy—as an imagination ringed with fire, inspiring and rejoicing" (Works i 449).

I pass, like night, from land to land,

I have strange power of speech;
The moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me;
To him my tale I teach . . .

Coleridge had known Davy's face. And Davy never forgot the tale.