… He is a man of fluent Eloquence & general knowledge … but unfortunately he has received a few rays of supernatural Light thro' a crack in his upper story." To Cheshire's credit, he manages to find a method in the madness and to elucidate "a coherent metaphysical scheme." When Coleridge promoted Gilbert's sprawling, annotated The Hurricane: A Theosophical and Western Eclogue (1796), he described it as a "strange Poem" by "a man of fine Genius, which, at intervals, he still discovers-But, ah me! Madness smote with her hand.
Gilbert's infusion of eccentric esotericism into their developing Romanticism forced them to deal with a "voice that veers so uninhibitedly between nonsense and sublimity" that they suspected that there was madness in his method. After fifteen years of diligent detective work, Cheshire has produced a provocative and illuminating study of William Gilbert (1763–1824), an Antiguan-born radical theosophist and astrologer who intrigued, inspired, and distressed his friends Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
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