Dears, i. 35; and yet a fifth exists in a MS. in the British Museum. The fellow from Aberdeen' was Sir James Mackintosh, a man whom Coleridge heartily detested.

When the verses were reprinted in 1834 this note was prefixed :-'See the apology for the " Fire, Famine, and Slaughter. This is the first time the author ever published these lines.1 He would have been glad had they perished; but they have now been printed repeatedly in magazines, and he is told that the verses will not perish. Here, therefore, they are owned, with the hope that they will be taken, as assuredly they were composed, in mere sport.' The verses were excluded from the edition of 1852.

'His voice was like a monarch wooing.'

When writing the opening passage Coleridge probably had in his mind Wordsworth's lines, which he often heard repeated at Alfoxden less than three years before :— 'I heard a thousand blended notes

While in a grove I sate reclined, In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

Lines written in Early Spring.

157. The Mad Monk, p. 156.

First printed in The Wild Wreath (1804), edited by M. S. Robinson, a daughter of Perdita.' It was first reprinted in the 'Supplement' to Coleridge's P. and D. W.' 1877-80. See preceding Note.'

158. The Two Round Spaces on the
Tombstone, p. 157.

First printed in Morning Post, Dec. 4, 1800, with the title-The Two Round Spaces: A Skeltoniad.' A squib is always best in its original form, and this I have preferred to print, rather than the revised version given in the P. W. 1834. Two others were given in Fraser's Magazine for Feb. and May 1833 respectively; a fourth is printed in J. Payne Collier's Old Man's

159. The Snow-drop, p. 158. This fragment is here printed for the first In quality it is very unequal, but there are some lines which no one but Coleridge could have written. The draft title and the letter explain the motive and intention of the verses. There are five stanzas more, but they are too imperfect for print.

LINES WRITTEN IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE
PERUSAL OF MRS. ROBINSON'S SNOW
DROP.

To the Editor of the Morning Post.
SIR,

162. Dejection: an Ode, p. 159. First printed in the Morning Post, Oct. 4, 1802- Wordsworth's wedding-daywith signature 'ESTHE.' See' APPENDIX G.' But this was not the original form of the poem: when first written it was addressed to Wordsworth by nameWilliam' standing for the Edmund' of the Morning Post. In the Appendix to the third volume of his edition of Wordsworth's Poetical Works, Prof. Knight gives this information taken from two autograph copies of the Ode existing among the Coleorton papers, one of them

being signed S. T. Coleridge to William Wordsworth. The other is imperfect, for S. T. C. breaks off at the line

'My shaping spirit of Imagination,' adding: I am so weary of this dolefu! poem that I must break off. My own impression is that the asterisks of the M.P. stand merely for the few lines added in Sib. Leaves. That these lines existed in Oct. 1802 is certain, as they were then sent to J. Wedgwood (see further on in this Note).

In his Latin letter to Coleridge of Oct. 9, 1802 (Ainger's Letters, i. 185), Lamb makes allusion to the appearance of the Ode in a passage thus translated by Canon Ainger: I am wonderfully pleased to have your account of the marriage of Wordsworth (or perhaps I should say of a certain Edmund of yours). All blessings rest on thee, Mary! [Mrs. Wordsworth] too happy in thy lot. I wish thee also joy in this new alliance, Dorothy, truly so named, that other gift of God.'1

When the Ode was next printed (Sik. Leaves, 1817), considerable and notable alterations had been made, but the text underwent no further changes. The following are the more remarkable divergences between the original and the revised versions. 'Lady,' it will be observed, takes the place of Edmund'; the line between 36 and 37-

'A boat becalm'd a lovely sky-canoe,' disappears; a new line is introduced (66)-

'Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower';

the address which preceded Stanza VI. (V. of M.P.) is omitted; the gap which followed the line

'My shaping spirit of Imagination' in the M.P. is partially filled up by 11.

1 See also, in Macmillan's Magazine for June 1887, a very interesting paper by Canon Ainger'Coleridge's "Ode to Wordsworth"-in which the significance of Dejection: an Ode is inter preted, both as regards Coleridge and Words. worth, with much insight. I should have been glad, had it been possible, to have incorporated the whole in this Note.

87-95 (p. 161); in l. 120 (p. 162) 'Otway' is substituted for Edmund'; and lastly -most significant change of all-the concluding passage, in which Wordsworth was invoked as Brother and Friend,' and 'lofty Poet,' reappears, but abbreviated and discharged, as far as possible, of all colour of personality.

The same decolorising process was applied to the lines addressed to Wordsworth on hearing The Prelude (p. 176), when they came to be printed in Sib. Leaves. The same sad reason operated in both cases--between composition and publication 'whispering tongues' had caused the two friends to stand aloof for nearly two years, and the reconciliation which followed had not wholly done away 'the marks of that which once had been.'

Il. 37, 38. Coleridge quotes these lines in Maxilian (Blackwood's Mag. January 1822), and they are quoted by Wordsworth in his pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra (1809, p. 135; see Prose Works, i. 132).

Il. 47-75; and, in continuation, Il. 2938. In the Appendix' to Cottle's Early Recollections (ii. 201-240) will be found a reprint from 'Felix Farley's (Bristol) Journal' of some Essays on the Fine Arts, contributed by Coleridge in August 1814. In the third, 'On the principles of genial criticism concerning the Fine Arts, especially those of Statuary and Painting,' these lines are quoted with the signature 'S. T. C., MS. Poem.' The lines are introduced by a quotation from Plotinus (unreferenced, but it is from ENN. I. lib. vi. ch. 3, and is very incorrectly printed). 'Plotinus, difficult indeed, but under a rough and austere rind concealing fruit worthy of Paradise; and if obscure, at tenet umbra Deum!' [I substitute for the original, Thomas Taylor's translation, as Plotinus's Greek is difficult indeed ']:-'When, therefore, sense beholds the form in bodies,

at strife with matter, binding and vanquish ing its contrary nature, and sees form gracefully shining forth in other forms, it collects together the scattered whole, and introduces it to itself, and to the indivisible form within; and renders it consonant, congruous, and friendly to its own intimate form.'

'A divine passage' (continues Coleridge)

'faintly represented in the following lines, written many years ago by the writer, though without reference to, or recollection of, the above.'

The construction of the quotation from Dejection is remarkable--the identification of this light, this glory, this fair luminous mist with that green light that lingers in the west'; and it is also notable that Coleridge should have, in 1814, described a poem published in 1802 as still in MS.' In the text of the quotation are a few various readings of no great importance.

11. 21-28. In a Scholium' on the foregoing passage and quotation, Coleridge remarks that the sensation of pleasure always precedes the judgment, and is its determining cause. We find [the object] agreeable. But when we declare an object beautiful, the contemplation or intuition of its beauty precedes the feeling of complacency, in order of nature at least; nay, in great depression of spirits may even exist without sensibly producing it.' And then he quotes 11. 21-28 without a hint that they come from the same poem. The passage in the Essay' which immediately follows is printed as a fragment in Allsop's Letters, etc. ii. 42-44.

11. 80-81. 'Ere I speak of myself in the tones, which are alone natural to me under the circumstances of late years [c. 181315], I would fain present myself [in Satyrane's Letters, 1799-1800] to the Reader as I was in the first dawn of my literary life

ginal, followed the line, "My shaping spirit of Imagination," '--and then he quotes ll. 87-93, the sole difference in text being in the last

And now is almost grown the temple of my soul.'

COTTLE, Rem. p. 444.

11. 117-125. Here, of course, the reference is to Wordsworth's Lucy Gray, rendered not the less palpable by the successive changes from William' to 'Edmund,' and from Edmund' to 'Otway.' The germ of the passage occurs in a letter (unpublished) to Poole a whole year earlier : Greta Hall, Feb. 1, 1801.-O my dear, dear Friend! that you were with me by the fireside of my study here, that I might talk it over with you to the tune of this night-wind that pipes its thin, doleful, climbing, sinking notes, like a child that has lost its way, and is crying aloud, half in grief, and half in the hope to be heard by its mother. Lucy Gray had just been printed (L.B. 1800), and Poole was then reading the copy Wordsworth sent him, so that he would not fail to catch the allusion.

163. The Picture; or, The Lover's
Resolution, p. 162.

First printed in the Morning Post, Sept. 6, 1802. Lamb had arrived home from his visit to Greta Hall on the day before, and on the 8th he wrote thus to Coleridge, in a letter only a small portion of which has been published: 'I was pleased to recognise your blank-verse poem (the Picture) in the Morn. Post of Monday. It reads very well, and I feel some dignity in the notion of being able to understand it better than most Southern readers.' This settles the scenery of the poem, as well as the date of its composition. It was conveyed from the Morning Post to the Poetical Register for 1802 (1804) with but little change in text; but it reappeared in Sib. Leaves (1817) a good deal altered. Lines 17-26 and 34

42 had been added, and also, by way of the Errata, l. 126-133, and some minor textual changes were effected. The poem, indeed, was kept under the file up to 1829.

11. 17-25. On the 27th May 1814, when Coleridge was the guest of Mr. Wade at Bristol, and, perhaps, at the lowest ebb of his fortunes, he wrote thus to Cottle, who was at the time recovering from an illness: I have had more than a glimpse of what is meant by death and utter darkness, and the worm that dieth not. But the consolations, at least the sensible sweetness of hope, I do not possess. On

the contrary, the temptation which I have constantly to fight up against, is a fear that if annihilation and the possibility of heaven were offered to my choice, I should choose the former. This is, perhaps, in part, a constitutional idiosyncrasy, for when a mere boy, I wrote these lines-"Oh, what a wonder seems the fear of death"[etc. Monody on Chatterton, ll. 1-4, p. 61]; and in my early manhood, in lines descriptive of a gloomy solitude, I disguised my own sensations in the following words [mark the adaptations of the text of The Picture]:

'Here Wisdom might abide, and here Remorse!

Here too, the woe-worn [written over heart-sick erased] Man, who weak

in soul,

And of this busy human Heart a-weary, Worships the spirit of unconscious Life In Tree or Wild-flower. Gentle Lunatic! If so he might not wholly cease to BE, He would far rather not be that he is; But would be something that he knows not of,

In Woods, or Waters, or among the Rocks.'

[I quote from the original letter, printed incorrectly in Rem. p. 381.]

11. 79-86. In Mr. Samuel's annotated copy of Sib. Leaves, Coleridge has drawn his pen down the margin at these lines, and after correcting the text to that of 1829, he writes: These lines I hope to fuse into a more continuous flow, at least to articulate more organically.' 'The hope was not realised.

11. 28-30. See 'Note 123' for a cancelled stanza in Love, in which the crazed knight in crossing the woodman's path had his feet gored' by 'low stubs.'

11. 150-153. Cf. entry No. 36 in

lowing stanzas by Frederike Brun (née Münter), a German poetess, who called her poem Chamouni at Sun-rise,' and addressed it to Klopstock. This was pointed out by De Quincey in Tait's Magazine for September 1834 (p. 510); but he allowed that Coleridge had 'created the

of Chamouni, p. 165.

First printed in the Morning Post, Sept. 11, 1802, with the following title and introductory note :

'CHAMOUNI, THE HOUR BEFORE SUNRISE.

[Chamouni is one of the highest mountain valleys of the Barony of Faucigny in the Savoy Alps; and exhibits a kind of fairy world, in which the wildest appearances (I had almost said horrors) of Nature alternate with the softest and most beautiful. The chain of Mont Blanc is its boundary; and besides the Arve it is filled with sounds from the Arveiron, which rushes from the melted glaciers, like a giant, mad with joy, from a dungeon, and forms other torrents of snow-water, having their rise in the glaciers which slope down into the valley. The beautiful Gentiana major, or greater gentian, with blossoms of the brightest blue, grows in large companies a few steps from the never-melted ice of the glaciers. I thought it an affecting emblem of the boldness of human hope, venturing near, and, as it were, leaning over the brink of the grave. Indeed, the whole vale, its every light, its every sound, must needs impress every mind not utterly callous with the thought -Who would be, who could be an Atheist in this valley of wonders! If any of the readers of the MORNING POST have visited this vale in their journeys among the Alps, I am confident that they will not find the sentiments and feelings expressed, or attempted to be expressed, in the following poem, extravagant.]'

Any one reading this might very naturally suppose that Coleridge had composed the poem in the Vale of Chamouni, or with the impressions of its scenery fresh on his mind's eye; but he never saw the place, and never acknowledged that he was indebted for the germ of the poem, and for many of its words and images, to the fol

fulness of life.'

Aus tiefem Schatten des schweigenden
Tannenhains

Erblick' ich bebend dich, Scheitel der
Ewigkeit,

Blendender Gipfel, von dessen Höhe Ahndend mein Geist ins Unendliche schwebet!

'Wer senkte den Pfeiler tief in der Erde Schooss,

Der, seit Jahrtausenden, fest deine Masse stützt?

Wer thürmte hoch in des Aethers Wölbung Mächtig und kühn dein umstrahltes Antlitz ?

'Wer goss Euch hoch aus des ewigen Winters Reich,

O Zackenstrome, mit Donnergetös herab? Und wer gebietet laut mit der Allmacht Stimme :

"Hier sollen ruhen die starrenden Wogen?"