APPENDIX IV

PROSE VERSIONS OF POEMS, ETC.

A

[Vide ante, p. 409.]

Why is my Love like the Sun?

1. The Dawn = the presentiment of my Love.

2. The Sunrise = the suddenness, the all-at-once of Love—and the first silence—the beams of Light fall first on the distance, the interspace still dark.

3. The Cheerful Morning—the established Day-light universal.

4. The Sunset—who can behold it, and think of the Sun-rise? It takes all the thought to itself. The Moon-reflected Light—soft, melancholy, warmthless—the absolute purity (nay, it is always pure, but), the incorporeity of Love in absence—Love per se is a Potassium—it can subsist by itself, tho' in presence it has a natural and necessary combination with the comburent principle. All other Lights (the fixed Stars) not borrowed from the absent Sun—Lights for other worlds, not for me. I see them and admire, but they irradiate nothing.

B

[Vide ante, pp. 426, 919, 920.]

1

2

3

4

1845

C

I have often amused myself with the thought of a self-conscious Looking-glass, and the various metaphorical applications of such a fancy—and this morning it struck across the Eolian Harp of my Brain that there was something pleasing and emblematic (of what I did not distinctly make out) in two such Looking-glasses fronting, each seeing the other in itself, and itself in the other. Have you ever noticed the Vault or snug little Apartment which the Spider spins and weaves for itself, by spiral threads round and round, and sometimes with strait lines, so that its lurking parlour or withdrawing-room is an oblong square? This too connected itself in my mind with the melancholy truth, that as we grow older, the World (alas! how often it happens that the less we love it, the more we care for it, the less reason we have to value its Shews, the more anxious are we about them—alas! how often do we become more and more loveless, as Love which can outlive all change save a change with regard to itself, and all loss save the loss of its Reflex, is more needed to sooth us and alone is able so to do!) What was I saying? O, I was adverting to the fact that as we advance in years, the World, that spidery Witch, spins its threads narrower and narrower, still closing on us, till at last it shuts us up within four walls, walls of flues and films, windowless—and well if there be sky-lights, and a small opening left for the Light from above. I do not know that I have anything to add, except to remind you, that pheer or phere for Mate, Companion, Counterpart, is a word frequently used by Spencer (sic) and Herbert, and the Poets generally, who wrote before the Restoration (1660), before I say that this premature warm and sunny day, antedating Spring, called forth the following.

Strain in the manner of G. Herbert, which might be entitled The Alone Most Dear: a Complaint of Jacob to Rachel as in the tenth year of her service he saw in her or fancied that he saw symptoms of Alienation. N.B. The Thoughts and Images being modernized and turned into English.

Jacob Hodiernus.

Ah! me!!

FOOTNOTES:

D

Note to Line 34 of the Joan of Arc Book II. 1796, pp. 41, 42.

Line 34. Sir Isaac Newton at the end of the last edition of his Optics supposes that a very subtile and elastic fluid, which he calls aether, is diffused thro' the pores of gross bodies, as well as thro' the open spaces that are void of gross matter: he supposes it to pierce all bodies, and to touch their least particles, acting on them with a force proportional to their number or to the matter of the body on which it acts. He supposes likewise, that it is rarer in the pores of bodies than in open spaces, and even rarer in small pores and dense bodies, than in large pores and rare bodies; and also that its density increases in receding from gross matter; so for instance as to be greater at the 1/100 of an inch from the surface of any body, than at its surface; and so on. To the action of this aether he ascribes the attractions of gravitation and cohœsion, the attraction and repulsion of electrical bodies, the mutual influences of bodies and light upon each other, the effects and communication of heat, and the performance of animal sensation and motion. David Hartley, from whom this account of aether is chiefly borrowed, makes it the instrument of propagating those vibrations or configurative motions which are ideas. It appears to me, no hypothesis ever involved so many contradictions; for how can the same fluid be both dense and rare in the same body at one time? Yet in the Earth as gravitating to the Moon, it must be very rare; and in the Earth as gravitating to the Sun, it must be very dense. For as Andrew Baxter well observes, it doth not appear sufficient to account how the fluid may act with a force proportional to the body to which another is impelled, to assert that it is rarer in great bodies than in small ones; it must be further asserted that this fluid is rarer or denser in the same body, whether small or great, according as the body to which that is impelled is itself small or great. But whatever may be the solidity of this objection, the following seems unanswerable:

If every particle thro' the whole solidity of a heavy body receive its impulse from the particles of this fluid, it should seem that the fluid itself must be as dense as the very densest heavy body, gold for instance; there being as many impinging particles in the one, as there are gravitating particles in the other which receive their gravitation by being impinged upon: so that, throwing gold or any heavy body upward, against the impulse of this fluid, would be like throwing gold thro' gold; and as this aether must be equally diffused over the whole sphere of its activity, it must be as dense when it impels cork as when it impels gold, so that to throw a piece of cork upward, would be as if we endeavoured to make cork penetrate a medium as dense as gold; and tho' we were to adopt the extravagant opinions which have been advanced concerning the progression of pores, yet however porous we suppose a body, if it be not all pore, the argument holds equally, the fluid must be as dense as the body in order to give every particle its impulse.

It has been asserted that Sir Isaac Newton's philosophy leads in its consequences to Atheism: perhaps not without reason. For if matter, by any powers or properties given to it, can produce the order of the visible world and even generate thought; why may it not have possessed such properties by inherent right? and where is the necessity of a God? matter is according to the mechanic philosophy capable of acting most wisely and most beneficently without Wisdom or Benevolence; and what more does the Atheist assert? if matter possess those properties, why might it not have possessed them from all eternity? Sir Isaac Newton's Deity seems to be alternately operose and indolent; to have delegated so much power as to make it inconceivable what he can have reserved. He is dethroned by Vice-regent second causes.

We seem placed here to acquire a knowledge of effects. Whenever we would pierce into the Adyta of Causation, we bewilder ourselves; and all that laborious Conjecture can do, is to fill up the gaps of imagination. We are restless, because invisible things are not the objects of vision—and philosophical systems, for the most part, are received not for their Truth, but in proportion as they attribute to Causes a susceptibility of being seen, whenever our visual organs shall have become sufficiently powerful.

E

DEDICATION[1113:1]

Ode on the Departing Year, 1796, pp. [3]-4.

[Vide ante, p. 160.]

To Thomas Poole, of Stowey.

My Dear Friend—

Soon after the commencement of this month, the Editor of the Cambridge Intelligencer (a newspaper conducted with so much ability, and such unmixed and fearless zeal for the interests of Piety and Freedom, that I cannot but think my poetry honoured by being permitted to appear in it) requested me, by Letter, to furnish him with some Lines for the last day of this Year. I promised him that I would make the attempt; but almost immediately after, a rheumatic complaint seized on my head, and continued to prevent the possibility of poetic composition till within the last three days. So in the course of the last three days the following Ode was produced. In general, when an Author informs the Public that his production was struck off in a great hurry, he offers an insult, not an excuse. But I trust that the present case is an exception, and that the peculiar circumstances which obliged me to write with such unusual rapidity give a propriety to my professions of it: nec nunc eam apud te jacto, sed et ceteris indico; ne quis asperiore limâ carmen examinet, et a confuso scriptum et quod frigidum erat ni statim traderem.[1113:2] (I avail myself of the words of Statius, and hope that I shall likewise be able to say of any weightier publication, what he has declared of his Thebaid, that it had been tortured[1113:3] with a laborious Polish.)

For me to discuss the literary merits of this hasty composition were idle and presumptuous. If it be found to possess that impetuosity of Transition, and that Precipitation of Fancy and Feeling, which are the essential excellencies of the sublimer Ode, its deficiency in less important respects will be easily pardoned by those from whom alone praise could give me pleasure: and whose minuter criticisms will be disarmed by the reflection, that these Lines were conceived 'not in the soft obscurities of Retirement, or under the Shelter of Academic Groves, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow'.[1114:1] I am more anxious lest the moral spirit of the Ode should be mistaken. You, I am sure, will not fail to recollect that among the Ancients, the Bard and the Prophet were one and the same character; and you know, that although I prophesy curses, I pray fervently for blessings. Farewell, Brother of my Soul!

Never without an emotion of honest pride do I subscribe myself

Your grateful and affectionate friend,

S. T. Coleridge.

Bristol, December 26, 1796.

FOOTNOTES:

F

[Vide ante, p. 519.]

In this sketch of a tragedy, all is imperfect, and much obscure. Among other equally great defects (millstones round the slender neck of its merits) it presupposes a long story; and this long story, which yet is necessary to the complete understanding of the play, is not half told. Albert had sent a letter informing his family that he should arrive about such a time by ship; he was shipwrecked; and wrote a private letter to Osorio, informing him alone of this accident, that he might not shock Maria. Osorio destroyed the letter, and sent assassins to meet Albert. . . Worse than all, the growth of Osorio's character is nowhere explained—and yet I had most clear and psychologically accurate ideas of the whole of it. . . A man, who from constitutional calmness of appetites, is seduced into pride and the love of power, by these into misanthropism, or rather a contempt of mankind, and from thence, by the co-operation of envy, and a curiously modified love for a beautiful female (which is nowhere developed in the play), into a most atrocious guilt. A man who is in truth a weak man, yet always duping himself into the belief that he has a soul of iron. Such were some of my leading ideas.

In short the thing is but an embryo, and whilst it remains in manuscript, which it is destined to do, the critic would judge unjustly who should call it a miscarriage. It furnished me with a most important lesson, namely, that to have conceived strongly, does not always imply the power of successful execution. S. T. C.

[From Early Years and Late Reflections, by Clement Carlyon, M.D., 1856, i. 143-4.]

APPENDIX V

ADAPTATIONS

For a critical study of Coleridge's alterations in the text of the quotations from seventeenth-century poets, which were inserted in the Biographia Literaria (2 vols., 1817), or were prefixed as mottoes to Chapters in the rifacimento of The Friend (3 vols., 1818), see an article by J. D Campbell entitled 'Coleridge's Quotations,' which was published in the Athenæum, August 20, 1892, and 'Adaptations', P. W., 1893, pp. 471-4. Most of these textual alterations or garblings were noted by H. N. Coleridge in an edition of The Friend published in 1837; Mr. Campbell was the first to collect and include the mottoes and quotations in a sub-section of Coleridge's Poetical Works. Three poems, (1) 'An Elegy Imitated from Akenside', (2) 'Farewell to Love ', (3) 'Mutual Passion altered and modernized from an Old Poet', may be reckoned as 'Adaptations'. The first and third of these composite productions lay no claim to originality, whilst the second, 'Farewell to Love', which he published anonymously in The Courier, September 27, 1806, was not included by Coleridge in Sibylline Leaves, or in 1828, 1829, 1834. For (1) vide ante, p. 69, and post, Read:—p. 1123; for (2) ante, p. 402; and for (3) vide post, p. 1118.

1

FULKE GREVILLE. LORD BROOKE

A Treatie of Warres, st. lxvi-vii.

Motto To 'A Lay Sermon', 1817

S. T. C.

The same quotation from Lord Brooke is used to illustrate Aphorism xvii, 'Inconsistency,' Aids to Reflection, 1825, p. 93 (with the word 'both', substituted for 'still' in line 1). Line 8 is from Macbeth, Act I, Sc. vii, 'Letting I dare not,' &c. The reference to Lord Brooke was first given in N. and Q., Series VIII, Vol. ii, p. 18.

2

[Vide ante, p. 403]

Sonnet XCIV [Coelica]

Lines on a King and Emperor-Making-King altered from the 93rd Sonnet of Fulke Greville, the friend of Sir Philip Sydney.

ll. 1-4 The augurs, &c.

l. 5 Abroad they thus did boast each other's wit.

l. 7 Behold yon Corsican with dropsied heart

l. 9 He wonder breeds, makes ignorance to speak

l. 12 Talleyrand will laugh his Creature's praise to scorn.

First published in the Courier, Sept. 12, 1806. See Editor's note, Athenæum, April 25, 1903, p. 531.

3

Of Humane Learning

Stanza CLX

Lord Brooke.

Motto to Notes on a Barrister's Hints on Evangelical Preaching, 1810, in Lit. Rem., 1839, iv. 320.

ll. 2, 3

4

SIR JOHN DAVIES

On the Immortality of the Soul

(Sect. iv. Stanzas 12-14.)

Stanza 12 Doubtless, &c.

l. 2 Bodies to spirit, &c.

l. 4. As we our food, &c.

Stanza 13, l. 1 From their gross matter she abstracts their forms.

Stanza 14

Biog. Lit., Cap. xiv, 1817, II, 12; 1847, II, Cap. i, pp. 14-15. The alteration was first noted in 1847.

5

DONNE

Eclogue. 'On Unworthy Wisdom'

These lines are quoted by Coleridge in The Friend, 1818, i. 192; 1850, i. 147. The first two lines run thus:

The alteration was first pointed out in an edition of The Friend issued by H. N. Coleridge in 1837.

6

Letter To Sir Henry Goodyere

Stanzas II, III, IV, and a few words from Stanza V, are prefixed as the motto to Essay XV of The Friend, 1818, i. 179; 1850, i. 136.

For Stanza II, line 3—

For Stanza III—

The motto reads:

The alteration was first noted in 1837. In 1850 line 3 of Stanza III 'fair' is misprinted 'far'.

7

BEN JONSON

A Nymph's Passion

Underwoods No. V.

Mutual Passion

Altered and Modernized From an Old Poet