[324:1] First published in the Morning Post, September 24, 1799: included in Sibylline Leaves, 1817, 1828, 1829, and 1834. There is no evidence as to the date of composition. In a letter to Coleridge, dated July 5, 1796, Lamb writes 'Have a care, good Master Poet, of the Statute de Contumeliâ. What do you mean by calling Madame Mara harlots and naughty things? The goodness of the verse would not save you in a Court of Justice'—but it is by no means certain that Lamb is referring to the Lines Composed in a Concert-Room, or that there is any allusion in line 3 to Madame Mara. If, as J. D. Campbell suggested, the poem as it appeared in the Morning Post is a recast of some earlier verses, it is possible that the scene is Ottery, and that 'Edmund' is the 'Friend who died dead of' a 'Frenzy Fever' (vide ante, p. 76). In this case a probable date would be the summer of 1793. But the poem as a whole suggests a later date. Coleridge and Southey spent some weeks at Exeter in September 1799. They visited Ottery St. Mary, and walked through Newton Abbot to Ashburton and Dartmouth. It is possible that the 'Concert-Room,' the 'pert Captain,' and 'primmer Priest' are reminiscences of Exeter, the 'heath-plant,' and the 'ocean caves' of Dartmoor and Torbay. If so, the 'shame and absolute rout' (l. 49 of variant, p. 325) would refer to the victory of Suwaroff over Joubert at Novi, which took place August 15, 1799. See Letters of S. T. C., 1895, i. 307.

[326:1] First published in the Morning Post, Sept. 27, 1802: reprinted in Essays on His Own Times, 1850, iii. 992. First collected in P. W., 1877-80, ii. 170.

[326:2] Now published for the first time. The lines were sent in a letter to George Coleridge dated September 29, 1799. They were prefaced as follows:—'We were talking of Hexameters with you. I will, for want of something better, fill up the paper with a translation of one of my favourite Psalms into that metre which allowing trochees for spondees, as the nature of our Language demands, you will find pretty accurate a scansion.' Mahomet and, no doubt, the Hymn to the Earth may be assigned to the end of September or the beginning of October, 1799.

[327:1] First published in Friendship's Offering, 1834, pp. 165-7, with other pieces, under the general heading:—Fragments from the Wreck of Memory: or Portions of Poems composed in Early Manhood: by S. T. Coleridge. A Note was prefixed:—'It may not be without use or interest to youthful, and especially to intelligent female readers of poetry, to observe that in the attempt to adapt the Greek metres to the English language, we must begin by substituting quality of sound for quantity—that is, accentuated or comparatively emphasized syllables, for what in the Greek and Latin Verse, are named long, and of which the prosodial mark is ¯; and vice versâ, unaccented syllables for short marked ˘. Now the Hexameter verse consists of two sorts of feet, the spondee composed of two long syllables, and the dactyl, composed of one long syllable followed by two short. The following verse from the Psalms is a rare instance of a perfect hexameter (i. e. line of six feet) in the English language:—

But so few are the truly spondaic words in our language, such as Ēgȳpt, ūprŏar, tūrmoĭl, &c., that we are compelled to substitute, in most instances, the trochee; or ¯ ˘, i. e. in such words as mērry̆, līghtly̆, &c., for the proper spondee. It need only be added, that in the hexameter the fifth foot must be a dactyl, and the sixth a spondee, or trochee. I will end this note with two hexameter lines, likewise from the Psalms:—

S. T. C.'

On some proof-sheets, or loose pages of a copy of The Hymn as published in Friendship's Offering for 1834, which Coleridge annotated, no doubt with a view to his corrections being adopted in the forthcoming edition of his poems (1834), he adds in MS. the following supplementary note:—'To make any considerable number of Hexameters feasible in our monosyllabic trocheeo-iambic language, there must, I fear, be other licenses granted—in the first foot, at least—ex. gr. a superfluous ˘ prefixed in cases of particles such as 'of, 'and', and the like: likewise ¯ ˘ ¯ where the stronger accent is on the first syllable.—S. T. C.'

The Hymn to the Earth is a free translation of F. L. Stolberg's Hymne an die Erde. (See F. Freiligrath's Biographical Memoirs prefixed to the Tauchnitz edition of the Poems published in 1852.) The translation exceeds the German original by two lines. The Hexameters 'from the Psalms' are taken from a metrical experiment which Coleridge sent to his brother George, in a letter dated September 29, 1799 (vide ante). First collected in 1834. The acknowledgement that the Hymn to the Earth is imitated from Stolberg's Hymne an die Erde was first prefixed by J. D. Campbell in 1893.

[329:1] First published in 1834. In an unpublished letter to Southey, dated Sept. 25, 1799, Coleridge writes, 'I shall go on with the Mohammed'. There can be no doubt that these fourteen lines, which represent Coleridge's contribution to a poem on 'Mahomet' which he had planned in conjunction with Southey, were at that time already in existence. For Southey's portion, which numbered 109 lines, see Oliver Newman. By Robert Southey, 1845, pp. 113-15.

[330:1] First published (with four preliminary and three concluding stanzas) as the Introduction to the Tale of the Dark Ladie, in the Morning Post, Dec. 21, 1799 (for complete text with introductory letter vide Appendices): included (as Love) in the Lyrical Ballads of 1800, 1802, 1805: reprinted with the text of the Morning Post in English Minstrelsy, 1810 (ii. 131-9) with the following prefatory note:—'These exquisite stanzas appeared some years ago in a London Newspaper, and have since that time been republished in Mr. Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, but with some alterations; the Poet having apparently relinquished his intention of writing the Fate of the Dark Ladye': included (as Love) in Sibylline Leaves, 1828, 1829, and 1834. The four opening and three concluding stanzas with prefatory note were republished in Literary Remains, 1836, pp. 50-2, and were first collected in 1844. For a facsimile of the MS. of Love as printed in the Lyrical Ballads, 1800 (i. 138-44), see Wordsworth and Coleridge MSS., edited by W. Hale White, 1897 (between pp. 34-5). For a collation of the Introduction to the Tale of the Dark Ladie with two MSS. in the British Museum [Add. MSS., No. 27,902] see Coleridge's Poems. A Facsimile Reproduction, &c. Ed. by James Dykes Campbell, 1899, and Appendices of this edition.

It is probable that the greater part of the Introduction to the Tale of the Dark Ladie was written either during or shortly after a visit which Coleridge paid to the Wordsworths's friends, George and Mary, and Sarah Hutchinson, at Sockburn, a farm-house on the banks of the Tees, in November, 1799. In the first draft, ll. 13-16, 'She leaned, &c.' runs thus:—

In the church at Sockburn there is a recumbent statue of an 'armed knight' (of the Conyers family), and in a field near the farm-house there is a 'Grey-Stone' which is said to commemorate the slaying of a monstrous wyverne or 'worme' by the knight who is buried in the church. It is difficult to believe that the 'arméd knight' and the 'grey stone' of the first draft were not suggested by the statue in Sockburn Church, and the 'Grey-Stone' in the adjoining field. It has been argued that the Ballad of the Dark Ladié, of which only a fragment remains, was written after Coleridge returned from Germany, and that the Introduction to the Tale of the Dark Ladie, which embodies Love, was written at Stowey in 1797 or 1798. But in referring to 'the plan' of the Lyrical Ballads of 1798 (Biog. Lit., 1817, Cap. XIV, ii. 3) Coleridge says that he had written the Ancient Mariner, and was preparing the Dark Ladie and the Christabel (both unpublished poems when this Chapter was written), but says nothing of so typical a poem as Love. By the Dark Ladié he must have meant the unfinished Ballad of the Dark Ladié, which, at one time, numbered 190 lines, not the Introduction to the Tale of the Dark Ladie, which later on he refers to as the 'poem entitled Love' (Biog. Lit., 1817, Cap. XXIV, ii. 298), and which had appeared under that title in the Lyrical Ballads of 1800, 1802, and 1805.

In Sibylline Leaves, 1828, 1829, and 1834, Love, which was the first in order of a group of poems with the sub-title 'Love Poems', was prefaced by the following motto:—

Petrarch.