third acts. This fact Coleridge, in characteristic fashion, forgets to mention :-to his own detriment, for Southey's portion is not to be compared with his own. The Dedication,—which ultimately was not addressed to Mrs. Hannah More, as at first intended,— ran as follows: ΤΟ H. MARTIN, Esq., OF JESUS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. DEAR SIR,-Accept, as a small testimony of my grateful attachment, the following Dramatic Poem, in which I have endeavoured to detail, in an interesting form, the fall of a man whose great bad actions have cast a disastrous lustre on his name. In the execution of the work, as intricacy of plot could not have been attempted without a gross violation of recent facts, it has been my sole aim to imitate the impassioned and highly-figurative language of the French orators, and to develop the characters of the chief actors on a vast stage of horrors. Yours fraternally,1 Jesus College, Sept. 22, 1794. S. T. COLERIDGE. It is usual to speak disparagingly of this performance, and certainly Coleridge never reprinted it. But at the time, it is clear, he set some value upon it. We find, under date, Sept. 1794, a poem To a Young Lady, with a Poem on the French Revolution. This is evidently our drama. Indeed, Coleridge's portion of this poem exhibits at times both dignity and vigour. 1 Fraternally.] Notice the word. 2 Drama.] Robespierre came to power in July, 1793, when appointed a member of the Committee of Public Safety, and was guillotined the July following. Coleridge had lost no time. Witness the description of Robespierre himself: "Sudden in action, fertile in resource, Again, Couthon's remark is that of a shrewd ob server: "What goodly virtues Bloom on the poisonous branches of ambition!" and Robespierre's reproof to the back-slider, Barrère, is not unworthy of Shakspere : "Why, thou hast been the mouth-piece of all horrors, And, like a blood-hound, crouch'd for murder! Now Aloof thou standest from the tottering pillar, Or, like a frighted child behind its mother, The charming song,— "Tell me on what holy ground,”— a distinct echo of Collins,-was reprinted in Poems on Various Subjects, 1796, and may possibly have been written earlier than 1794. In April, 1796, appeared at Bristol-the publisher being Cottle- -a small volume, entitled Poems on Various Subjects, by S. T. Coleridge, late of Jesus College, Cambridge. This volume was designed to be the first of two,' the second of which, if ever written, some of it certainly was, did not, at this date, see the light. It contained three poems by Lamb. 1 Two.] "I mean to have none but large poems in the second volume; none under three hundred lines; therefore I have crowded all my little pieces into this."-Coleridge to Cottle. The Religious Musings is the sole representative, so far as we know, of this second volume. See note on it in the text. 66 The Preface ran as follows: 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 a 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 From others' eyes bid artless sorrows flow, 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 is the Public interested in your sorrows or your description?' We are for ever attributing 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. 66 6 Holy be the lay If I could judge of others by myself, I should not hesitate to affirm, that the most interesting passages in all writings are those in which the author developes his own feelings. The sweet voice of Cona1 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. 1 Cona.] Ossian.-C. 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. Âkenside 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 Would teach to others' bosoms what so charms "There is one species of egotism which is truly disgusting; not that which leads us to communicate our feelings to others, but that 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 favourites 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." After explaining that the sonnets are called "effusions" (as they are in this volume), because they "do not possess that oneness of thought indispensable" to a sonnet, the Preface concludes "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." In this same year, 1796, Southey published Joan of Arc. An Epic Poem. In the second book were inserted some four hundred lines contributed by Coleridge. Southey, in his second edition, cast them out, and Coleridge revised them, making extensive changes, and inserted them ultimately-not in his edition of 1797, as originally intended (see note in the text), but-in Sibylline Leaves, in 1817, under the title of The Destiny of Nations. Further modifications were introduced in subsequent editions. The original version is printed at the end of Cottle's Early Recollections, chiefly relating to S. T. Coleridge, 1836. Later in the year 1796 Coleridge printed privately a small selection of sonnets (twenty-four in number), to bind up with Bowles's. They were by dead and living writers, including Southey, Lloyd, and Lamb, and three were inserted which Bowles had, on maturer thought, rejected. Coleridge's share in this volume consisted of his four sonnets, To the River Otter, On a Discovery made too Late, To an Old Man, and To the Author of The Robbers.' They were duly bound up with Bowles's fourth edition,' accompanied with a preface on the sonnet, of which we give an analysis presently. 6 Yet another publication belongs to 1796, though not actually issued before the year following. This is the Ode to the Departing Year, printed in quarto, at Bristol. It was composed, Coleridge tells us, "on the 24th, 25th, and 26th days of December, 1796; and was published on the last day of that year." The concluding remark applies to its appearance in The Cambridge Intelligencer, to the editor of which Bowles's fourth edition.] Sonnets and Other Poems, Bath, 1796. Bowles's first volume appeared in 1789, and consisted of fourteen sonnets. "When Bowles's sonnets first appeared," says Wordsworth," a thin quarto pamphlet, entitled Fourteen Sonnets,-I bought them in a walk through London with my dear brother, who was afterwards drowned at sea. I read them as we went along; and to the great annoyance of my brother, I stopped in a niche of London Bridge to finish the pamphlet."-Memorandum of Wordsworth's Conversation, in a note, by the Editor, to Rogers' Table Talk, 1856, p. 258. See note, in the text, to the sonnet To Bowles. |