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[The lines "To a Lady offended by a sportive observation that women have no souls (vide suprà, p. 308), also originally appeared in Omniana, vol. i. p. 238.]

NOTES.

NOTE TO VOL. I. P. 29.

The Raven.

This poem on its original appearance in The Morning Post, was preceded by the following mock epistle :

"Sir, I am not absolutely certain that the following Poem was written by Edmund Spenser, and found by an Angler buried in a fishing-box :—

666 Under the foot of Mole, that mountain hoar, Mid the green alders, by the Mulla's shore';

"but a learned Antiquarian of my acquaintance has given it as his opinion that it resembles Spenser's minor Poems as nearly as Vortigern and Rowena the Tragedies of William Shakespeare.-This Poem must be read in recitative, in the same manner as the Egloga Secunda of the Shepherd's Calendar.

"CUDDY."

NOTE TO VOL. 1. PP. 129-132.

Introduction to the Sonnets.

This Introduction originally appeared as the Preface to a privately-printed pamphlet of sixteen pages (1796), containing a selection of twenty-eight Sonnets from various Authors, made "for the purpose of binding them up with the Sonnets of the Rev. W. L.

Bowles." The concluding paragraph, which afterwards gave way to that printed in the text, ran as follows in the pamphlet :

"Miss Seward, who has perhaps succeeded the best in these laborious trifles, and who most dogmatically insists on what she calls the sonnet-claim, has written a very ingenious although unintentional burlesque on her own system, in the following lines prefixed to the Poems of a Mr. Carey." (And then the lines are quoted.)

The selection that follows contains three Sonnets of Bowles, "not in any edition," notes Coleridge in MS., "since the first quarto pamphlet of his Sonnets"; four of Southey; four of Charles Lloyd; two of Charlotte Smith; one specimen each of Thomas Warton, Bamfylde, Henry Brooke (the author of The Fool of Quality), Sotheby, Thomas Russell, Thomas Dermody, and Anna Seward; and last, but not least, four of Charles Lamb, and four of Coleridge's own, which it will be worth while to particularize. Of those of Lamb two had appeared as Effusions XI. and XIII. in the first edition of Coleridge's Poems: the other two were those beginning

"We were two pretty babes, the youngest she," and

"When last I roved these winding wood-walks green,"

both of which afterwards appeared, together with others, in the second edition of 1797. But in the pamphlet Coleridge has appended the following printed editorial footnote to the line in the former Sonnet-

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'And hid in deepest shades her awful head!"

"Innocence, which while we possess it, is playful as

a babe, becomes AWFUL when it has departed from us. This is the sentiment of the line-a fine sentiment and nobly expressed.-EDITOR.”

The four Sonnets of his own which Coleridge has included in this little Selection are as follows:

To the River Otter.

On a discovery made too late.

"Sweet Mercy! how my very heart has bled.”
To the Author of the Robbers.

In the last-named Sonnet, as it appears in the pamphlet, Coleridge took occasion to remove a 'bull' which had been pointed out to him in his first edition, where he wishes to die

"Lest in some after moment aught more mean Might stamp me mortal !"

In doing this he transposed the four opening lines, and altered the word "mortal" to "human," thus:

"That fearful voice, a famish'd father's cry,
From the dark dungeon of the tower time-rent,
If thro' the shuddering midnight I had sent,
Schiller! that hour I would have wish'd to die-
That in no after moment aught less vast
Might stamp me human!" &c.

In the second edition, while the other alterations are adopted, the opening lines are redistributed into their original places, and the word "human" is altered back to "mortal."

At the end of this Sonnet, in a copy of the pamphlet now lying before me, Coleridge has written :—“ I affirm, John Thelwall! that the six last lines of this Sonnet to Schiller are strong and fiery; and you are

the only one who think otherwise.-There's a spurt of author-like vanity for you!"

The copy in question of this singularly interesting pamphlet is bound up, according to Coleridge's intention, at the end of a copy of the fourth edition of Bowles's Sonnets and other Poems, published at Bath in 1796, throughout which not Coleridge certainly and presumably Thelwall, who is apostrophized, as we have seen, in one of the MS. notes, and to whose wife this copy was given, has written in the margins a number of sarcastic and disparaging remarks on poor Mr. Bowles's verses, which constitute a wholesome antidote to the strong dose of hyperbolical and extravagant laudation administered by Coleridge, who has written the following presentation note in a fly-leaf of the same copy ::

"DEAR MRS. THELWALL,

"I entreat your acceptance of this volume, which has given me more pleasure, and done my heart more good, than all the other books I ever read, excepting my Bible. Whether you approve or condemn my poetical taste, the book will at least serve to remind you of your unseen, yet not the less sincere friend, "SAMUEL TAYLOR COLEridge.

"Sunday Morning,

"December the eighteenth, 1796.”

There is nothing in history or literature to match this, unless it be the infatuated passion of Queen Titania for Bottom in the Midsummer Night's Dream. This volume is now in the Dyce Collection at the South Kensington Museum. At the end of it is inserted a printed slip containing the lines "To a friend who had declared his intention of writing no more poetry," signed S. T. COLERIDGE. This is apparently the form in which

they appeared in a Bristol newspaper in 1796. They offer no variation of text; but the word "nostril " in the antepenultimate line is marked in ink, presumably by Coleridge himself, with a plural "s."

NOTE TO VOL. I. P. 131.

"to write pathetic Axes, or pour forth extempore Eggs

and Altars!"

The ancient little wits wrote many poems in the shape of Eggs, Altars, and Axes.

(MS. Note by S. T. C. in the volume described

above.)

NOTE TO VOL. I. P. 148.

(No. iv. of the Miscellaneous Sonnets.)

This Sonnet is much improved in the third edition; but I cannot recollect the alterations. There were three or four Sonnets, of which so many lines were written by Southey, and so many by me, that we agreed to divide them, in order to avoid the ridiculous anxiety of attributing different lines in the same short poem to two different authors.

(MS. Note by S. T. C., in a copy of the edition of 1797, now in the possession of Mr. Frederick Locker.)

NOTE TO VOL. I. p. 176.

Ode to the Departing Year, Epode 11.

many a fearless age."

"Hence thro' many a fearless age

Has social Freedom loved the land,

Nor alien despot's jealous rage

"Hence for

Or warp'd thy growth or stamp'd the servile brand." (Thus quoted in Coleridge's treatise On the Constitution of the Church and State, Lond. 1830, p. 18).

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