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EARLIER POEM S.

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GENEVIEVE.*

AID of my love, sweet Genevieve!
In beauty's light you glide along:
Your eye is like the star of eve,

M

And sweet your voice as Seraph's

song.

Yet not your heavenly beauty gives
This heart with passion soft to glow:
Within your soul a voice there lives!
It bids you hear the tale of woe.
When sinking low the sufferer wan
Beholds no hand outstretch'd to save,
Fair as the bosom of the swan
That rises graceful o'er the wave,

I've seen your breast1 with pity heave,
And therefore love I you, sweet Genevieve!

* This little poem was written when the author was a boy.-C.

Your breast.] A bold simile, even more boldly developed in the last stanza but one of Lewti.

ABSENCE.

A FAREWELL ODE ON QUITTING SCHOOL FOR

JESUS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.*

HERE graced with many a classic
spoil

Cam rolls his reverend stream along,
I haste to urge the learned toil

That sternly chides my love-lorn song:
Ah me! too mindful of the days
Illumed by passion's orient rays,'
When peace, and cheerfulness, and health
Enrich'd me with the best of wealth.

Ah fair delights! that o'er my soul,
On memory's wing, like shadows fly!
Ah flowers! which Joy from Eden stole,
While Innocence stood smiling by!—
But cease, fond heart! this bootless moan:
Those hours on rapid pinions flown
Shall yet return, by absence crown'd,
And scatter livelier roses round.

The sun, who ne'er remits his fires,
On heedless eyes may pour the day:

* Coleridge quitted Christ's Hospital in September, 1790. A sonnet on the same subject will be found among "Additional Early Poems."

Passion's orient rays.] Coleridge had been in love at school. "From this time," he says, 66 to my nineteenth year, when I quitted school for Jesus, Cambridge, was the era of love and poetry." Compare The Sigh, and "Introduction," § 1.

The moon, that oft from Heaven retires,
Endears her renovated ray.

What though she leave the sky unblest,
To mourn awhile in murky vest?
When she relumes her lovely light,
We bless the Wanderer of the night.

SONGS OF THE PIXIES.*

THE PIXIES, in the superstition of Devonshire, are a race of beings invisibly small, and harmless or friendly to man. At a small distance from a village in that county, half way up a wood-covered hill, is an excavation called the Pixies' Parlour. The roots of old trees form its ceiling; and on its sides are innumerable cyphers, among which the author discovered his own and those of his brothers,' cut by the hand of their childhood. At the foot of the hill flows the river Otter.

To this place the Author, during the summer months of the year 1793, conducted a party of young ladies; one of whom, of stature elegantly small, and of complexion colourless, yet clear, was proclaimed the Faery Queen. On which occasion the following Irregular Ode was written.

I.

HOM the untaught shepherds call
Pixies in their madrigal,

Fancy's children, here we dwell:

Welcome, Ladies! to our cell.

* Written in 1793. Coleridge was spending his long vacation at Ottery. The poem frequently recalls Milton's earlier work, as well as sources to which Milton was indebted, such as Shakspere's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Faithful Shepherdess of Fletcher. The instances are much too numerous to point out.

1 Brothers.] We discovered those of Tennyson and his brothers, in an old quarry near Somersby in Lincolnshire,

in 1857.