The Poetical Works of Coleridge and Keats: with a memoir of each

Front matter

THE POETICAL WORKS OF COLERIDGE AND KEATS WITH A MEMOIR OF EACH FOUR- VOLUMES IN TWO VOL. I. NEW YORK PUBLISHED BY HURD AND HOUGHTOH BOSTON: H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY Cfjc 33ib--s't8c Prcgg, Cambrt&gc COPTEIGHT, 1S55, Bt LITTLE, BROWN & CO. The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass. Printed by H. O Hougkton and Company.

ADVERTISEMENT.

TO THIS EDITION. The present edition of the Poetical and Dramatic Works of Coleridge is a reprint of the latest Lon don edition of 1852, published under the super vision of the poet's son and daughter. The poems were prepared for the press by the late Mrs. H. N. Coleridge, a person eminently fitted for the duty, because in her the zeal of the daughter was tempered by the discretion of the accomplished critic. The preface and the greater part of the illus trative notes were written by her ; and the selec tion and arrangement have been determined almost wholly by her judgment, or by records in her pos session. The rest of the notes were added by the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, who also prepared the preface to the Dramatic Works. A proper biography of Coleridge is still wanting, but there is prefixed to this edition a sketch of his life in which the more characteristic facts have been gathered from every accessible source of information, and given with as much fulness as was consistent with the plan of this series.

Preface

TO THE POEMS.* As a chronological arrangement of Poetry in completed collections is now beginning to find general favour, pains have been taken to follow this method in the present Edition of S. T. Coleridge's Poetical and Dramatic Works, as far as circumstances permitted — that is to say, as far as the date of composition of each poem was ascertainable, and as far as the plan could be carried out without effacing the classes into which the Author had himself distributed his most important poetical publication, the " Sibylline Leaves," namely, Poems occasioned by Political Events, or Feelings connected with them ; Love Poems ; Meditative Poems in blank verse ; Odes and Miscellaneous Poems. On account of these impediments, together with the fact, that many a poem, such as it appears in its ultimate form, is the growth of different periods, the agreement with chronology in this Edition is approximative rather than perfect ; yet in the majority of instances the date of each piece has been made out, and its place fixed accordingly. * By Mrs. H. N. Coleridge.

It is dated March, 1852. preface. In another point of view, also, the Poems have been distributed with relation to time : they are thrown into three broad groups, representing first the Youth, — secondly, the Early Manhood and Middle Life, — thirdly, the Declining Age of the Poet ; * and it will be readily perceived that each division has its own distinct tone and colour, corresponding to the period of life in which it was composed. It has been suggested, indeed,"! that Coleridge had four poetical epochs, more or less diversely characterized, — that there is a discernible difference betwixt the productions of his Early Manhood and of his Middle Age, the latter being distinguished from those of his Stowey life, which may be considered as his poetic prime, by a less buoyant spirit. Fire they have ; but it is not the clear, bright, mounting fire of his earlier poetry, conceived and executed when " he and youth were housemates still."

In the course of a very few years after three-and-twenty all his very finest poems were produced ; his twenty-fifth year has been called his annus mirabilis. To be a "Prodigal's favourite — then, worse truth! a Miser's pensioner," % is the lot of Man. In re- * S. T. Coleridge was born Oct. 21, 1772, and died Julr 25, 1834. t See Supplement to the Second Edition of the Biographia Literaria, vol. ii. p. 417. X Words vorth's Poetical Works, vol. v. p. 291. The Small Celandine. See motto to the last section.

PREFACE.

. XVII spect of pietry, Coleridge was a " Prodigal's favourite," more, perhaps, than ever Poet was before. 1. The Juvenile Poems (now called Poems written in Youth,) so named by the Author him self when he had long ceased to be juvenile, were first published in 1796. The second edition, which appeared in May, 1797, omitted nineteen pieces of the previous publication, and added eleven new. The volume, says Mr. H. N. Coleridge, in a note to the Biographia Literaria, comprised poems by Lamb and Lloyd, and on the title-page was printed the prophetic aspiration : — "Duplex nobis vin* culum, et amicitiæ junctarumque Camœnarum, — quod utinam neque mors solvat, neque temporis longinquitas." * In the London edition of 1803, fifty-two of the pieces, contained in the first and second, were again presented to the public, but what is now difficult to account for, unaccompanied by many fine poems which were undoubtedly written by that time, but saw not the light till, in 1817, they formed a part of the " Sibylline Leaves," beside the " Ancient Mariner," " The Foster-Mother's Tale " (an off-shoot from " Remorse," then en titled " Osorio,") and " The Nightingale : a Con versation Poem," which entered the world along with the afterwards celebrated and ever immor- » Biographi; Literaria, 2d edit. vol. i. p. 4. B

PREFACE.

. XVIII tal "Lyrical Ballads" of William Wordsworth. Only thirty-six of the Juvenile Poems were in cluded in the collection of Coleridge's " Poetical and Dramatic Works," published by Mr. Picker ing in 1828. These all produced before the Au thor's twenty-fourth year, devoted as he was to the " soft strains " of Bowles, have more in common with the passionate lyrics of Collins and the pic turesque wildness of the pretended Ossian, than with the well-tuned sentimentality of that Muse which the over-grateful poet has represented as his earliest inspirer. For the young they will ever retain a peculiar charm, because so fraught with the joyous spirit of youth ; and in the minds of all readers that feeling which disposes men " to set the bud above the rose full-blown " would secure them an interest, even if their intrinsic beauty and sweetness were less adequate to ob tain it. 2.

Poems of Early Manhood are " The Ancient Mariner," " The Wanderings of Cain," " Kubla Khan," " Christabel," Part I. The " Sibylline Leaves" of 1817 comprises many minor poems of the same date as those just mentioned, and like wise another set, which must be referred to Mid dle Life, that collection extending from 1796 to the time of publication. The second part of " Chris tabel " we know, on the Poet's own authority, to have been composed in 1800 ; it therefore occupies an intermediate station between the two eras.

PREFACE.

. XIX "Remorse" was first cast at Stowey, in 1797 or 8. Alvar's Soliloquy (Act v. Scene 1,) was published with the "Lyrical Ballads," in 1798 under the title of " The Dungeon." The translation of " Wallenstein " was made in the winter of 1800. " Zapolj-a," published in 1817, must have been composed somewhere between 181 _ and 1816.* 3. Poems written in Later Life. The second edition of the " Sibylline Leaves " contained a certain number of short poems, quaintly desig nated " Prose in Rhyme, Moralities, Epigrams, and Poems without a Name." The whole of these as late productions, are placed in the last section, and to them are added many other pieces, serious and sportive, which are known to have been the harvest of the latest season accorded to the Poet in this state of existence. The present Editors have been guided in the general arrangement of this edition by those of 1817 and 1828, which may be held to represent the author's matured judgment upon the larger and more important part of his poetical productions.

They have reason, indeed, to believe, that the edition of 1828 was the last upon which he was able to bestow personal care and attention. That of 1834, the last year of his earthly sojourn ing, a period when his thoughts were wholly en- * See Dramatic Works.

PREFACE.

. XX grossed, so far as the decays of his frail outward pp.rt Mt them free for intellectual pursuits and speculations, by a grand scheme of Christian Philosophy, to the enunciation of which in a long projected work his chief thoughts and aspirations had for many years been directed, was arranged mainly, if not entirely, at the discretion of his earliest Editor, H. N. Coleridge, who, not to men tion the boon he has conferred on the public in preserving so valuable a record of his Uncle's conversation as is contained in the Table Talk of S. T. Coleridge, performed his task in editing The Friend, The Literary Remains, The Church and State and Lay Sermons, and The Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, in a manner which must ever procure him sentiments of gratitude from all who prize the writings of Coleridge.

Such alterations only have been made in this final arrangement of the Poetical and Dramatic Works of S. T. Coleridge, by those into whose charge they have devolved, as they feel assured, both the Author himself and his earliest Editor would at this time find to be either necessary or desirable. The observations and experience of eighteen years, a period long enough to bring about many changes in literary opinion, have satisfied them that the immature essays of boyhood and adolescence, not marked with any such prophetic note of genius as certainly does belong to the four school-boy poems they have retained, tend to injure the general

PREFACE.

. XXI effect of a body of poetry. That a writer, especially a writer of verse, should keep out of sight his third-rate performances, is now become a maxim with critics ; for they are not, at the worst, effectless : they have an effect, that 01 diluting and weakening, to the reader's feelings, the general power of the collection. Mr. Cole ridge himself constantly, after 1796, rejected a certain portion of his earliest published Juvenilia : never printed any attempts of his boyhood, ex cept those four with which the present publication commences ; and there can be no doubt that his Editor of 1834 would ere now have come to the conclusion, that only such of the Author's early performances as were sealed by his own approval ought to form a permanent part of the body of his poetical works. The " Allegoric Vision," as it cannot be considered poetry in the full sense of the word, and may be read with much more advantage in its proper place — the Introduction to the Author's second Lay Sermon, — the Editors have thought fit to withdraw from this collection.

And a piece of extravagant humour, printed for the first time among the Author's works in 1834, rather it would appear with his acquiescence, than by his desire, has been excluded for the reasons assigned by the Author himself in the Apologetic Preface. The " Devil's Walk," having been reproduced with his full authority in the Edition of 1828, has

PREFACE.

. been retained, — restored, however, as in the Edi tion of 1834, to its original form and complete ness. To this extent a discretionary privilege has been exercised, for which, it is believed, that little apology will be required by the public* It must be added, that time has robbed of their charm certain sportive effusions of Mr. C.'s later years, which were given to the public, in the first gloss and glow of novelty in 1834, and has proved that, though not devoid of the quality of genius, they possess, upon the whole, not more than an ephemeral interest. These the Editors have not scrupled to omit on the same grounds and in the same confidence that has been already ex plained. Four short pieces only have been added, the third and ninth Sonnets [pages 49 and 55] from the edition of 1796, the "Day-Dream" [page 266] from the Appendix to Coleridge's " Essays on his own Times," and the " Hymn " [vol. ii. page 70] which is now printed for the first time. * This humorous piece first appeared in the Morning Post, when, according to the Editor of that Journal, it made so great a sensation that several hundred sheets extra were sold by them, as the paper was in request for days and weeks afterwards.

PREFACE.

. Compositions resembling those of the j resent volume are not unfrequently condemned for their querulous egotism. But egotism is to be con demned then only when it offends against time and place, as in a history or an epic poem. To cen sure 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 em ployment 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 0 ! how grateful to a wounded heart The tale of misery to impart — From others' eyes bid artless sorrows flow, And raise esteem upon the base of woe ! " SHAW. The communicativeness of our nature leads us to

PREFACE.

. 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) u but how is the Public interested in your sor rows or your description ? " We are for ever attributing personal unities to imaginary aggre gates. 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. " Holy be the lay Which mourning soothes the mourner on his way." If I could judge of others by myself, I should not hesitate to affirm, that the most interesting pas sages in all writings are those in which the author develops his own feelings ?

The sweet voice of Cona* never sounds so sweetly, as when it speaks of itself; aud I should almost suspect that man ot an unkindly heart, who could read the opening of the third book of the Paradise Lost without peculiar emotion. 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. Aken side therefore speaks with philosophical accuracy * Ossian,

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. XXV 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 Their own. pleasures of imagination. There is one species of egotism which is truly disgusting ; not that which leads us to commu nicate 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 con temptuously 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.

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 infe riority of one poem to another may sometimes be owing to the temper of mind in which he happens to peruse it

PREFACE.

. My poems have been rightly charged with a profusion of double-epithets, and a general turgid ness. I have pruned the double-epithets with no sparing hand ; and used my best efforts to tame the swell and glitter both of thought and diction.* This latter fault, however, had insinuated itself into my " Religious Musings " with such intricacy of union, that sometimes I have omitted to disen tangle the weed from the fear of snapping the flower. A third and heavier accusation has been brought against me, that of obscurity ; but not, I think, with equal justice. An author is obscure, when his conceptions are dim and imperfect, and his language incorrect, or inappropriate, or in volved. A poem that abounds in allusions, like the Bard of Gray, or one that impersonates high and abstract truths, like Collins's Ode on the poetical character, claims not to be popular — but should be acquitted of obscurity.

The deficiency * Without any feeling of anger, I may yet be allowed to express some degree of surprise, that after having run the critical gauntlet for a certain class of faults, which I had, viz., a too ornate, and elaborately poetic diction, and nothing having come before the judgment-seat of the Reviewers during the long interval, I should for at least seventeen years, quarter after quarter, have been placed by them in the foremost rank of the proscribed, and made to abide the brunt of abuse and ridicule for faults directly opposite, viz., bald and prosaic language, and an affected simplicity both of matter and man ner — faults which assuredly did not enter into the character of my compositions. — Literary Life, i. 61; published 1817.

PREFACE.

. XXVII is in the reader. But this is a charge which every poet, whose imagination is warm and rapid, must expect from his contemporaries. Milton did not escape it ; and it was adduced with viru lence against Gray and Collins. We now hear no more of it : not that their poems are better understood at present, than they were at their first publication ; but their fame is established ; and a critic would accuse himself of frigidity or inattention, who should profess not to understand them. But a living writer is yet subjudice ; and if we cannot follow his conceptions or enter into his feelings, it is more consoling to our pride to consider him as lost beneath, than as soaring above us. If any man expect from my poems the same easiness of style which he admires in a drinking-song, for him I have nut written.

In telligibilia, non intellectum adfero. I expect neither profit nor general fame by my writings ; and I consider myself as having been amply repaid without either. Poetry has been to me its own " exceeding great reward ; " it has soothed my afflictions ; it has multiplied and refined my enjoyments ; it has endeared solitude ; and it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the Good and the Beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.* S. T. C. • The above preface was prefixed by the author to the third edition of the Juvenile Poems, in 1803, and transferred by him,

PREFACE.

. without alteration, to the collected edition of his poetical works in 1828. It is made up from the Prefaces to the first two editions of his Poems, and referred, in the first instance, to the earlier productions of his Muse. In the Preface to the Sibylline Leaves, which he did not reprint, he states that that collection was " presented to the reader as perfect as the author's skill and powers could render them; " adding, that " henceforward he must he occupied by studies of a very different kind." The motto which appears on a subse quent page is taken from the same place and points to o similar conclusion. D. C. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on the 21st of October, 1772, at Ottery St. Mary, Devon shire.* He was the youngest of ten children, and, as his father, the vicar of the parish of Ottery, and master of the grammar school, had but a small salary, the means of the family were much straitened.

Of his mother but little has been handed down, beside the fact that she made her youngest child her spoiled favorite. There are some stories respecting the eccen tricities of the vicar which are interesting only as one can trace in them the origin of some of the peculiarities of his more distinguished son. Cole ridge in a letter to his friend Thomas Poole, says of his father, " The truth is, my father was not a first-rate genius ; he was, however, a first-rate Christian, which is much better. I need not de tain you with his character. In learning, good heartedness, absentness of mind, and excessive ignorance of the world, he was a perfect Parson Adams." * " St. Mary Ottery, my native village, In the sweet vale of Devon." Lamb's John Woudvil, Act V, last Scene. MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR. The early years of the future poet were un happy enough.

He described them as follows : " So I became fretful, timorous, and a tell-tale ; and the schoolboys drove me from play and were always tormenting me. And hence I took no pleasure in boyish sports, but read incessantly. I read through all gilt-covered little books that could be had at that time, and likewise all the un covered tales of Tom Hickathrift, Jack the Giant Killer, and the like. And I used to lie by the wall and mope ; and my spirits used to come upon me suddenly, and in a flood ; — and then I was accustomed to run up and down the churchyard, and act over again all I had been reading on the docks, the nettles, and the rank grass. At six years of age I remember to have read Beli sarius, Robinson Crusoe, and Philip Quarles [Quarll] ; and then I found the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, one vale of which (the tale of a man who was compelled to seek for a pure vir gin) made so deep an impression on me, (I had read it in the evening while my mother was at her needle,) that I was haunted by spectres, whenever 1 was in the dark : and I distinctly recollect the anxious and fearful eagerness with which I used to watch the window where the book lay ; and when the sun came upon it, I would seize it, carry it by the wall and bask and read.

My father found out the effect which these books had produced and burned them. ** So I became a dreamer, and acquired an in disposition to all .bodily activity ; I was fretful, and inordinately passionate ; and as I could not play at any thing, and was slothful, I was despised and hated by the boys; and because I could read and spell, and had, I may truly say, a memory aud understanding forced into almost unnatural ripeness, I was flattered and wondered at by all the old women. And so I became very vain, and despised most of the boys that were at. all near my own age, and before I was eight years old I was a character. Sensibility, imagination, vanity, sloth, and feelings of deep and bitter contempt for almost all who traversed the orbit of my under standing, were even then prominent and mani fest." * It appears that his father, simple-minded as he was, recognized the peculiar gifts of the child of his age, " for," says Coleridge, " he had resolved that I should be a parson."

In 1781, before Coleridge was nine, years old, his father died. He continued to live with his mother at Ottery till the spring of 1782, when he was sent to London to remain with his uncle * This passage is taken from one of a series of autobiogra phical letters addressed by Coleridge to Mr. Poole in the year 1797. These letters relate only to his early life. They appeared for the first time in a Biographical Supplement to Mrs H. N. Coleridge's edition of the Biographia Literaria, Lon lion, 1847. for a few weeks previous to entering Christ's Hospital. "My uncle was very proud of me, and used to carry me from coffee-house to coffee-house, and tavern to tavern, where I drank, and talked, and disputed as if I had been a man. Nothing was more common than for a large party to exclaim in my hearing, that I was a prodigy, &c. ; so that while I remained at my uncle's, I was most completely spoilt and pampered, both mind and body." * In July, he was admitted to Christ's Hospital, and there underwent that trying experience in a boy's life, when, for the first time separated from home, he is thrown upon his own resources and compelled to make a place and friends for himself.

Coleridge remained at Christ's Hospital for eight years. Here it was that his friendship with Charles Lamb, which death alone was permanently to in terrupt, commenced ; and long afterward Lamb embodied his recollections of the school-boy life of his friend in the beautiful essay, " Christ's Hospital five-and-thirty years ago." Who that has read his glowing description of Coleridge at this time, so sad from the contrast with his later life, can forget it, and who that has read it once but will be glad to read it again ? * Letter to Mr. Poole. Biographia Literaria, ii. 328. " Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the dayspring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee, — the dark pillar not yet turned, — Samuel Taylor Coleridge, — Logician, Metaphysician, Bard! — How have I seen the casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration, (while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the young Mirandula,) to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamb licus, or Plotinus, (for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts,) or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar, — while the walls of the old Grey Friars reechoed to the accents of the inspired charity boy !

" The Reverend James Bowyer was at this period head master of Christ's Hospital. He was a stern master ; " J. B. was a rabid pedant," says Lamb, but he knew how to teach his boys, and Cole ridge was accustomed to speak in warm terms of the obligations which they were under to him, not only for his discipline of their intellects, but also for his cultivation of their taste. Nothing was done for their religious or moral education ; though Coleridge long afterward declared that he had received one just flogging at school, on his taking occasion to declare himself an infidel. " My talents and superiority made me," he says, " for ever at the head in my routine of study, though utterly without the desire to be. so ; without a C MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR. spark of ambition ; and as to emulation, it had no meaning for me ; but the difference between me and my form-fellows, in our lessons and exercises, bore no proportion to the measureless difference between me and them in the wide, wild, wilderness of useless, unarranged book knowledge and book thoughts." * Such was his standing, indeed, that in 1790 he was elected to College, and bade farewell to school in the sonnet, beginning, — " Farewell, parental scenes 1 a sad farewell !

To you my grateful heart still fondly clings, Though fluttering round on Fancy's burnished wings Her tale of future joy Hope loves to tell." On the 5th of February, 1791, Coleridge entered at Jesus College, Cambridge. He was not yet nineteen years old. His natural taste and fortuitous circumstances had led him to read all sorts of books, whether " he understood them or did not understand them ;" and he had spent much time over metaphysical and theological writers, whose abstruse specula tions had bewildered and unsettled a mind orV- *_ nally not well balanced. He had neglected mathe matics and the other branches of exact science, and late in life he thus expressed his sense of the great disadvantage which this had been to him : — " In a long brief dream-life of regretted regrets, I still find a noticeable space marked out by * Biographical Supplement, Biugraphia Literaria, ii the regret, of having neglected the mathema tical sciences.

No weeks, few days, pass un haunted by a fresh conviction of the truth in the Platonic superscription over the portal of Philosophy, — Mndeic uyeuphpnToc elairu." The want of that strict discipline of the reasoning powers which is gained by the study of mathe matics was a loss of more than usual importance to Coleridge. His memory was very retentive, but deficient in method and arrangement. Highly endowed with imagination by nature, his educa tion had tended to develop this faculty still further, until it had assumed a disproportionate influence over his life. " History and particular facts lost all interest in my mind," he says. He was always forming plans and laying out great projects, which were rarely brought to the point of execution. His moral perceptions were strong and acute in regard to matters of theory, but his conscience was silent and inoperative in the affairs of every-day occurrence.