myself for the present with stating the main result of the Chapter, which I have reserved for that future publication, a detailed prospectus of which the reader will find at the close of the second volume.

The IMAGINATION then, I consider either as primary, or 5 secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, 10 yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is 15 essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of 20 time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.

25

Whatever more than this, I shall think it fit to declare concerning the powers and privileges of the imagination in the present work, will be found in the critical essay on the uses of the Supernatural in poetry, and the principles that regulate its introduction: which the reader will find pre- 30 fixed to the poem of The Ancient Mariner.

END OF VOLUME FIRST.

NOTES TO VOL. I

In the notes the following abbreviations have been adopted :— Poet. Works The Poetical Works of S. T. Coleridge. Edited

=

by J. Dykes Campbell. (Macmillan, 1905.)

=

Life Samuel Taylor Coleridge: a narrative of the events of his life. By J. Dykes Campbell. (Macmillan, 1896.)

=

Letters Letters of S. T. Coleridge. Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge. (Heinemann, 1895.)

Lectures =

Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare. Edited by T. Ashe. (Bohn's Library, 1902.)

Miscellanies Miscellanies, Aesthetic and Literary. Edited by T. Ashe. (Bohn's Library, 1892.)

=

A. P. Anima Poetae: from the unpublished notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge. (Heinemann, 1895.)

L. B. = Lyrical Ballads. Edited by G. Sampson. (1903.) T. T. = Coleridge's Table-Talk. Edited by H. N. Coleridge. The references are given under the dates.

O. W. =

The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Edited by Thomas Hutchinson. (Oxford Edition, Henry Frowde, 1904.) Biog. Lit. 1847 = Biographia Literaria, &c.: Second Edition, prepared in part by H. N. Coleridge, completed and published by his widow. 2 vols. (1847.)

Biog. Lit. The present edition of the Biographia Literaria and the Aesthetical Essays.

The references to Schelling are taken from the 1858 edition of his works, and those to Kant from the 1867 edition (by Hartenstein).

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA

CHAPTER I

PAGE 1 1. 1. This opening paragraph was probably written when the greater part of the book was already complete. See Supplementary Note to Introduction.

PAGE 2 1. 3. In 1794. The actual date was the spring of 1796. The volume was entitled 'Poems upon Various Subjects: London: Printed for C. G. and J. Robinson; and J. Cottle, Bookseller, Bristol.' Of these poems the best known are Religious

Musings, the Monody on the Death of Chatterton, and the poem afterwards named The Aeolian Harp. Lamb contributed several sonnets, and Southey part of one sonnet, to this volume.

8. The critics of that day. In a letter to Estlin of this year (1796) Coleridge writes: 'The Reviews have been wonderful. The Monthly has cataracted panegyric on my poems, the Critical has cascaded it, and the Analytical has dribbled it with very tolerable civility.' The critic of the Analytical Review was apparently the only one who commented on the 'compound epithets, through which' (as he wrote) 'the language becomes sometimes turgid'. The Monthly Review, while according high praise to the poems, reprimands the author for being often uncouth, obscure, and verging to extravagance'; while the Monthly Magazine remarks that the poems though neglectfully composed, discover the true character of genius'. (See Coleridge's Letters to the Rev. J. P. Estlin, pub. by the Philobiblon Society, p. 21.)

6

II. a profusion of new coined double epithets. Coleridge's note implies that the use of double epithets is the sign of an immature style. But it is rather the quality than the quantity of such words that is affected by the ripening judgement of the poet. Thus no play of Shakespeare's contains so many double epithets as the Troilus and Cressida. And they are also characteristic (to take a more modern instance) of Keats's maturer work. But in both poets, and especially in Keats, the later examples are far more felicitous than the earlier. (See Keats's Poems, ed. E. de Sélincourt, App. C, p. 581.)

F.N. Tanquam scopulum, &c. See Gell. Noct. Att. i. 10. 4 'Id quod a C. Caesare, excellentis ingenii ac prudentiae viro, in primo de analogia libro scriptum est; habe semper in memoria atque in pectore, ut tanquam scopulum, sic fugias inauditum atque insolens verbum.' (Caesar's Commentaries, ed. Kübler, iii. 141.)

PAGE 3 1. 8. In the after editions. The second edition appeared in 1797. Some twenty of the poems contained in the first edition were omitted and ten new ones added, including the Ode to the Departing Year and Reflections on leaving a place of Retirement. To this edition was 'prefixed the dedication to Coleridge's brother George, which is full of autobiographical interest. Both Lamb and Lloyd contributed to this volume. It was reprinted in 1803, with the omission of Lloyd's poems.

9. I pruned the double epithets with no sparing hand, &c. In the whole of this sentence Coleridge is quoting almost word for word from the preface to the second edition, where he returns thanks to his reviewers for the assistance they have given him in discovering his 'poetic deficiencies'. A comparison of the two volumes, however, reveals that the 'pruning' process was not carried out so sternly as one is here led to suppose. Thus sorrowshrivelled', deleted in the Monody, is inserted in the Man of Ross.

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.

The

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.

11. 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.

20. a schoolfellow who had quitted us for the University. Middleton left Christ's Hospital for Cambridge in 1788. He 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