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Such epithets as 'eye-startling', 'twy-streaming', 'sure-refuged', flower-caressing', are retained; and the number of actual omissions is small.

15. From that period to the date of the present work I have published nothing, &c. We must remember that Coleridge wrote these words in 1815, before the publication of Christabel, Zapolya, or the first Lay Sermon. But even so he has forgotten Remorse, which was published in 1812.

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18. the three or four poems printed with the works of a friend. The Lyrical Ballads, to which Coleridge here alludes, were first published in 1798, and Coleridge contributed four poems-The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere; The Nightingale, a Conversation Poem; The Foster-Mother's Tale; and The Dungeon. majority of the reviewers took all the poems to be the work of one writer. The critic of the Monthly Review expressed his regrets that he could not regard them as poetry'; the Analytical Review, on the other hand, infinitely preferred 'the simplicity of this volume to the meretricious frippery of the Darwinian taste'. None of them knew what to make of the Ancient Mariner; but it was the matter of this 'cock-and-bull story', rather than the manner, to which they took exception. The only comment of the Monthly Magazine upon the volume is to the effect that it is 'an attempt at the simplicity of the old writers'.

31. the desire of giving a poetic colouring, &c. Cp. his own description of his poetry to Thelwall (Letters, p. 197; Dec. 1796): 'My philosophical opinions are blended with or deduced from my feelings; and this, I think, peculiarizes my style of writing.'

PAGE 4 1. 10. a very severe master. Cp. Coleridge's account of 'his one just flogging' (T. T., May 27, 1830); also Lamb's essay Christ's Hospital five-and-thirty years ago, and Coleridge's MS. note, Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 34225.

II. the preference of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil. Coleridge retained his poor opinion of Virgil to the end of his life. Cp. T. T., June 2, 1829. It was no doubt on similar grounds that he preferred, even in the matter of style, the prose writers of the seventeenth century to Addison and his contemporaries. (See Miscellanies, p. 175.)

PAGE 5 1. 16. the Manchineel fruit. Despite Boyer's teaching, Coleridge was tempted to introduce this simile in the dedication of the 1797 edition of his poems :

Some most false,

False and fair-foliaged as the manchineel,

Have tempted me to slumber in their shade

E'en mid the storm; then breathing subtlest damps,
Mixed their own venom with the rain from Heaven,
That I woke poisoned.

See letter from Lamb to Coleridge (Ainger's Lamb, i. 83); and

cp. De Quincey (ed. Masson), xi. 378: Coleridge in his early days used the image of a man "sleeping under a manchineel tree" alternately with the case of Alexander killing Clytus as resources for illustration which Providence had bountifully made exhaustless in their application.'

PAGE 6 1. 35. Ne falleretur, &c. This passage may, as Sara Coleridge surmised, be Coleridge's own invention. At least I cannot discover any authority for the use of 'genuina' as a substantive; though 'genuinus' is so used.

PAGE 7 1. 26.

in whose halls are hung Armoury of the invincible knights of old. Wordsworth, Poems dedicated to Nat. Independ., &c., Sonnet xvi.

31. Instead of storing the memory, &c. Cp. Lectures, p. 160: 'We should address ourselves to those faculties in a child's mind, which are first awakened by nature, and consequently first admit of cultivation, that is to say, the memory and the imagination. The comparing power, the judgement, is not at that age active, and ought not to be forcibly exercised, as is too frequently done in the modern systems of education, which can only lead to selfish views, debtor and creditor principles of virtue, and an inflated sense of merit.'

Plin. Ep. I. xvi.

PAGE 8 1. 9. Neque enim debet. 17. the sonnets of Mr. Bowles. The volume here referred to must be the second edition, published in 1789, and containing twenty-one sonnets.

He

20. a schoolfellow who had quitted us for the University. Middleton left Christ's Hospital for Cambridge in 1788. renewed his friendship with Coleridge when the latter entered the University in October, 1791; but (unfortunately for Coleridge, who no doubt felt the loss of his influence) he left Cambridge in 1792. He was appointed the first Bishop of Calcutta in 1813, and held this position till his death in 1824.

25. Qui laudibus amplis, &c. From Petrarch's Latin Epistles, No. 7, Barbato Subnonensi. For qui the original reads quae ; for Dulcia, Regia.

PAGE 9 1. 13. the three or four following publications. A fourth and a fifth edition of the sonnets of Bowles were published in 1796. Coleridge acknowledged his debt to Bowles in a sonnet printed in the Morning Chronicle, Dec. 26, 1794. To the Rev. W. L. Bowles' ('My heart has thanked thee, Bowles, for these soft strains'), of which a second version appeared in the 1796 edition of Coleridge's poems. In the introduction to a collection of Sonnets which he edited in 1796, Coleridge writes,' Those sonnets appear to me the most exquisite in which moral sentiments are deduced from and associated with the scenery of Nature. They create a sweet

and indissoluble union between the intellectual and the material world. . . . Hence the sonnets of Bowles derive their marked superiority over all other sonnets.' By 1802 Coleridge had realized (especially in the later poems of Bowles) the deficiencies in this treatment of Nature. The poet's heart and intellect (he writes to Southey in that year) should be intimately combined and unified with the great appearances of Nature, and not held in solution and loose mixture with them, in the shape of formal similes.' But the process of disenchantment probably began some time before this. At the end of 1796 Bowles was still the 'god of his idolatry' (Letters, pp. 179, 196), but it is significant that Coleridge's project of dedicating the second edition (1797) of his poems to Bowles (Coleridge, I love you for dedicating your poems to Bowles': Lamb's Letters, ed. Ainger, i. 46) was not carried out. The two poets met in 1797, and the meeting does not seem to have impressed Coleridge favourably (Cottle, Rem. p. 130). In 1816 Coleridge injured himself irreparably in Bowles's eyes by his corrections of his former idol's poems. He visited Bowles at Bremhill, and showed him these corrections, and also his remarks in the Biog. Lit. Bowles 'took the corrections, but never forgave the corrector' (Letter to Brabant, Westm. Rev., July 1870, p. 21). For Bowles's influence on Coleridge the reader should compare the elder poet's sonnet 'To the Itchin' with Coleridge's 'To the River Otter' (Life, p. 18). Coleridge assimilated the faults as well as the excellences of his teacher, and was some time in getting rid of them. Four years later (1793) Wordsworth came across Bowles's sonnets for the first time, and found the same charm in them.

25. At a very premature age. Cp. the famous passage in Lamb's essay (Christ's Hospital five-and-thirty years ago), which is doubtless to some extent founded on fact. 'Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the dayspring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee-the dark column not yet turned-Samuel Taylor Coleridge-Logician, Metaphysician, Bard! How have I seen the casual passer through the cloisters stand still,' &c.

31. two or three compositions. The first version of the Monody on the Death of Chatterton was among Coleridge's schoolboy compositions (see Poet. Works, p. 8).

PAGE 10 1.7. Of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate, &c. Milton, Paradise Lost, ii. 559-60.

14. an accidental introduction to an amiable family. This was the family of Mrs. Evans, whose acquaintance Coleridge probably made in 1788. His love for Mary Evans, her daughter, the first and only real passion of his life, does not seem to have declared itself until the end of 1790, a year after his introduction to Bowles's sonnets. Coleridge's intercourse with them ceased on his discovery in 1794 that Mary Evans did not return his love, and

with it ceased' one of the most important crises of his life.' (Life, pp. 14-16, 40.)

22. have sought refuge in abstruse researches. Cp. 'Dejection', ll. 87-91:

For not to think of what I needs must feel,
But to be still and patient, all I can,
And haply by abstruse research to steal
From my own nature all the natural man,
This was my sole resource, my only plan.

Cp. Letters, &c., of S. T. Coleridge, ed. by T. Allsop, 1836, ii. 136: My eloquence was most commonly excited by the desire of running away and hiding myself from my personal and inward feelings, and not for the expression of them. And to W. Collins, in 1818, he writes (Letters, p. 694) : ́Poetry is out of the question. The attempt would only hurry me into that sphere of acute feelings from which abstruse research, the mother of self-oblivion, presents an asylum.'

26. a long and blessed interval. Doubtless the years 1795-8, the most productive and probably the happiest period of Coleridge's life, when the troubles he had to contend with were as yet but

as the stuff

Whence fancy wove me dreams of happiness. Cp. Hazlitt (Spirit of the Age, Coleridge): 'Poetry redeemed him from his spectral philosophy, and he bathed his heart in beauty.'

PAGE 11 1. 1. the Lewsdon Hill of Mr. Crow. First published at the Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1786. The poem is marked by the same merits and defects as the sonnets of Bowles. We have the same attitude to Nature, the same moralizing sentiment and uninspired reflection, which Coleridge subsequently condemned; and the same advance in the direction of a natural, as opposed to an artificial, simplicity. The following extract may serve as an example :-

Thou nameless Rivulet, that from the side
Of Lewsdon softly swelling, forth dost dip
Adown the valley, wandering sportively,
Alas! how soon thy little course shall end!
How soon thy infant stream shall lose itself
In the salt mass of waters, ere it grow
To name or greatness! Yet it flows along
Untainted with the commerce of the world,
Not pressing by the noisy haunts of men,
But thro' sequestered meads.

And then comes the human 'association

So to thine early grave didst thou run on,
Spotless Francesca !

28. thoughts translated into the language of poetry. Cp. On Poesy or Art, 1818 (Biog. Lit. ii. 262): 'Remember that there is a difference between form as proceeding, and shape as superinduced; the latter is either the death or the imprisonment of the thing; the former is its self-witnessing and self-effected sphere of agency.' (The italics are mine.)

31. Darwin's Botanic Garden. Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), poet, physician, inventor, and natural philosopher. In 1788 he made a botanical garden near Lichfield, on which his friend Miss Seward wrote some verses, which seem in their turn to have suggested his Botanic Garden. The poem was published in two parts (the Loves of the Plants, 1789, and the Economy of Vegetation, 1792). Darwin took Pope as his poetic model, and held the theory (expounded in the notes to his poems) that poetry should consist of word-painting (see Lectures, p. 48). Darwin's Loves of the Plants was parodied with great effect by the Anti-Jacobin in the Loves of the Triangles. (See the Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, ed. C. Edmunds, 1890, p. 151.)

PAGE 12 1. 3. a contribution for a literary society in Devonshire. This society was probably the Society of Gentlemen at Exeter, a volume of whose essays was published in 1796. The society existed until 1808, and is described in the Gentleman's Magazine, Jan. 1810. As Coleridge was not a regular member his essay was not included in the volume, and it is greatly to be regretted that no other trace of it is to be found.

sc. 6.

10. the simile in Shakespeare. Merchant of Venice, Act ii.

29. personifications, or mere abstractions. What Coleridge blames in Gray is apparently not so much that he personifies abstractions, as that he leaves them when personified cold and lifeless; whereas from Collins they receive a real, not merely a verbal, personality. See T. T. (ed. 1858), p. 340: Gray's personifications, he said, were mere printers' devils' personifications,' &c.

PAGE 13 F.N. look out in the Gradus. A reference to the Gradus shows that Coleridge's example is inaccurate; but his criticism is none the less just.

PAGE 14 1. 4. Thy image on her wing, &c. 'Memory's Wing' is a figure employed by Coleridge himself in his Farewell Ode on quitting School for Jesus College, Cambridge-a poem which abounds in instances of this same fault.

II. no authority could avail. In these words Coleridge's final standpoint in criticism is summed up; and it is significant that it should have been attained thus early.

22. not the poem which we have read, but, &c. i. e. because the fact of our returning to it proves that its attraction did not lie in the novelty of the matter. Cp. the vigorous denunciation in Satyrane's

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