consorted with unbelievers like Thelwall and distressed his good brother
George by his heterodoxy, he was by nature deeply religious. He tried in
his letters to recover Thelwall from his "atheism," though he heartily
approved a sentiment expressed by the latter: "He who thinks and _feels_
will be virtuous; and he who is absorbed in self will be vicious,
whatever may be his speculative opinions." Godwin's system of "Justice,"
with its soulless logic, he abhorred. He preached often in Unitarian
churches. To young Hazlitt, who heard him preach in January, 1798, from
the text "And He went up into the mountain to pray, _Himself, alone_,"
it seemed "as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human
heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence
through the universe." In politics he was, when he went to Stowey,
"almost equidistant from all the three prominent parties, the Pittites,
the Foxites, and the Democrats"; he was "a vehement anti-ministerialist,
but after the invasion of Switzerland, a more vehement anti-Gallican
[see the last two stanzas of "France"], and still more intensely an
anti-Jacobin." Under Wordsworth's influence his thoughts turned in great
measure from contemporary politics to more fundamental matters. Always
his poetry had been the utterance of his essential being. "I feel
strongly and I think strongly," he wrote to Thelwall in 1796, "but I
seldom feel without thinking or think without feeling. Hence, though my
poetry has in general a hue of tenderness or passion over it, yet it
seldom exhibits unmixed and simple tenderness and passion. My
philosophical opinions are blended with or deduced from my feelings."
Wordsworth gave his feelings a new object and his philosophy a higher
aim. In April of the second year at Stowey, in the letter to his brother
already quoted, Coleridge wrote: "I have for some time past withdrawn
myself totally from the consideration of _immediate causes_, which are
infinitely complex and uncertain, to muse on fundamental and general
causes, the 'causae causarum.' I devote myself to such works as encroach
not on the anti-social passions--in poetry, to elevate the imagination
and set the affections in right tune by the beauty of the inanimate
impregnated as with a living soul by the presence of life--in prose to
the seeking with patience and a slow, very slow mind, 'Quid sumus, et
quidnam victuri gignimus,'--what our faculties are and what they are
capable of be