One of the most potent and persistent myths in Romantic studies is. A n n u s M i r a b i l i s. P a r t I I

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1 P a r t I I A n n u s M i r a b i l i s But ah! how insincere are all our joys! Which, sent from heaven, like lightning make no stay; Their palling taste the journey s length destroys, Or grief, sent post, o ertakes them on the way. (Dryden, Annus Mirabilis ) Art thou, say Once more arriv d a harbinger of woe, Precursor of a year of miseries? ( Thelwall, Lines Written at Bridgewater ) To you, therefore, this Year of Wonders is justly dedicated, because you have made it so. You... who have built your selves an immortal Monument on your own ruins. You are now a Phoenix in her ashes (Dryden, Dedication to the City of London, in its Representatives, Annus Mirabilis ) One of the most potent and persistent myths in Romantic studies is that of the annus mirabilis, the miracle year of joint labour in the Quantocks that gave birth to Lyrical Ballads and thereby, by some accounts, to English Romanticism. It is unlikely, however, that many of the critics who continue, in spite of the deconstruction of so many other Romantic ideologies, to repeat the term first applied to Coleridge in 1880 (Ward 104) have stopped to consider its seventeenth-century origins. According to the OED, this Latin phrase first enters the English language in John Dryden s 1667 poem Annus Mirabilis, the Year of Wonders, commemorating both a major British naval victory over the

2 102 John Thelwall in the Wordsworth Circle Dutch, and the Great Fire of London. Readers have often noted the irony of Dryden s title, given that one of his two wonders is a great disaster in British history. As Dryden s Dedication to the poem makes clear, however, he considers the real victory to be neither the military one nor the mere survival of the fire, but rather the phoenix-like capacity of the metropolis to rise from its ashes, to be struck down and to triumph through the collective will and energy of the people s representatives. Thus at its very origins, annus mirabilis is defined less by miracles than by miseries, but miseries overcome by mutual reason (Dryden ). There is a lesson in Dryden s poem that scholars of Wordsworth and Coleridge would do well to heed, especially insofar as their annus mirabilis was so closely intertwined with Thelwall, who was a great admirer of Dryden. In The Peripatetic, Thelwall offered Scraps of Criticism on Dryden s Annus Mirabilis, finding in its style and form the same inseparable ups and downs that it commemorates in British history, and that would soon be applied to Lyrical Ballads : If he frequently rises higher than almost any author in our language, he sometimes sinks almost below every thing that oblivion has spared ( Peripatetic 292). With coincidental foresight, Thelwall here seems to be predicting the e xperience, products and reception of the famous annus mirabilis of English Romanticism, including his own. The truth of Dryden s poem that wonders are defined by their opposites, and that redemption is the result of democratic cooperation rather than providential grace or singular heroism is particularly pertinent for Thelwall, the products of whose own ambivalent annus mirabilis have long been buried in the ashes of his friends spectacular success. 1 For Wordsworth and Coleridge, the period between Wordsworth s arrival in the Quantocks in July 1797 and their departure in July 1798 indeed appears to have been a miracle year that provided a lifelong touchstone for both men, long after their friendship had foundered. Not only Lyrical Ballads, but The Borderers and Osorio, the beginnings of Wordsworth s ambitious The Recluse, and all the poetry, both conversational and supernatural, upon which Coleridge s lyric reputation rests, have their source in [t]hat summer when on Quantock s grassy Hills / Far ranging, and among the sylvan Coombs... we first / Together wantoned in wild Poesy ( Prelude ). For Thelwall, however, who ironically supplied much of the prototype for this idyllic reverie in his Sylvanus Peripatetic and his Lines Written at Bridgewater, the year was more like a trial by fire. In the aftermath of his visit to Alfoxden he too was inspired to remarkable poetic productivity, composing many of his Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement, including its ambitious bookends, The Fairy of the Lake and The Hope of Albion, in a three-month inferno of nonstop composition in spring But as what he hoped would be a brief departure from his friends stretched into two and then

3 Annus Mirabilis 103 three years of isolation and exile, his pastoral idyll was shadowed and shattered by the storms and persecutions that he had also foreseen, culminating in the sudden and devastating death of his greatest consolation and hope for the future, his beloved daughter, Maria, at the end of December 1799 with bitter irony, right on the threshold of a new century. By that time the double birth that he had so eagerly prophesied at Bridgewater had been transformed into an abortive and distended mirror of his friends success, a seemingly endless annus horribilis whose ghastly reverberations only amplified the silent partnership at its empty heart. But if Thelwall s own prospects were blasted, his annus horribilis also left the taste of ashes in the mouth of his friends miracle year. As the sweet invitation of the Lines Written at Bridgewater descended into the desperate pleas and bitter accusations of Thelwall s autumn poems and letters, Coleridge and Wordsworth were inescapably aware that their idyll had been purchased at the cost of his nightmare. Their annus mirabilis is defined by this awareness, as it was bracketed by visits from and to Thelwall. The visit of Thelwall to Alfoxden that had catalyzed their partnership was mirrored exactly a year later by their visit to Llyswen, on the eve of their departure for Germany. This is always portrayed, following Coleridge s testimony, as a spontaneous dart into Wales (CLSTC I. 414), and it may indeed have been unplanned, but it does not follow that it was undertaken lightly. Indeed, under the circumstances, they must have approached Llyswen with the same mix of eager anxiety and fearful hope as Thelwall approached Nether Stowey (and they awaited him) a long, long year before. Though no record of their reunion exists except the veiled memorial written by Wordsworth for The Excursion more than eight years later, the very existence of that account testifies to its memorable drama; beneath the layers of time, disguise and poetic license, the details of Books 2 4 of The Excursion are consistent enough both with the physical appearance of the recently discovered site of Thelwall s hermitage, and with other surviving accounts, to allow a reasonable speculation about their activities there. Like the Wanderer they were probably surprised by the vitality and pride, if not joy, that Thewall showed in the retreat within retreat ( Excursion ) that he had so laboriously built. He no doubt let slip some of the mournful... soreness and irritability ( Retirement xxxviii) that he records in his Prefatory Memoir (and that Wordsworth exaggerates in his Solitary), but knowing his assertive and resilient character, and judging from the energetic tone of other letters of this period (before the death of Maria), he probably welcomed them with a show of militant and competitive ego, as if to prove how well he had realized the dream of rustic self-sufficiency that Coleridge had offered, withdrawn, and was now, ironically, unable to sustain for his own family. No doubt Thelwall took a wry delight in that reversal of roles, comfortably settled

4 104 John Thelwall in the Wordsworth Circle beneath his thatch while his erstwhile Somerset neighbors said a (not so) fond farewell; no doubt, too, he enjoyed putting them through their peripatetic paces, both physically and philosophically, as they followed his brook, searched for his springs, and bounded up his mount, onto the windswept heights where he would have shown them the ancient monuments that now survive only in his (and Wordsworth s) poems. 3 But above all, they would have spent many hours in his romantic dingle, and the hobbyhorsical hermitage by the waterfall that he had constructed in imitation of the one at Alfoxden, where they would have renewed their triumvirate discussions, and shared the stream of inspiration whose currents wind through so much of their work in The Excursion and The Fairy of the Lake, in Thelwall s novel The Daughter of Adoption and even in the Biographia Literaria, where Coleridge so beautifully captured their ambivalent interpersonal dynamics in his image of poetry s war embrace. Just as the annus mirabilis is bounded by rocky meetings with Thelwall, so the companion pieces that issued from it, Lyrical Ballads and Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement, are buffeted by the same crosscurrents of hope and disappointment, guilt and sorrow, strength and sympathy, as the absent presences of the triumvirate partners resound in ventriloquized voices, broken questions and multiple meanings ( why/wye, once again ) that ring back and forth between them. Entering into dialogue with the travel journals that Thelwall brought with him to Alfoxden, and published from Llyswen, the Lyrical Ballads are sketches for a New Peripatetic, in which Coleridge and Wordsworth locate themselves, geographically and generically, stylistically and thematically, poetically and politically, in relation to the dis location of Thelwall. Though nowhere directly addressed or dramatized in the volume, Thelwall is present everywhere: as a ventriloquized speaker, implied listener or Bahktinian hero of Coleridge and Wordsworth s utterance; as a hidden source of anecdotes, images and turns of phrase; as a figure for the fate that might (or ought to) have been theirs; as a stimulus to a guilty renegotiation of their own earlier poetical and political positions and philosophies. Wordsworth and Coleridge serve a similar purpose in Thelwall s Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement, a volume that rings with echoes of their echoes of his words. In these allegories of absence and exile, Thelwall appeals and performs to Wordsworth and Coleridge as his implied auditors, and constructs himself as their alter ego (Davies Presences 218); in these wish-fulfillment fantasies of reunion and communion, he replays, replaces and seeks to revive their forsaken friendship, before finally moving beyond them, following his own restorative poetic therapy. But Lyrical Ballads and the Poems Written in Retirement are intertwined not only in their genesis and development, but also in their theory and reception: their prefaces were tarred with the same brush in the pages

5 Annus Mirabilis 105 of the Edinburgh Revie w, with whose editor, Francis Jeffrey, Thelwall did battle as a champion for his injured contemporaries, defending his own poetic theory as a complement to theirs, putting it into practice in his elocutionary project, and thereby precipitating the final crash of their triumvirate vehicle. In every way, then, Lyrical Ballads and Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement are works of joint labor, products of an annus mirabilis that embraces and resists both victory and defeat, shared between not two, but three.