PREFACE.* COMPOSITIONS resembling those of the present volume are not unfrequently condemned for their querulous Egotism. But Egotism is to be condemned then only when it offends against Time and Place, as in an History or an Epic Poem. To censure it in a Monody or Sonnet is almost as absurd as to dislike a circle for being round. Why then write Sonnets or Monodies? Because they give me pleasure when perhaps nothing else could. After the more violent emotions of sorrow, the mind demands amusement, and can find it in employment alone; but full of its late sufferings, it can endure no employment not in some measure connected with them. Forcibly to turn away our attention to general subjects is a painful and most often an unavailing effort. "But O! how grateful to a wounded heart The tale of Misery to impart From others' eyes bid artless sorrows flow, And raise esteem upon the base of Woe!"-SHAW. The communicativeness of our Nature leads us to describe our own sorrows; in the endeavour to describe them, intellectual activity is exerted; and from intellectual activity there results a pleasure, which is gradually associated, and mingles as a corrective, with the painful subject of the description. "True!" (it may be answered) "but how are the PUBLIC interested in your Sorrows or your Description?" We are for ever atributing personal Unities to imaginary Aggregates. What is the PUBLIC but a term for a number of scattered individuals? Of whom as many will be interested in these sorrows, as have experienced the same or similar. "Holy be the lay Which mourning soothes the mourner on his way." If I could judge of others by myself, I should not hesitate to affirm, that the most interesting passages are those in which the Author developes his own feelings? The sweet voice of Cona* never sounds so sweetly, as when it speaks of itself; and I should almost suspect that man of an unkindly heart, who could read the opening of the third book of the Paradise Lost without peculiar emotion. By a Law of our Nature, he, who labours under a strong feeling, is impelled to seek for sympathy; but a Poet's feelings are all strong. Quicquid amet valde amat. Akenside therefore speaks with philosophical accuracy when he classes Love and Poetry, as producing the same effects: "Love and the wish of Poets when their tongue Their own. There is one species of Egotism which is truly disgusting; not that which leads us to communicate our feelings to others, but that *To the First and Second Editions. ↑ Ossian. which would reduce the feelings of others to an identity with our own. The Atheist, who exclaims, "pshaw! when he glances his eye on the praises of Deity, is an Egotist: an old man, when he speaks contemptuously of Love-verses, is an Egotist: and the sleek Favorites of Fortune are Egotists, when they condemn all "melancholy, discontented verses. Surely, it would be candid not merely to ask whether the poem pleases ourselves, but to consider whether or no there may not be others, to whom it is well calculated to give an innocent pleasure. I shall only add, that each of my readers will, I hope, remember, that these Poems on various subjects, which he reads at one time and under the influence of one set of feelings, were written at different times and prompted by very different feelings; and therefore that the supposed inferiority of one Poem to another may sometimes be owing to the temper of mind, in which he happens to peruse it. My poems have been rightly charged with a profusion of doubleepithets, and a general turgidness. I have pruned the double-epithets with no sparing hand; and used my best efforts to tame the swell and glitter both of thought and diction. This latter fault however had insinuated itself into my Religious Musings with such intricacy of union, that sometimes I have omitted to disentangle the weed from the fear of snapping the flower. A third and heavier accusation has been brought against me, that of obscurity; but not, I think, with equal justice. An Author is obscure, when his conceptions are dim and imperfect, and his language incorrect, or unappro priate, or involved. A poem that abounds in allusions, like the Bard of Gray, or one that impersonates high and abstract truths, like Collins's Ode on the poetical character, claims not to be popular -but should be acquitted of obscurity. The deficiency is in the Reader. But this is a charge which every poet, whose imagination is warm and rapid, must expect from his contemporaries. Milton did not escape it; and it was adduced with virulence against Gray and Collins. We now hear no more of it: not that their poems are better understood at present, than they were at their first publication; but their fame is established; and a critic would accuse himself of frigidity or inattention, who should profess not to understand them. But a living writer is yet sub judice; and if we cannot follow his conceptions or enter into his feelings, it is more consoling to our pride to consider him as lost beneath, than as soaring above us. If any man expect from my poems the same easiness of style which he admires in a drinking-song, for him I have not written. Intelligibilia, non intellectum adfero. I expect neither profit or general fame by my writings; and I consider myself as having been amply repaid without either. Poetry has been to me its own 66 exceeding great reward:" it has soothed my afflictions; it has multiplied and refined my enjoyments; it has endeared solitude; and it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the Good and the Beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me. S. T. C. INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR. ONE of the most anomalous circumstances in the history of the great poets of the beginning of our century, is the smallness of their success on first publication. By great poets, I mean those who were true to their art, and to whom poetry was its own motive and end, and by success I mean extent of circulation and pecuniary reward. Sir Walter Scott and Byron were romancers, and the one by an archæological revival, the other by many personal and adventitious causes outside his poetry, were both as popular and a hundred times more read than now, but their contemporaries, who were exclusively poets by mental nature and bodily temperament, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and I may add Wordsworth, while they were plentifully written about while they lived, died without any certainty of having made their mark on the literature of the country. Wordsworth indeed survived to an advanced age, and long before the end of his life knew for a certainty that both he and his early friend, Coleridge, were of the immortals, and had the whole English-speaking world for their audience, but it is quite doubtful whether the actual sale of his own editions of his poetry paid their expenses. Further than that, though not at all astonishing, more than one of these men were beset by vermin in the shape of Reviewers, Tories who felt it to be something like a duty to put down those who belonged to the new era, even in poetry. In the course of half a century, how complete is the change, one edition after another appears, and to the furthest west of America their names are household words. The present one shall be made as complete as possible. The father of Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a clergyman of amiable character and simple habits, settled as vicar of the parish of Ottery St. Mary, a rather out of the world village in Devonshire. Not only vicar but head master of the free grammar school of Ottery, he was a learned man, and had assisted Dr. Kennicott in his Hebrew Bible, a work of which the present writer is entirely ignorant. Here he continued many years, a constant student forgetful not only of the distant world but of the things about him; and here his wife died, leaving three daughters, children, to whom he gave a second mother by marrying Anne Bowdon, who seems to have been all that second marriages require. Besides, she quickly increased the number of the vicarage household, and the last of her ten children appearing year by year, was the poet. Samuel's recollections of Ottery St. Mary and of his father were vivid, although the Rev. John Coleridge, died before his son completed his seventh year, at which time the family must have left the place. Before he was nine his mother died also, and as the living was not a very rich one, and Anne Bowdon had only added to the vicar's riches in another direction, the orphan family were in some difficulties, which friends mitigated by getting the youngest into the Blue-coat school in London a year after, at the age of ten. Unaccustomed to many luxuries, easily contented, and absentminded, like his father, even from childhood, his life at Christ's Hospital was rendered harder by the habits of the school and the character of the head master, of whom Charles Lamb, then also wearing the yellow stockings, has left a vivid and alarming picture. Now-a-days boys at public schools suffer only from their elder comrades, then they also suffered brutal indignities and corporal punishment from the masters, and this man, whose name was Bowyer, used his power unsparingly. The consequence of this tyranny on a dependent boy, not too much inquired after, must have been very serious, and in a short time we find him a remarkably advanced scholar, but a melancholy little fellow, shy and frightened by playmates and their games, shut up in his own fancies; flying in fact from realities to a dramatically conceived life of his own, a habit natural to his temperament, which continued all his days, although it took various shapes, and found its paradise during manhood in opium-eating and complete abstraction. The accompaniment of this habit, or rather we ought to say, the only work congenial to it as giving it expression, is verse-writing; and this he began, it is said, at a very early time. His earliest verses were, however, not original; the fear of detection will not account for this, as he would have recorded that had it existed; but modern writing, either verse or prose, did not at first touch his remote and imaginative apprehension, and the second leading characteristic of his nature was already visible-the love of the furthest distant,-little known books were delightful to him, and speculation of a purely theological sort, the more abstruse the better, was his pastime. He hated facts and everything founded on them, as a living poet says of himself, and the anecdote, which we can't do better than give in the words of his latest previous editor, W. M. Rossetti, is curiously expressive of this. Out of the precincts somehow one day, the tide of life and multitude of novelties to be seen did not withdraw his attention from his own ideas, "the forlorn Blue-coat boy strolling through a crowded London thoroughfare, was thrusting out his arms and hands in an abstracted mood, when his fingers touched a gentleman's waistcoat. Accused on the instant of pocket-picking intentions, he explained that he had been fancying himself Leander in the act of swimming across the Hellespont. Such a response was well calculated to take his questioner aback; the result was that the latter good-naturedly paid for Coleridge as subscriber to a circulating library, whence the youth drank many a draught of bookish delight." Yet we are told that "history did not interest him at all, nor even poetry and romance much," which puts us in mind of one of his "Instances of forms of wit, taken largely."—"Why are you reading romances at your age? Why? because I used to be fond of history, but had to give it up, it was so grossly improbable." He found translating the Hymns of Synesius more amusing, and rising to be Deputy Grecian in the classes, was selected for a scholarship'at Cambridge, after the manner of the endowment of Christ's Hospital, a preferment which must have rejoiced his family and friends as well as himself, now emancipated from the tyranny of the ogre Bowyer. Coleridge was eighteen and a half when he was entered at Jesus College, Cambridge, not a very strong or active youth, having just before been attacked by illness; not a premature genius either, leaving next to no hidden treasures of verse among his papers; nor yet likely to be first in classics, although his previous attainments enabled him to take a prize for a Greek ode. Worldly wisdom we must not expect, so he immediately got into trouble on account of the price of the furniture he took over with his rooms. Although he did not care for the amusements of young men, he was, and this is the earliest indication of his poetic capacities, very susceptible to the charms of girls, and is reported to have fallen in love the first year at College, already his second experience in the pastime. During the following year some other agitations were added, though he was then, and always, morally innocent; but suddenly he was missed, and for some time entirely lost sight of. This episode in his career used to afford his friends in later life the nearest approach to humour it was possible to indulge in conversation with Coleridge: he had always too much weight on his mind, too many besetting ideas, and too much seriousness to allow any moments of chaff or raillery. He made no secret of it, but never explained the mystery. What is very |