[319:1] First published in the Morning Post, September 6, 1799: included in 1828, 1829, and 1834. It is printed separately as the Devil's Walk, a Poem, By Professor Porson, London, Marsh and Miller, &c., 1830. In 1827, by way of repudiating Porson's alleged authorship of The Devil's Thoughts, Southey expanded the Devil's Thoughts of 1799 into a poem of fifty-seven stanzas entitled The Devil's Walk. See P. W., 1838, iii. pp. 87-100. In the Morning Post the poem numbered fourteen stanzas; in 1828, 1829 it is reduced to ten, and in 1834 enlarged to seventeen stanzas. Stanzas iii and xiv-xvi of the text are not in the M. P. Stanzas iv and v appeared as iii, iv; stanza vi as ix; stanza vii as v; stanza viii as x; stanza ix as viii; stanza x as vi; stanza xi as vii; stanza xvii as xiv. In 1828, 1829, the poem consists of stanzas i-ix of the text, and of the concluding stanzas stanza xi ('Old Nicholas', &c.) of the M. P. version was not reprinted. Stanzas xiv-xvi of the text were first acknowledged by Coleridge in 1834.

[320:1] And I looked, and behold a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death, Rev. vi. 8. M. P.

[321:1] This anecdote is related by that most interesting of the Devil's Biographers, Mr. John Milton, in his Paradise Lost, and we have here the Devil's own testimony to the truth and accuracy of it. M. P.

The allegory here is so apt, that in a catalogue of various readings obtained from collating the MSS. one might expect to find it noted, that for 'Life' Cod. quid. habent, 'Trade.' Though indeed the trade, i. e. the bibliopolic, so called κατ' ἐξοχήν, may be regarded as Life sensu eminentiori; a suggestion, which I owe to a young retailer in the hosiery line, who on hearing a description of the net profits, dinner parties, country houses, etc., of the trade, exclaimed, 'Ay! that's what I call Life now!'—This 'Life, our Death,' is thus happily contrasted with the fruits of Authorship.—Sic nos non nobis mellificamus Apes.

Of this poem, which with the 'Fire, Famine, and Slaughter' first appeared in the Morning Post [6th Sept. 1799], the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 9th, and 16th stanzas[321:A] were dictated by Mr. Southey. See Apologetic Preface [to Fire, Famine and Slaughter]. [Between the ninth and the concluding stanza, two or three are omitted, as grounded on subjects which have lost their interest—and for better reasons. 1828, 1829.]

If any one should ask who General —— meant, the Author begs leave to inform him, that he did once see a red-faced person in a dream whom by the dress he took for a General; but he might have been mistaken, and most certainly he did not hear any names mentioned. In simple verity, the author never meant any one, or indeed any thing but to put a concluding stanza to his doggerel.

[323:1] In a MS. copy in the B. M. and in some pirated versions the blank is filled up by the word 'Gascoigne's'; but in a MS. copy taken at Highgate, in June, 1820, by Derwent Coleridge the line runs 'General Tarleton's', &c.

[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.