De Quincy, in his "Suspiria de Profundis," Blackwood's _Magazine_, June,
1845, p. 748., speaking of the spectre of the Brocken, and of the
conditions under which that striking phenomenon is manifested, observes
that
"Coleridge ascended the Brocken on the Whitsunday of 1799 with
a party of English students from Goettingen, but failed to see
the phantom; afterwards in England (and under the same three
conditions) he saw a much rarer phenomenon, which he described
in the following eight lines. I give them from a corrected
copy. The apostrophe in the beginning must be understood as
addressed to an ideal conception:
"'And art thou nothing? Such thou art as when
The woodman winding westward up the glen
At wintry dawn, when o'er the sheep-track's maze
The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist'ning haze,
Sees full before him, gliding without tread,
An image with a glory round its head:
This shade he worships for its golden hues,
And makes (not knowing) that which he pursues.'"
These lines are from "Constancy to an ideal Object;" but in the usual
editions of Coleridge's _Poems_, the last two lines are printed thus:
"The enamour'd rustic worships its fair hues,
Nor knows he makes the shadow he pursues."
Coleridge's _Poetical Works_, vol. ii. p. 91., 1840.
Query: Which reading is the correct one? Coleridge refers to the
_Manchester Philosophical Transactions_ for a description of this
phenomenon; but, as the earlier volumes of these are scarce, perhaps
some of your correspondents would copy the description from the volume
which contains it, or furnish one from some authentic source.