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ginal, followed the line, "My shaping spirit of Imagination," and then he quotes 11. 87-93, the sole difference in text being in the last

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11. 17-25. On the 27th May 1814, when Coleridge was the guest of Mr. Wade at Bristol, and, perhaps, at the lowest ebb of his fortunes, he wrote thus to Cottle, who was at the time recovering from an illness :

And now is almost grown the temple of I have had more than a glimpse of my soul.'

COTTLE, Rem. p. 444.

11. 117-125. Here, of course, the reference is to Wordsworth's Lucy Gray, rendered not the less palpable by the successive changes from William' to 'Edmund,' and from Edmund' to 'Otway.' The germ of the passage occurs in a letter (unpublished) to Poole a whole year earlier : Greta Hall, Feb. 1, 1801.-O my dear, dear Friend! that you were with me by the fireside of my study here, that I might talk it over with you to the tune of this night-wind that pipes its thin, doleful, climbing, sinking notes, like a child that has lost its way, and is crying aloud, half in grief, and half in the hope to be heard by its mother.' Lucy Gray had just been printed (L.B. 1800), and Poole was then reading the copy Wordsworth sent him, so that he would not fail to catch the allusion.

163. The Picture; or, The Lover's Resolution, p. 162.

what is meant by death and utter dark-
ness, and the worm that dieth not. .
But the consolations, at least the sensible
sweetness of hope, I do not possess. On
the contrary, the temptation which I have
constantly to fight up against, is a fear
that if annihilation and the possibility of
heaven were offered to my choice, I should
choose the former. This is, perhaps, in
part, a constitutional idiosyncrasy, for when
a mere boy, I wrote these lines-"Oh, what
a wonder seems the fear of death" [etc. Mon-

ody on Chatterton, 11. 1-4, p. 61]; and in
my early manhood, in lines descriptive of
a gloomy solitude, I disguised my own
sensations in the following words [mark
the adaptations of the text of The Pic-
ture]:-

'Here Wisdom might abide, and here Remorse !

Here too, the woe-worn [written over heart-sick erased] Man, who weak

in soul,

And of this busy human Heart a-weary,
Worships the spirit of unconscious Life
In Tree or Wild-flower. Gentle Lunatic!
If so he might not wholly cease to BE,
He would far rather not be that he is;
But would be something that he knows
not of,

Rocks.'

[I quote from the original letter, printed incorrectly in Rem. p. 381.]

First printed in the Morning Post, Sept. 6, 1802. Lamb had arrived home from his visit to Greta Hall on the day before, and on the 8th he wrote thus to Coleridge, in a letter only a small portion In Woods, or Waters, or among the of which has been published: 'I was pleased to recognise your blank-verse poem (the Picture) in the Morn. Post of Monday. It reads very well, and I feel some dignity in the notion of being able to understand it better than most Southern readers.' This settles the scenery of the poem, as well as the date of its composition. It was conveyed from the Morning Post to the Poetical Register for 1802 (1804) with but little change in text; but it reappeared in Sib. Leaves (1817) a good deal altered. Lines 17-26 and 3442 had been added, and also, by way of the Errata, ll. 126-133, and some minor textual changes were effected. The poem, indeed, was kept under the file up to 1829.

11. 79-86. In Mr. Samuel's annotated copy of Sib. Leaves, Coleridge has drawn his pen down the margin at these lines, and after correcting the text to that of 1829, he writes: These lines I hope to fuse into a more continuous flow, at least to articulate more organically.' The hope was not realised.

11. 28-30. See 'Note 123' for a cancelled stanza in Love, in which the crazed knight in crossing the woodman's path had his 'feet gored' by 'low stubs.'

11. 150-153. Cf. entry No. 36 in

'Commonplace Book, c. 1795-97' (in ADDENDA) :—' The subtle snow in every breeze, rose curling from the Grove, like pillars of cottage smoke.' (When printing this in the Remains, the editor took liberties with Coleridge's diction.)

lowing stanzas by Frederike Brun (née Münter), a German poetess, who called her poem Chamouni at Sun-rise,' and addressed it to Klopstock. This was

pointed out by De Quincey in Tait's Magazine for September 1834 (p. 510); but he allowed that Coleridge had 'created the

164. Hymn before Sun-rise, in the Vale dry bones of the German outline into the fulness of life.'

of Chamouni, p. 165.

First printed in the Morning Post, Sept. 11, 1802, with the following title and introductory note :

'CHAMOUNI, THE HOUR BEFORE SUNRISE.

[Chamouni is one of the highest mountain valleys of the Barony of Faucigny in the Savoy Alps; and exhibits a kind of fairy world, in which the wildest appearances (I had almost said horrors) of Nature alternate with the softest and most beautiful. The chain of Mont Blanc is

'Aus tiefem Schatten des schweigenden Tannenhains

Erblick' ich bebend dich, Scheitel der

Ewigkeit,

Blendender Gipfel, von dessen Höhe Ahndend mein Geist ins Unendliche schwebet!

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its boundary; and besides the Arve it is Mächtig und kühn dein umstrahltes Ant- Col 37

filled with sounds from the Arveiron, which rushes from the melted glaciers, like a giant, mad with joy, from a dungeon, and forms other torrents of snow-water, having their rise in the glaciers which slope down into the valley. The beautiful Gentiana major, or greater gentian, with blossoms of the brightest blue, grows in large companies a few steps from the never-melted ice of the glaciers. I thought it an affecting emblem of the boldness of human hope, venturing near, and, as it were, leaning over the brink of the grave. Indeed, the whole vale, its every light, its every sound, must needs impress every mind not utterly callous with the thought -Who would be, who could be an Atheist in this valley of wonders! If any of the readers of the MORNING POST have visited this vale in their journeys among the Alps, I am confident that they will not find the sentiments and feelings expressed, or attempted to be expressed, in the following poem, extravagant.]'

Any one reading this might very naturally suppose that Coleridge had composed the poem in the Vale of Chamouni, or with the impressions of its scenery fresh on his mind's eye; but he never saw the place, and never acknowledged that he was indebted for the germ of the poem, and for many of its words and images, to the fol

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between the poems. Had Coleridge been borrowing from Schiller or Goethe, this would have been a fair, though hardly a sufficient excuse; but the author borrowed from was obscure, or had merely a local reputation. See Wordsworth's Prose Works (iii. 442) for a proof that, even to him, Coleridge had never spoken of any source but his own imagination.

Between 1802 and 1829, Coleridge made many alterations in the text of the Hymn, which it will be interesting to read in an early form. A year after it had appeared in the Morning Post, he revised it, and sent the revised copy to the Beaumonts. This version will be found in 'APPENDIX F,' taken from the Coleorton Letters, edited by Professor Knight, 1886 (i. 26).

Four versions belong to The Friend. I. The MS. now in the Forster Collection at S. Kensington. II. The Friend, No. XI. first issue. III. Ditto, second (contemporary) issue. IV. Ditto, first issue as corrected by the Errata et Corrigenda printed in No. XIII. It was in IV. that 11. 70-80 (with some slight verbal differences) first appeared. In II. the passage

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Thou too, again, stupendous Mountain ! thou

Who, as once more I lift my Head bow'd low,

And to thy summit upward from thy base Slow travel with dim eyes suffus'd with tears,

Solemnly seemest, like a vapoury Cloud,
To rise before me. Rise, thou aweful
Form,

Rise like a Cloud of Incense, from the
Earth!

Thou kingly Spirit,' etc.

165. To Matilda Betham, p. 167. I sent these lines to the Athenæum (March 15, 1890) with this introduction :

'I found the following verses in a volume of miscellaneous tracts, bound up apparently by Southey, and now in the Forster Library at South Kensington. They are printed in a fragment of what appears to have been a privately printed autobiographical sketch of Miss Matilda Betham, the cherished friend of the Southeys and the Lambs. The fragment is probably

unique, for Miss Betham's distinguished niece and biographer, Miss M. BethamEdwards, informs me she was unaware of the existence of anything of the kind.'

Mr. E. B. Betham (great-nephew of Miss Matilda Betham), who also was unaware of the existence of the verses or autobiography, replied that 'Boughton' was Lady Boughton, wife of Sir Charles Rouse-Boughton, Bart.

11. 18, 19. Cf. TENNYSON, The Princess (vii. 269).

Till at the last she set herself to man,
Like perfect music unto noble words.'

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167. Inscription for a Fountain on a Heath, p. 169.

First printed in Morning Post, Sept. 24, 1802, with the heading, Inscription on a jutting stone over a spring.' In the annotated copy of P. W. 1828, frequently mentioned in these Notes, Coleridge wrote at the foot of this poem: This fountain is an exact emblem of what Mrs. Gillman was by nature, and would still be if the exhaustion by casualties, and anxious duties, and hope-surviving hopes had not been too disproportionate to the "tiny and never-failing spring of reproductive life at the bottom of the pure basin. No "drouth," no impurity from without, no alien ingredient in its own composition-it was indeed a crystal Fount of water undefiled. But the demand has been beyond the supply the exhaustion in merciless disproportion to the reproduction! But, God be praised! it is immortal, and shoots up its bright column of living waters,

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favours Fools.' No, says Coleridge, good men may not find the fortune which fools seek and sometimes find, but they find what they themselves seek-each class adopts the appropriate means to the desired end. In this sense the Proverb is current by a misuse, or a catachresis at least, of both the words, Fortune and Fools.

11. 14, 15. No doubt Coleridge had in his mind Hooker's words (Eccl. Pol. Bk. V.): 'Half a hundred years spent in doubtful trial which of the two in the end would prevail, --the side which had all, or else the part which had no friend, but God and Death, the one a Defender of his Innocency, the other a finisher of all his troubles.' I found this reference pencilled by an unknown hand on the margin of a copy of the Remains, i. 53.

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In Poems, 1852, the verses were printed with a note saying that it has been recently ascertained to have been written in 1803.' On the 22nd Sept. 1803, soon after his return from his Scotch tour, Coleridge wrote thus to Sir G. and Lady Beaumont (Coleorton Letters, i. 6) :—

Previously to my taking the coach, I had walked 263 miles in eight days, in the hope of forcing the disease [gout] into the extremities--and so strong am I, that I would undertake at this present time to walk 50 miles a day for a week together. In short, while I am in possession of my will and my reason, I can keep the fiend at arm's length; but with the night my horrors commence. During the whole of my journey three nights out of four I have fallen asleep struggling and resolving to lie awake, and, awaking, have blest the scream which delivered me from the reluctant sleep. Nine years ago I had three months' visitation of this kind, and I was cured by a sudden throwing off of a burning corrosive acid. These dreams, with all their mockery of guilt, rage, unworthy desires, remorse, shame, and terror, formed at that time the subject of some Verses, which I had forgotten till the return of the complaint, and which I will send you in my next as a curiosity.'

The statement regarding the 'visitation nine years ago' is entirely uncorroborated. Coleridge seems not to have sent the verses to the Beaumonts; but a fortnight later he writes thus to Poole (Oct. 3): 'God forbid that my worst enemy should ever have the

Nights and the Sleeps that I have had

night after night surprised by sleep, while I struggled to remain awake, starting up to bless my own loud scream that had awakened me yea, dear friend! till my repeated night-yells had made me a nuisance in my own house. As I live and am a man, this is an unexaggerated tale. My dreams became the substances of my life.' Then follow, in the letter, without further introduction and with but a few verbal differences, ll. 18-32 of The Pains of Sleep. The rest of the poem was probably written about the same time. De Quincey relates similar experiences in a cancelled passage of his Confessions, which is printed only in the notes to Dr. Garnett's edition of that work (Parchment Library

ed. 1885, p. 263). Coleridge had returns of these 'visitations' long after he was supposed to have abandoned the abuse of opium. See, for instance, a letter of July 31, 1820, and another of March 4, 1822, in Allsop's Letters, etc. 1836, i. 78 (or 1864, p. 42) and 1836, ii. 84 (or 1864, p. 169) respectively. See also Note to The Visionary Hope, below (No. 171); and Gillman's Life, p. 246.

11. 51, 52. me, who from my childhood have had no avarice, no ambition, whose very vanity in my vainest moments was, nine-tenths of it, the desire, and delight, and necessity of loving and of being beloved.' (To Sir G. B., Oct. 1, 1803, in Coleorton Letters, i. 15.)

171. The Visionary Hope, p. 171.

There being no certainty as to the date of this poem, I have grouped it with The Pains of Sleep, because although certainly composed somewhat later, it is a variation on the same theme. Both may be compared with Remorse, Act iv. Sc. i. 11. 68-73 (p. 386), and it is to be noted that these lines appear neither in the Osorio MS. nor in the first edition of Remorse. They were added in the second edition. See also an interesting quotation of this passage-altered, and twice altered Biog Lit. chap. xviii. (1817, ii. 72).

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I have added the two little fragmentsboth printed for the first time-An Exile and Homeless in this place because they harmonise with The Visionary Hope, and might have been lost sight of amid other surroundings.

172. To Asra, p. 171.

These verses, now printed for the first time, accompanied a MS. copy of one of Coleridge's poems presented to a friend in 1803.

173. Phantom, p. 172.

This is a dream-poem found in a Diary kept during the voyage to Malta. First printed in 1834.

174. Sonnet translated from Marini, p. 172.

This was found in a very much tortured

draft among papers of Coleridge mostly belonging to the Malta period. I have pieced out the text as well as I could. The following is the Italian original :ALLA SUA AMICO. Sonetto.

Donna, siam rei di morte. Errasti, errai; Di perdon non son degni i nostri errori, Tu che avventasti in me si fieri ardori ; Io che le fiamme a sì bel sol furai.

Io che una fiera rigida adorai, Tu che fosti sord' aspra1 a' miei dolori ; Tu nell' ire ostinata, io negli amori : Tu pur troppo sdegnasti, io troppo amai.

Or la pena laggiù nel cieco averno: Pari al fallo n' aspetta. Arderà poi, Chi visse in foco, in vivo foco eterno Quivi se Amor fia giusto amboduo noi All' incendio dannati, avrem l' inferno, Tu nel mio core, ed io negli occhi tuoi.

Opere del Cavalier Giambattista Marino, congiunte di nuovi componimenti inediti. Nuova Edizione, con un discorso preliminare di Giuseppe Zirardini. Napoli, 1861, p. 550.

175. A Sunset, p. 172.

These lines were sent by Coleridge to 'William Worship, Esq., Yarmouth,' on April 22, 1819. In the letter accompanying them he writes: The lines are little worth your or the lady's acceptance. But as the autography was the main desideratum, I thought that unpublished, and as far as I know, never to be published Lines would be more ad propositum than better ones transcribed from print.' The lines with a few verbal differences occur in a note-book dated Malta, Aug. 16, 1805, and with the statement that they were written as 'nonsense verses, merely to try a metre; but they are by no means contemptible.'

176. Constancy to an Ideal Object,
P. 172.
First printed in P. W. 1828, but, I

1 So in Zirardini. I think aspra must be a misprint for aspe, or aspide, or aspido (=an asp). Neither FLORIO (1598) nor BARRETTI (1831) has aspra.-ED.

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