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. 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.

He

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 !

Cp.

28. thoughts translated into the language of poetry. 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

Letters (Biog. Lit. ii. 160-1) of the playgoer who attends the theatre merely to gratify his curiosity; and Lectures (p. 237), 'Expectation in preference to surprise as a characteristic of Shakespeare's plays.'

32. in perusing French tragedies. Coleridge cherished throughout his life an unreasonable antipathy to the French classical drama, and indeed to everything French; yet his remarks in Satyrane's Letters show that he was fully alive to the distinctive excellence of this form of drama. Cp. Lectures, p. 213, where he characterizes the dialogue of French tragedies as 'the natural product of the hotbed of vanity, namely, the closet of an author who is actuated originally by a desire to excite surprise and wonderment at his own superiority to other men', &c. (1818).

PAGE 15 1. 3. I was wont boldly to affirm, &c. Cp. T. T., July 3, 1833: 'The collocation of words is so artificial in Shakespeare and Milton, that you may as well think of pushing a brick out of a wall with your forefinger as attempt to remove a word out of their finished passages;' and p. 340 (ed. 1858).

11. from Donne to Cowley. See Miscellanies, p. 135. 'Wonder-exciting vigour, intenseness, and peculiarity of thought, using at will the almost boundless stores of a capacious memory, and exercised on subjects where we have no right to expect it-this is the wit of Donne!' Cp. also Poet. Works, p. 471.

...

26. the Monody at Matlock, pub. 1791; the Vision of Hope, pub. 1796. Letter to Thelwall, Nov. 1796: 'Bowles has written a poem lately without plan or meaning, but the component parts are divine. It is entitled "Hope: an allegorical sketch "'.

(Letters, p. 179.)

30. The poems of West, Gilbert West (1703-56). He is best known for his imitations of Spenser and translations of Pindar's Odes and of Euripides. In his introduction to the translation of the Odes is a condemnation of Cowley's previous translation, very similar in spirit to Coleridge's criticisms of the same work (Biog; Lit. ii. 66). Johnson found West's translation 'elegant and exact, but sometimes too paraphrastical'; and Horace Walpole remarked of it that 'the poetry is very stiff'. Gray, on the other hand, speaks of himself and his friends being 'all enraptured and enmarvailed' by West's imitation of Spenser, On the abuse of travelling.' (Gray's Works, ed. Gosse, ii. 90.)

PAGE 16 1. 2. Warton. Thomas Warton (1728-90). His sonnets, which were special favourites with Hazlitt, resemble those of Bowles in their tenderness and sincerity of feeling. One in particular, To the River Lodon, suggests comparison with Bowles's To the Itchin, and Coleridge's To the River Otter, which it may have helped to inspire. Coleridge scarcely seems to make due acknowledgement of his debt to Warton, just as he omits all reference to Akenside, whose influence he yet undoubtedly felt. (See Athenæum, Feb. 16, 1905; Letters, p. 197.)

4. Percy's collection. Thomas Percy (1728-1811), Bishop of Dromore, poet, scholar, and antiquary. His Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (most of them genuine English poems, some retouched, and some modern imitations) were published in 1765, and became generally and immediately popular, going through four editions before Percy's death. Of the poets of the succeeding generation, Walter Scott came most directly under their influence. Wordsworth, writing in 1815 (Essay Supplementary to Preface), says: 'I do not think there is an able writer of the present day who would not be proud to acknowledge his obligations to the Reliques; I know that it is so with my friends; and for myself, I am happy in this occasion to make a public avowal of my own.'

F. N. Cowper's Task. The Task was first published in 1785; Thomson's Castle of Indolence in 1746. Coleridge was certainly familiar with Cowper in 1796 (cp. Letters, p. 197, where he speaks of the 'divine chit-chat of Cowper '), and probably earlier.

17. the lines which are now adopted. These lines, contributed by Coleridge to Book II of Southey's Joan of Arc (first edition 1796), were to have been enlarged into a separate poem and published in the 1797 edition of Coleridge's poems, under the title of Visions of the Maid of Orleans. The additions, however, were never finally completed, and the poem was left in the fragmentary state in which it finally appeared (in the Sibylline Leaves, 1817) as the Destiny of Nations: a Vision. The only addition of importance is the passage Il. 123-270 (Poet. Works, p. 584). Coleridge is surely strangely at fault in classing this poem, 'in respect of the general tissue of style,' with the shorter blank verse poems of these years. See his letter to Wade, June 16, 1814 (Poet. Works, p. 585), where he speaks of 'the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotony and dead plumb down of the pauses, and the absence of all bone, muscle, and sinew in the single lines,' a criticism which includes his own verse as well as Southey's.

18. in the present collection, i. e. in Sibylline Leaves, published with the first edition of the Biog. Lit.

20. the Tragedy of Remorse. In its earliest form, as written and sent to Sheridan in 1797, the drama was entitled Osorio. Rejected by Sheridan, it lay for many years in MS.; in 1812 it was recast as Remorse, and produced in January 1813 at Drury Lane.

PAGE 17 1. 3. a copy of verses half ludicrous, half splenetic. The Address to a Young Jackass and its tethered Mother, first published in Morning Chronicle, Dec. 30, 1794. See Letters, p. 606. The motto Sermoni propriora was not affixed to this poem, but (in the edition of 1797) to the poem Reflections on leaving a place of retirement (see T. T, July 25, 1832: Charles Lamb translated my motto sermoni propriora by properer for a sermon !').

II. under the name of Nehemiah Higginbottom.

These