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BROAD-BREASTED Pollards, with broad- Describebranching heads.

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'TWAS sweet to know it only possibleSome wishes cross'd my mind and dimly cheer'd it

And one or two poor melancholy Pleasures

In these, the pale unwarming light of Hope

Silv'ring their flimsy wing, flew silent by, Moths in the moonlight.

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Behind the thin

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the never-bloomless Furze-and the transition to the Gordonia Lasianthus. [Which is done at great length, in prose. "The never-bloomless furze" occurs in the sixth line of Fears in Solitude.-ED.]

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The sunshine lies on the cottage-wall, A-shining thro' the snow.

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A maniac in the woods-She crosses heedlessly the woodman's path-scourg'd

Grey cloud that cover'd but not hid the by rebounding boughs.

sky

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[Compare this with discarded stanza in Intro. to the Tale of the Dark Ladié' ['Love'], as printed in the Morning Post, Dec. 21, 1799. See Note 123.'

And how he cross'd the woodman's paths, Thro' briars and swampy mosses beat ; How bows rebounding scourg'd his limbs,

And low stubs gor'd his feet.-ED.]

4I

SABBATH-DAY

From the Miller's mossy wheel the water-drops dripp'd leisurely.

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The merry nightingale That crowds, and hurries, and precipi

tates

With fast thick warble his delicious

notes

[and so on, down to 'Of all its music' -the passage verbatim et literatim as it has appeared in all the editions of The Nightingale: a Conversation Poem. -ED.]

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EPILOGUE TO

'THE RASH CONJURER'

AN UNCOMPOSED POEM

Two wedded hearts, if ere were such,
Imprison'd in adjoining cells,

Across whose thin partition-wall

The builder left one narrow rent,
And where, most content in discontent,

We ask and urge-(here ends the story!) | A joy with itself at strife—

All Christian Papishes to pray

That the unhappy Conjurer may,

Instead of Hell, be put in Purgatory,—

For there, there's hope ;

Long live the Pope!

Remains, i. 52.

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O TH' Oppressive, irksome weight
Felt in an uncertain state:
Comfort, peace, and rest adieu
Should I prove at least untrue!
Self-confiding wretch, I thought
I could love thee as I ought,
Win thee and deserve to feel
All the Love thou canst reveal,
And still I chuse thee, follow still.

1805.

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1805.

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EPIGRAM ON KEPLER

FROM THE GERMAN

No mortal spirit yet had clomb so high
As Kepler-yet his Country saw him
die

For very want! the Minds alone he fed,
And so the Bodies left him without bread.
The Friend for Nov. 30, 1809 (1818, ii. 95;
1850, ii. 69).

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Fann'd the calm air upon the brow of Sweet tales, and true, that lull me into

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The worst the world can wreak on methe worst

That can make Life indifferent, yet disturb

His own fair countenance, his kingly fore

head,

His tender smiles, love's day-dawn on his lips,

With whisper'd discontent the dying At the same moment in his steadfast eye The sense, and spirit, and the light divine,

prayer

I have beheld the whole of all, wherein
My heart had any interest in this life
To be disrent and torn from off my Hopes
That nothing now is left. Why then
live on?

That hostage that the world had in its keeping

Given by me as a pledge that I would

live

That hope of Her, say rather that pure Faith

In her fix'd Love, which held me to keep truce

With the tyranny of Life-is gone, ah! whither ?

What boots it to reply? 'tis gone! and

now

Well may I break the pact, this league of Blood

That ties me to myself-and break I

Where Virtue's native crest, th' immortal

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80

77

As when the new or full Moon urges The high, large, long unbreaking surges Of the Pacific main.

MS.

1811.

BREVITY OF THE GREEK AND ENGLISH COMPARED

As an instance of compression and brevity in narration, unattainable in any language but the Greek, the following | distich was quoted :

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Written on a fly-leaf of a copy of Field on the Church, folio, 1628, under the name of a former possessor of the volume inscribed thus: 'Hannah Scollock, her book, February 10, 1787.'

THIS, Hannah Scollock! may have been the case;

Your writing therefore I will not erase. But now this book, once yours, belongs to me,

The Morning Post's and Courier's S. T. C. ;

Elsewhere in College, knowledge, wit and scholarage

To friends and public known as S. T. Coleridge.

Witness hereto my hand, on Ashly Green, One thousand, twice four hundred, and fourteen

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IN the two following lines, for instance, there is nothing objectionable, nothing which would preclude them from forming, in their proper place, part of a descriptive poem :

Behold yon row of pines, that shorn and bow'd

Bend from the sea-blast, seen at twilight

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The following burlesque on the Fichtean Egoismus may, perhaps, be amusing to the few who have studied the system, and to those who are unacquainted with it, may convey as tolerable a likeness of Fichte's idealism as can be expected from an avowed caricature. [S. T. C.]

The Categorical Imperative, or the Annunciation of the New Teutonic God, ΕΓΩΕΝ ΚΑΙ ΠΑΝ: a dithyrambic Ode, by Querkopf Von Klubstick, Grammarian, and Subrector in Gymnasio. . . . Eu! Dei vices gerens, ipse Divus, (Speak English, friend!) the God Imperativus,

Here on this market-cross aloud I cry: I, I, II itself I!

The form and the substance, the what and the why,

Year of our Lord-and of the month The when and the where, and the low

The fifteenth day, if right I do remember.

November

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and the high,

The inside and outside, the earth and

the sky,

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ou, and he, and he, you and I, All souls and all bodies are I itself I !

All I itself I!

(Fools! a truce with this starting!)

All my I all my I !

Truly Pisa indeed is of Jove,

But the Olympiad (or, the Olympian games) did Hercules establish,

The first-fruits of the spoils of war.
But Theron for the four-horsed car
That bore victory to him,

He's a heretic dog who but adds Betty It behoves us now to voice aloud:

The Just, the Hospitable,

Martin !'
Thus cried the God with high imperial The Bulwark of Agrigentum,

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In robe of stiffest state, that scoff'd at The Flower, even him

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