COLERIDGE AS POET AND CRITIC
Before entering upon any attempt, however brief and inadequate it be, to
estimate the multiform genius of Coleridge, it is well to remember that
its permanent expression was, at least, three-sided. To-day he is
regarded chiefly as a poet; for a dozen who know something of his
poetry, there is hardly one who troubles to read his prose. The
_Biographia Literaria_, for example, attracts few students; the _Table
Talk_ recorded by his nephew, and Thomas Allsop's _Letters,
Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge_, passed out of
fashion about the middle of the Victorian Era. His _Aids to Reflection_
is only now returning to public notice after long neglect. The book
enjoyed about twenty years' popularity in England and America, and then
seemed to pass from the service of readers. But it is clear that quite
apart from his poetry and prose, Coleridge's gifts found complete
expression not only in lectures and letters, but in those casual
discourses which held complete strangers entranced. He has been
described as the finest conversationalist since Samuel Johnson. The
printed work that bears his name falls far short of doing him justice.
It suffers on the prose side from the modern lack of interest in his
precise attitude towards the metaphysical speculations that meant so
much to him and his times. On the side of poetry it suffers from the
widening of the boundaries that then marked the confines of legitimate
poetic expression, and from the unfortunate truth that the poet in him
died young. Coleridge the poet employed a very limited palette, not
because he had no more colours, but because their use was
discountenanced by his own early training and by the canons of
contemporary criticism. To estimate the tradition that went to the
making of the poet, and the long road he had to follow before he could
find himself, turn to his Sonnet to the Evening Star, written when he
was eighteen. It opens:
"O meek attendant of Sol's setting blaze
I hail, sweet star, thy chaste efulgent glow."
And it closes:
"Her spirit in thy kindred orb, O star benign."
Though it is generally unfair to divorce lines from their context, it is
permissible here, just to show what passed current as legitimate poetic
expression, and we have to remember that within ten years of the writing
of the sonnet, the poet in Coleridge had given place to the critic,
after enriching poetry with many immortal lines. Clearly one may not
hope, save in certain inspired moments, for much in the way of beauty of
untrammelled form; the thought must be sought beneath the cumbrous
wrapping, and modern readers have less leisure for this than was
granted to Coleridge's contemporaries. The "Lines on an Autumnal
Evening," written perhaps three years later than the sonnet, show a
marked improvement: the poet is beginning to prove stronger than the
formal limitations that beset him, but the spirit of the time is
displayed through a curious incident. The poem was first printed in the
little volume offered to the public in 1796, and is accompanied by an
apology for printing such "intolerable stuff" as lines 57-70. At the
same time he declares that he has not imitated Rogers' "Pleasure of
Memory" in certain other lines (27-36), and suggests that Rogers himself
had borrowed his story from "Lochleven," a poem by Michael Bruce. In a
second edition Coleridge gives reasons for "reprieving his own poem from
immediate oblivion," and proceeds to apologise to Rogers in terms of
which the following are part: "No one can see more clearly the
_littleness_ and futility of imagining plagiarisms in the works of men
of genius; but _nemo omnibus horis sapit_; and my mind at the time of
writing that note was sick and sore with anxiety and weakened through
much suffering. I have not the most distant knowledge of Mr. Rogers save
as a correct and elegant poet. If any of my readers should know him
personally, they would oblige me by informing him that I have expiated a
sentence of unfounded detraction by an unsolicited and self-originating
apology."
One can hardly resist the temptation of applying to the youthful writer
of such stuff as this his own opening line of the address "To a Young
Ass," written one year after the lines to the Autumnal Evening, and
three years earlier than the above apology:
"Poor little foal of an oppressed race."
It is in his "Ode on the Departing Year" (1796) that Coleridge seems for
the first time to discover his own full power, but the classical
top-hamper accompanying it shows that the limitations upon freedom of
expression are still there. The poem is preceded by a quotation from the
"Agamemnon" of Æschylus, and when published in a small quarto pamphlet
held dedicatory letter to Tom Poole, into which a long quotation from
Statius forces unwelcome way. Capital letters, quotations, italics,
notes of exclamation were ever to the fore in the early days of the
nineteenth century. But 1797-8 brought some of the finest lines the poet
has given us. "The Three Graves" has much that one is pleased to
remember, and the lines addressed to Charles Lamb--"This Lime Tree Bower
my Prison," and referred to with a quotation in a previous chapter, show
keen appreciation of Nature and natural beauty. Reference has been made
elsewhere in this little paper to the limited response that Coleridge
shows to his surroundings, but this poem shows that he was not quite
oblivious of them. One cannot help feeling that the inspiration came
suddenly and unexpectedly, born of compulsory solitude and the fine June
evening; the limited appeal of Nature to the poet is shown by the fact
that the poem was omitted from the 1803 edition of his work, and that,
in the lines near the end, "My Sarah and my friends" was substituted
for "My gentle-hearted Charles," rather to Elia's annoyance.
Of the famous "Kubla Khan" fragment, written in a lonely farm-house
between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and
Devonshire, it has been pointed out that opium was in all probability
the source of inspiration. The poet had been reading a passage from
_Purchas his Pilgrimage_--it runs as follows:
"In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Palace, encompassing
sixteene miles of plaine ground within a wall wherein are fertile
Meadowes, pleasant Springs, delightfull Streames, and all sorts of
beasts of chase and game, and in the middle thereof a sumptuous
house of pleasure."
Coleridge used to recite his strange fragment to Lamb, who told
Wordsworth that it brought Heaven and Elysian bowers into his parlour,
but added in the same letter his fear lest in the light of cold print it
should appear "no better than nonsense."
There is a clear suggestion of transient force behind the lines. For
example, we read in the beginning (lines 3-5):
"Where Alph the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea."
And in line 18:
"A mighty fountain momently was forced."
Then in line 27 the poet harks back to an earlier image:
"Then reached the caverns measureless to man";
while earlier in line 24 he reverts to the ill-conditioned adverb of his
18th line:
"It flung up momently the sacred river."
But, as was suggested earlier, the explanation of "Kubla Khan" may be
found in its last two lines:
"For he on honey dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise."
Next in order of composition comes "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,"
the poem which is the most widely read of any that Coleridge wrote,
though it may be doubted whether the full extent of the poet's
achievement is grasped by more than a minority of those who know it. The
"Ancient Mariner" has many merits; it is one of the greatest ballads in
English poetry. The sheer music of the lines, the romance they enshrine,
the sense they convey of a vivid description of things actually seen,
have given an abridged version of the poem a place in schoolbooks
without number, and will probably continue to do so for generations to
come, so that "The Mariner" is the first figure of his kind to touch the
youthful imagination. Wordsworth has told us how the poem came to be
written, when he, his sister Dorothy, and Coleridge had left Stowey to
visit the Valley of Rocks, near Linton, on a November day in 1797. They
had planned an excursion, and proposed to pay for it out of the proceeds
of some poetry then to be written. In the course of the walk Coleridge
discussed the poem with his two friends; he was founding it upon the
dream of Mr. Cruickshank, a friend of his. Wordsworth, who had been
reading a book of travels dealing with a journey round Cape Horn
(Shelvocke's _Voyage Round the World_), suggested the incident of the
albatross and the navigation of the ship by dead men. On the same
evening the work started, Wordsworth contributing a few lines--less than
a dozen at most. A great deal has been written about the Wordsworth
contribution, which, upon his own showing, was quite slight in
substance, though it was valuable in suggestion. Shelvocke's story of
the doubling of Cape Horn and the meeting with albatrosses prompted
Wordsworth, and Coleridge may have derived some of his details from a
book by Captain Thomas James, published in 1633, and dealing with the
"intended discovery of a North-West Passage in to the South Sea." But we
are less concerned with this than with the implicit logic that Coleridge
has packed into his poem. His vivid imagination traced the whole course
of the Ancient Mariner's journey in fashion that demands and will repay
the closest observation.
For example, turn to the sixth stanza:
"Below the kirk, below the hill,
Below the lighthouse top";
and it will be realised that here we have the natural order of the
disappearance of objects seen by a vessel leaving the shore. The
position stands reversed in the passage describing the Mariner's return.
In the opening line of Part II we read:
"The sun now rose upon the right."
This is, because they have doubled Cape Horn.
These instances of close observation of natural phenomena could be
multiplied did space permit, the poem is full of them, only in the line
"the furrow followed free" may he be held to have fallen into error. Yet
this excellence has, after all, but a small concern with the poetic
worth of the work, and it is astonishing to find that its music rang
harshly in the ears of contemporary criticism, though its awesome and
fantastic beauty moves the English-speaking world to this day. One lady
(Mrs. Barbauld) told Coleridge that, while she liked the "Ancient
Mariner," she had to find two faults. In the first place, the story was
improbable, and secondly, it had no moral! Wordsworth himself had his
doubts about it, and Southey somewhat obscurely called it "a Dutch
attempt at German sublimity," for which quintessential criticism Charles
Lamb took him to task.
Looking back upon the life and work of Coleridge, we know that his
"Ancient Mariner" reaches the high-water mark of his poetic achievement
in narrative verse, and that it will endure when the greater part of his
writing, whether in verse or prose, has been forgotten--remembered not
only on account of its beauty as a complete work of art, but on account
of the irresistible music of many of the stanzas. It stands for the
fruit of the supremely inspired hours of a greatly gifted man.
"Christabel," another poem that has gained Coleridge a host of admirers,
is, unfortunately, incomplete. In the ponderous preface to the first
edition (John Murray, 1816), Coleridge explains that he wrote the first
part at Nether Stowey in 1797, and the second part at Keswick three
years later. "Since then his powers have been in a state of suspended
animation, but he hopes to embody in verse the three parts yet to come
in the course of the present year." Twelve or thirteen years later,
Coleridge was still full of the thought of completion, but he omits the
pious hope from the preface to the 1834 edition--he knew by then that
inspiration had long been dead. Yet the failure to complete galled him
through many years after the poem was laid aside. We find him writing to
Allsop in 1821: "Of my poetic works, I would fain finish 'Christabel.'"
In later years, when he was living with Gillman, he described the story
as it was to have been told in verse, but Wordsworth told the late Lord
Chief Justice Coleridge that he did not know anything about the plan of
completion, and does not think Coleridge had one. In his _Table Talk_
Coleridge himself remarks that the presence of worries and the absence
of good music kept him from completing "Christabel," which was received
with marked favour by the limited public of its day, three editions
being called for in one year. He did not realise, when he spoke to his
nephew, that his gifts had passed from one form of expression to
another.
Hazlitt is suspect, on insufficient evidence, of having reviewed
"Christabel" harshly in the _Edinburgh Review_ and the _Examiner_; but
the _Quarterly Review_ found that its success in dealing with "witchery
by daylight" is complete. It is a matter for regret that the interest
taken in the "Ancient Mariner" and in fragments like "Kubla Khan" and
"Christabel" has been at the expense of poems like the "Ode to
Dejection" and smaller pieces, gems of poetic thought, finely expressed.
As time wore on, the realities of life divorced the poet's muse, now
quite a minor quantity, from its union with classicism, to the great
advantage of his work, and though he cannot be said to have fulfilled
the promise of his best years, he wrote much that his admirers will not
willingly let die. One would perhaps hesitate to call it poetry--the
work he wrote between his twenty-third and twenty-seventh years was
poetry in the fullest sense of the term--it is rather philosophy
expressed in set forms with a measure of charm that can never be absent
long from any utterance of Coleridge.
It may perhaps be suggested that the poetic genius in Coleridge needed
nursing, and failed to get what it required; to a certain extent such a
theory is permissible. We have to remember, in the first place, that his
health was bad from youth. He was very susceptible to rheumatism; before
middle age he was a martyr to gout; he could not endure extreme cold;
and yet he elected to go and live at Greta Hall, in the Vale of
Derwentwater, where the rain it raineth nearly every day, and strong
harsh winds are the rule rather than the exception. These surroundings
confirmed and strengthened the opium habit. To make matters worse, his
home life was not of the kind that makes for poetry. Mrs. Coleridge was
in many respects a deserving and worthy lady, but she had grave
limitations. With things of the intellect she was not on any terms,
however remote, and she had a weakness that is said to extend to others
of her sex--she worried incessantly about trifles. Reading closely the
history of the unhappy married life that involved husband and wife in so
much trouble, the mistake of marrying the wrong woman may be condoned.
To the overstrung "philosopher in a mist," as he describes himself in
one of his earliest letters from Greta Hall, a querulous wife who found
small grievances everywhere, who judged her husband's talent from the
standpoint of what it brought in from the publishers, must have been a
sore trial. In the same way, for the sake of justice, let us admit that
the man who was always ready to undertake work that he could never be
prevailed upon to begin, who was erratic, intemperate, and wholly
unreliable, must have been a sore trouble to any woman who could not
appreciate his gifts, and could discern nothing in the future save an
increasing family and a diminishing income. But whatever the proper
apportionment of praise or blame, one fact remains. At Greta Hall the
fine flame of poetic inspiration burned low, and never afterwards
recovered its pristine radiance. Professor Alois Brandl does not go too
far when he says that at the age of thirty, that is by the year 1802,
Coleridge was a broken man; and it was this failure of his health, this
prolonged suffering from rheumatism and gout, which he sought so
foolishly and so vainly to cure by the aid of opium, that turned him
from poetry to the study of philosophy in order to find relief. He
sought, as he says in that fine but mournful "Ode to Dejection,"
"By abstruse research to steal
From my own nature all the natural man."
And at this point of his life, we find him turning away from the muse,
to which nearly all his lasting contribution has long been made, and
venturing into a field wherein he was destined to achieve considerable
success. Criticism and metaphysics occupied him in turn. The period of
study was a very long one; he was forty-four years of age when his _Lay
Sermons_ was published, in the wake of much journalism and some
desultory and miscellaneous work. Needless to say, he had many brilliant
intentions that were never carried out. One of them, a book to supersede
all dogmatic philosophy, was designed to fill six hundred pages with "A
collection of all possible modes of true, probable, and false
reasonings, with a strict analysis of their origin and operation."
But if he did not write the books--and he once declared that the mere
titles of those he had projected would fill a volume--Coleridge
accomplished a very considerable amount of work. Much of it must be
lost. He was an omnivorous reader, and his clear mind could detect flaws
in any reasoning that was not sound. He studied Berkeley, Fichte,
Hartley, Hegel, Herder, Hume, Kant, Lessing, Maass, Schelling, and
Spinoza, studied them with complete understanding, and luminous
criticism, and could discourse upon them brilliantly. It needed a
well-equipped intelligence to follow him; few could, and the majority
thought he talked brilliantly but irrelevantly. We know that this was
not the case, the truth being that he was too big for the most of his
audience.
He passed through a very considerable number of religious phases. His
earlier Pantheism gave way to Rationalism and Unitarianism, and he
arrived by way of the German transcendental philosophers to his ultimate
reconciliation with the doctrines of Christianity. In the years in which
he lived this ultimate orthodoxy was good alike for his reputation and
his circulation. His influence affected profoundly great thinkers like
F. D. Maurice and John Sterling, and it may be doubted whether cheap
reprints of certain of his prose writings would not find a considerable
measure of success to-day, for it is impossible to deny his gift of
style, his capacity to reason closely and clearly, or the intense
earnestness and conviction that vitalise his message. It is unfortunate,
perhaps, that his most popular work as a poet has kept him from
receiving due recognition first as a critic and then as a philosopher,
and that his work as a philosopher has been clouded by his unfortunate
inability to rule his own life on philosophic lines.
In the order of publication, his prose works are the _Lay Sermons_, to
which reference has been made; the _Sibylline Leaves_ (a revised edition
of his poems); the _Biographia Literaria_ (full of valuable criticism
badly arranged); the _Aids to Reflection_ (1824); _Church and State_
(1830); and two posthumous works, the _Confessions of an Enquiring
Mind_ (1840), and _Literary Remains_. The _Satyrane's Letters_ was
republished in the _Biographia Literaria_.
It is due probably to his troubled health, that he frequently
incorporated the reflections of other men among his own, and accusations
of plagiarism were not lacking. Among those who attacked him on this
ground were Thomas de Quincey, who led the assault in _Tait's Magazine_,
three months after his sometime friend was dead; Professor Ferrier, some
years later; and Sir William Hamilton, this last a singularly bitter
critic of little judgment. The charge against Coleridge is one that
should not have been made, even though it may be sustained to the
complete satisfaction of those who like to belittle great minds.
"I regard truth as a Divine ventriloquist, and care not from whose mouth
the sounds are supposed to proceed, if only the words be audible and
intelligible." In this passage Coleridge summed up an attitude that will
satisfy all who can take a sane and dispassionate view of his life, and
weigh its accomplishments and vicissitudes. Certain thoughts are the
children of every era, and will reach more than one thinker at a time;
they belong to the man who can make noblest use of them.
It is impossible to deny that for all his shortcomings Coleridge did
more for his countrymen than his countrymen did for him, and harsh
criticism is unbecoming the present generation, which enjoys the full
benefit of his work, and has not suffered any of the disappointments
that he inflicted upon his contemporaries. Let us remember, too, that
he was a simple and modest man, and nowhere claims to be a distinguished
poet or a great philosopher. He knew that he had more than the average
mental gift, but instead of pride in his possession we find him
regretting deeply his inability to justify it. Indeed, he goes further
than this, for he says in one of his letters that Wordsworth taught him
to recognise some of his limitations. The letter is written to Godwin
when Coleridge was in his thirty-first year, and in it he says that
Wordsworth, by showing him what true poetry was, made him know that he
himself was no poet.
Coleridge had a very highly developed critical faculty, and exercised it
brilliantly in his writings on Shakespeare. His criticisms sparkle with
intelligence; terse and virile, they leave the reader regretting that
they were not extended. He speaks of Polonius, "a statesman somewhat
past his faculties"; of Lear as "the ample and open playground of
Nature's passions."
Whether as poet, critic, or metaphysician, Coleridge was a progressive
thinker, and broke away slowly but deliberately from the fetters of form
that cripple his earliest utterances; nor were the flights of his
thought less remarkable than his experiments in method.
Whatever his acts, his intentions were of the highest. He sought to do
good, and he placed at the service of his countrymen the best that he
had to offer. One can only speculate upon the extent of the loss that
his chronic ill-health inflicted upon his own and succeeding
generations. His were the instincts of the schoolmaster, but of the
schoolmaster who takes all his fellow-countrymen for pupils. His
discourses on poetry, founded so largely upon prolonged and intimate
study of Wordsworth, stand to-day one of the finest examinations of the
range and proper limitation of poetic expression.
Coleridge was destined to be overshadowed in his own time, and in the
critical years immediately following his death, by more powerful
personalities--men whose appeal to the public was more immediate and
better sustained; but much that he wrote a hundred years ago is of
importance to us to-day, and modern criticism, detached, impersonal, and
with a true perspective, can hardly fail to do him justice in any of the
departments of his life-work.
How did he appeal to his contemporaries? Criticism was generally
undiscerning and hostile, but those who came within the charmed circle
were, with rare exception, delighted. The secret of his appeal passed
with him; there are still some who wonder how it has come about that,
the limits of ordered achievement being so marked, Coleridge stands
where he does. Poet, critic, and metaphysician, in each capacity he had
attracted the interest and retained the regard of a great majority of
his most notable contemporaries. His inspiration came by fits and
starts, but, when it did come, would find expression in felicitous
phrases revealing some aspects of truth that captured the imagination.
At the end of a long unhappy and often ill-spent life, he could command
the unstinted admiration of such a sour-tongued old critic as Thomas
Carlyle. Hear him in his _Life of Sterling_:
"Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill in those years looking
down on London and its smoke tumult like a sage escaped from the
inanity of life's battle, attracting towards him the thoughts of
innumerable brave souls still engaged there.... A sublime man, who
alone in those dark days had saved his crown of spiritual manhood,
escaping from the black materialism and revolutionary deluges with
'God, Freedom, Immortality' still his; a king of men."
And later he describes him with the true Carlyle touch as that "heavy
laden, high aspiring, and surely much suffering man." Wordsworth said
that Coleridge was the only wonderful man he had ever met; Nelson
Coleridge said that a day spent with Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a
"sabbath past expression, deep, tranquil, and serene."
Find him at the right time and in happy mood, he was capable of great
feats. For example, he was invited one morning to lecture before the
London Philosophical Society. He went with Gillman to the secretary to
inquire the subject chosen, but the secretary was out. In the evening
Coleridge and Gillman went to the Society's rooms, and heard the
announcement made that Mr. Coleridge would deliver an address on "The
Growth of the Individual Mind." He spoke extempore for over an hour and
a half, holding a critical audience enthralled.
Joseph Henry Green, whose two posthumous volumes entitled _Spiritual
Philosophy_, founded upon the teaching of the late Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, were published in 1865, was sufficiently under the spell to
devote a whole life-work to his master's teaching.
With Coleridge, the metaphysician, it is impossible to deal here. Dr.
Traill summed up his teaching very concisely in the following sentences:
"There is indeed no moral theory of life, there are no maxims of
conduct, such as youth above all things craves for, in Coleridge's
teaching. Apart from the intrinsic difficulties of the task to
which he invites his disciples, it labours under a primary and
essential disadvantage of postponing moral to intellectual
liberation. Contrive somehow or other to attain to just ideas as to
the capacities and limitations of the human consciousness,
considered especially in relation to its two important and
eternally distinct functions, the Reason and the Understanding: and
peace of mind shall in due time be added unto you. That is in
effect Coleridge's answer to the inquirer who consults him; and if
the distinction between the Reason and the Understanding were as
obvious as it is obscure to the average unmetaphysical mind, and of
a value as assured for the purpose to which Coleridge applies it as
it is uncertain, the answer would nevertheless send many a would-be
disciple sorrowful away."
It is not necessary to pursue the subject. Between the reader and the
metaphysician stands the poet and the critic, and for the greater part
of the present and future generations these will suffice.
INDEX
"Absence," 64
"Æolian Harp," 65
_Æsthetical Essays_, 49
_Aids to Reflection_, 52, 53, 75, 87
Allsop, Thomas, 49, 50, 51, 75, 83
Beaumont, Sir George, 36, 41
_Biographia Literaria_, 48, 49, 75
Blackwoods, the, 51
Boyer, Rev. James, 18, 64
Burnett, 23, 26, 65
Carlyle, on Coleridge, 91
Cary, Rev. H. F., 49
"Christabel," 30, 34, 48, 62, 82
Christ's Hospital, 18, 64
"Church and State," 58, 87
Clarke, Cowden, 52
Clarkson, Mrs., 43
Coleridge, Berkeley, 31
Coleridge, David Hartley, 28, 47, 50
Coleridge, Henry Nelson, 52, 58, 91
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, early life and education, 13;
at Christ's Hospital, 18, 64;
ill-health, 19, 25, 35, 39, 41, 84;
attachment to Mary Evans, 19;
at Jesus College, Cambridge, 19, 20, 23;
pecuniary difficulties and debts, 21, 23, 29, 39, 50, 51, 52;
erratic disposition, 20, 24, 40, 62;
joins the army, 21, 22;
Pantisocracy scheme, 22, 26;
relations with Southey, 22, 26, 27, 33, 36, 41, 47, 49, 71, 82;
engagement to Sarah Flicker, 23;
relations with Charles Lamb, 26, 27, 31, 34, 44, 47, 58, 59, 62,
78, 79;
marriage, 27;
opium habit, 28, 31, 32, 35, 47, 49, 52, 70, 84;
life at Nether Stowey with Charles Lloyd, 29;
relations with the Wordsworths, 29, 30, 32, 33, 36, 43, 44, 50,
57, 62, 73, 80, 82, 83, 89, 91;
the Wedgwoods' generosity, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 41, 46;
visit to Germany, 32;
literary life in London, 33;
in the Lake District, 34;
in Malta, 36, 37;
in Italy, 39;
troubled years, 41;
lectures, 42, 44, 46, 49, 91;
_Table Talk_, 52, 58, 63, 74, 83;
pension from Royal Society of Literature, 52, 56;
later and more tranquil years, 53, 55;
successful re-issue of poems, 56;
second visit to Germany, 57;
Government grant, 58, 59;
last days and death at Highgate, 59;
epitaph, 60, 71;
as observer of Nature, 61, 64, 65, 78;
philosophic bent, 63, 86;
essays and prose writings, 70, 75, 91;
as poet and critic, 75 _et seq._;
religious phases, 87;
place in literature, 88, 89
Coleridge, Sara, his daughter, 52, 58
Cologne, lines on, 57
_Confessions of an Enquiring Mind_, 88
Cottle, the publisher, 27, 47
_Courier, The_, 34, 41, 47, 49
De Quincey, 42, 88
Dove Cottage, 33, 34
Evans, Mary, 19, 21
Evening Star, Sonnet to, 26
_Fall of Robespierre_, 11, 23
Favell, Mr., 27
Ferrier, Professor, 88
Fricker, Sarah, afterwards Mrs. Coleridge, 23, 26, 43, 65, 84, 85
_Friend, The_, 43, 45
"Frost at Midnight," 68
Gillman, Dr., 47, 48, 52, 91
Grattan, Thomas Colley, 57
Green, Joseph Henry, 49, 59, 91
Greta Hall, 34, 84
Hamilton, Sir William, 88
Hazlitt, William, 31, 83
Horace, 72, 73
"Hymn before Sunrise," 69
"Inscription for a Fountain," 69
Jesus College, 19
_Joan of Arc_, by Southey, 23
"Kubla Khan," 31, 48, 79, 84
Lake Country, the, 33, 61
Lamb, Charles, 11, 18, 26, 27, 31, 34, 44, 47, 58, 59, 62, 78, 79
_Lay Sermons_, 86, 87
"Life," 64
_Literary Remains_, 88
Lloyd, Charles, 28, 29, 30, 31
_Lyrical Ballads_, 32, 34
_Metropolitan Encyclopædia_, 48
"Monody on the Death of Chatterton," 27
Montague, Basil, 44, 57
Morgans, the, 44, 45, 47
_Morning Chronicle, The_, 26, 28
_Morning Post_, 31, 34, 38, 65
Murray, John, publisher, 48
Nether Stowey, 28, 29
"Nightingale," the, 69
"Ode on the Departing Year," 78
"Ode to Dejection," 69, 84, 86
"On an Autumnal Evening," 65, 77
_Osorio_, 29, 30
Ottery St. Mary, 15, 16, 63
"Pains of Sleep," the, 48
Pantisocracy scheme, the, 22, 27
Pickering, William, publisher, 56
_Poems on Various Subjects_, 27
Poole, Thomas, 23, 27, 28, 41, 59
"Preliminary Treatise on Method," 48
"Prometheus of Æschylus," 53
"Raven, the," 64
"Reflection on having left a place of Retirement," 65
"Religious Musings," 27
_Remorse_, 45
"Rime of the Ancient Mariner," 30, 61, 80
Robinson, Henry Crabb, 44, 45, 59
Rogers, Samuel, 77
"Satyrane's Letters," 32
_Sibylline Leaves_, 87
"Songs of the Pixies," 64
"Sonnet to the River Otter," 64
Southey, Robert, 11, 22, 26, 27, 33, 36, 41, 49, 71, 82
_Table Talk_, 10, 11, 52, 58, 63, 74, 83
Thelwall, "Citizen" John, 28, 29
"This Lime Tree Bower my Prison," 67, 78
"Three Graves," 78
"To a Beautiful Spring in a Village," 64
"To a Young Ass," 77
Traill, Dr., quoted, 92
Tulk, Charles Augustus, 49
Virgil, 73
_Watchman, The_, 27
Wedgwoods, the, 30, 31, 34, 35, 41, 46
Wordsworth family, the, 11, 29, 30, 32, 33, 36, 43, 44, 50, 57, 62,
73, 80, 82, 83, 89, 91
"Youth and Age," 52
_Zapolya_, 47, 48, 49
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[Transcriber's Notes:
The transcriber made these changes to the text to correct obvious
errors:
1. p. 75 stangers --> strangers
2. p. 81 reserved --> reversed
3. p. 92 suffiee --> suffice
End of Transcriber's Notes]