PREFACE THE following collection has been entitled SIBYLLINE LEAVES, in allusion to the fragmentary and widely-scattered state in which they have been long suffered to remain. It contains the whole of the author's poetical compositions, from 1793 to the present date, with the exception of a few works not yet finished, and those published in the first edition of his juvenile poems, over which he has no controul. [He forgets The Eolian Harp,' printed here from the Poems of 1796.] They may be divided into three classes: First, A selection from the Poems added to the second and third editions, together with those originally published in the LYRICAL BALLADS, which after having remained many years out of print, have been omitted by Mr. Wordsworth in the recent collection of all his minor poems, and of course revert to the author. Second, Poems published at very different periods, in various obscure or perishable journals, etc., some with, some without the writer's consent; many imperfect, all incorrect. The third and last class is formed of Poems which have hitherto remained in manuscript. The whole is now presented to the reader collectively, with considerable additions and alterations, and as perfect as the author's judgment and powers could render them. In my Literary Life, it has been mentioned that, with the exception of this preface, the SIBYLLINE LEAVES have been printed almost two years; and the necessity of troubling the reader with the list of errata [forty-seven in number] which follows this preface, alone induces me to refer again to the circumstances, at the risk of ungenial feelings, from the recollection of its worthless causes. A few corrections of later date have been added. 1 See note at end of List of Contents.-ED. Henceforward the author must be occupied by studies of a very different kind. Ite hinc, CAMŒNA! Vos quoque ite, suaves, Dulces CAMCENE! Nam (fatebimur verum) Dulces fuistis!-Et tamen meas chartas Revisitote: sed pudenter et raro ! VIRGIL, Catalect. vii. At the request of the friends of my youth, who still remain my friends, and who were pleased with the wildness of the compositions, I have added two school-boy poems -with a song modernized with some additions from one of our elder poets. Surely, malice itself will scarcely attribute their insertion to any other motive, than the wish to keep alive the recollections from early life. I scarcely knew what title I should prefix to the first. By imaginary Time, I meant the state of a schoolboy's mind when, on his return to school, he projects his being in his day-dreams, and lives in his next holidays, six months hence and this I contrasted with real Time. The three poems mentioned in this Preface and which were printed with it, and with the Errata,' as a preliminary sheet-are Time, real and imaginary: an Allegory (then first printed); The Raven; and Mutual Passion. The other contents of the volume (which was issued without a list) were as follows. Pieces taken from the volumes of 1796 or 1797 have an asterisk (*): the titles of those which (probably) had not been printed before, are italicized. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. (With, for the first time, the marginal notes, and the motto from T. Burnet.) The Foster-Mother's Tale. [Half-title] Poems occasioned by Political Events or feelings connected with them.' [On the reverse of which is printed Wordsworth's sonnet beginning 'When I have borne in memory what has tamed Great nations.'] *Ode to the Departing Year. France: An Ode. Fears in Solitude. Recantation. Illustrated in the Story of the Mad Ox. Parliamentary Oscillators. Fire, Famine and Slaughter, a War Eclogue. With an Apologetic Preface. [The Ap. Pref. here first printed.] [Half-title] Love-Poems.' [On the reverse of which are printed eleven (Latin) lines from Petrarch.'] Love. Lewti, or the Circassian Love-Chant. To an Unfortunate Woman at the Theatre. To a Lady, with Falconer's ‘Shipwreck.' Something childish, but very natural. Home-sick. Written in Germany. A Fragment. Lines written in the Album at Elbingerode, in the Hartz Forest. *On observing a blossom on the 1st February, 1796. *The Eolian Harp, composed at Clevedon, Somersetshire. *Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement. *To the Rev. George Coleridge, of Ottery This Lime-tree bower my prison. of writing no more Poetry. To a Gentleman. Composed on the night after his recitation of a Poem on the Growth of an Individual Mind. The Nightingale; a Conversation Poem. Lines to W. L., Esq., while he sang a song to Purcell's Music. Addressed to a Young Man of Fortune who abandon'd himself to an indolent and causeless Melancholy. *Sonnet to the River Otter. *Sonnet. Composed on a journey homeward; the Author having received intelligence of the birth of a son, September 20, 1796. *Sonnet, to a Friend who asked how I felt when the Nurse first presented my Infant to me. The Virgin's Cradle-Hymn. Copied from [America to Great Britain. an American gentleman '-who doubtless was Washington Allston, the Painter.] Elegy, imitated from one of Akenside's Blank-verse Incriptions. The Destiny of Nations. A Vision. The printer's signature' on the sheet at which the regular pagination begins is 'VOL. II.-B.' This has attracted the notice of bibliographers, but it has never been correctly explained. An examination of the printers' accounts enables me to say that Coleridge originally projected a work in two volumes, the first of which was to contain his Biographia Literaria,' and the second his collected Poems.' While the two were being printed concurrently, the 'Biographia' outgrew the capacity of a single volume, and the 'Poems' were thenceforward called in the accounts Vol. III.' When the whole of Vols. I. and III. and half of Vol. II. had been printed, the author and the printers quarrelled. Vol. II. was completed by another printer; and the two works were published separately by Rest Fenner in 1817-as Biographia Literaria in two volumes; and 'Sibylline Leaves in one. The mention of this muddle alluded to in the Preface to the latter occurs at page 182 of the second volume of the B. Lit. The statement opens, appropriately, with a bull. 'For more than eighteen months have the volume of Poems, entitled SIBYLLINE LEAVES, and the present volume up to this page been printed, and ready for publication. Coleridge should have written up to page 128.'-ED. PREFACE [THE Preface is the same as that of 1803 and 1828, with addition of the following passage (quoted as a foot-note to the sentence 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. ')—'Without any feeling of anger, I may yet be allowed to express some degree of surprize, that after having run the critical gauntlet for a certain class of faults, which I had, viz. a too ornate, and elaborately poetic diction, and nothing having come before the judgementseat of the Reviewers during the long interval, I should for at least seventeen years, quarter after quarter, have been placed by them in the foremost rank of the proscribed, and made to abide the brunt of abuse and ridicule for faults directly opposite, viz. bald and prosaic language, and an affected simplicity both of matter and mannerfaults which assuredly did not enter into the character of my compositions. —LITERARY LIFE, i. 51. Published 1817.' text of the Biographia Literaria has been considerably modified.)] CONTENTS (The [As the present edition is founded on that of 1829, it seems desirable to give a full list of its contents, shewing at same time their arrangement under the various headings.-ED.] Genevieve To an Infant I 3 187 61 21 18 15 24 23 30 in answer to a letter from Bristol . 47 43 Lines to a Friend in answer to a melancholy Letter. Religious Musings; a desultory Poem, written on the Christmas The Destiny of Nations. A Vision SIBYLLINE LEAVES I. Poems occasioned by political events or feelings connected with them. |