ABSTRACT
Ralph Waldo Emerson's famed meeting with Samuel Taylor Coleridge at Highgate on 5 August 1833 was punctuated by the latter's recitation of these lines. Celebrating his 'Baptismal Birthday', Coleridge's sonnet rehearses the beginnings of his life even as he approaches its end, anticipating his death in 1834 while recalling his birth and christening in 1772. Ten months before hearing Coleridge deliver his 'Baptismal Birth-day', Emerson had delivered his 'Lord's Supper' sermon — a valediction to his congregation at Boston's Second Church, and his apology for rejecting the rite of communion. The distinction here suggested at the opening of 'Language' — identifying the physical world as 'symbol' of the spiritual — is consistent with the remainder of Emerson's Nature, as his broader indebtedness to the Romantic tradition first mediated by Coleridge's works. According to Emerson, the problem with his symbol is that it tethers 'object' to 'notion', it fastens them, serving to bind Nature and Spirit together in a chain.
