(6) "Ode to the Rain" (?); (7) "Dejection: an Ode;" (8) "Answer to a Child's Question; " (9) "A Day-dream." He had written in 1800 "The Stranger Minstrel " and "The Mad Monk;" and in 1801 he wrote and published in the 'Morning Post' his "Ode to Tranquillity" and "Lines on Revisiting the Sea Shore ;" and, last of all, "The Pains of Sleep," which was written at Edinburgh in 1803, but not published till 1816. These, with the exception of the undated lines, "The Knight's Grave," "A Thought suggested by a View of Saddleback," "The Tombless Epitaph," and most probably that late-gleaned treasure, the ballad of "Alice du Clos," were all the poems which were written in the Lake District between the years 1800-1804. The exquisite trio or lyrical trilogy, "Recollection of Love," "The Happy Husband," and "A Day-dream," I associate, rightly or wrongly, with Stowey revisited; while the "Lines to a Gentleman," i. e. Wordsworth-that pathetic poem with an unpathetic or antipathetic title, were written when he was staying with the Wordsworths in a farmhouse not a stone's throw from Sir George Beaumont's then unfinished mansion at Coleorton. Be not dismayed; I can only say a few words on one or two of this loose-strung chaplet of jewels which "wildly glitter here and there.' Contemporary with "Christabel," there or thereabouts, was "The Keepsake." It opens thus: "The tedded hay, the firstfruits of the soil, VOL. XXIV. 9 In "The Picture, or the Lover's Resolution," which "And hark! the noise of a near waterfall,— The opening lines of this poem, "Through weeds and thorns and matted underwood I force my way,' etc., may be cited in corroboration of Hazlitt's observation that the "numbers came" to Coleridge when his "path was rough," when he was "walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse;" or they may be regarded as the germ of the reminiscence. Characteristic anecdotes are dear to the heart of the biographer and the essayist, but they should be taken with two pinches of quali fying salt, a pinch of "perhaps" and a pinch of "sometimes." " in I must pass over two exquisite fragments, "The Knight's Grave," dear to Sir Walter Scott, and "Lines suggested by a View of Saddleback" (" On stern Blencartha's perilous height "), which were, I conceive, sparks from the anvil on which Part II of "Christabel" was forged; and proceed to two other poems of the first magnitude written at Keswick, "Dejection: an Ode" (April, 1802), and "The Hymn before Sunrise" (August, 1802). Of the first and greatest I will say little. The imagery is of the valley and the home. "The larch that pushes out in tassels green its bundled leafits" (I quote from an early draft), the "peculiar tint of yellow green the western sky, the wild storm, the "mad Lutanist who in this month of showers, Of dark brown gardens and of peeping flowers, Mak'st Devil's yule," fix and present the season, but are not characteristic of the place. We know, but could hardly guess, that the poem was written at Greta Hall. On the other hand, "The Hymn before Sunrise," which purported to have been composed at Chamouni, derived not, indeed, its form, or even the whole of its substance, but its passion and its power, from the enthusiasm or possession, the spiritual excitement aroused by a solitary walk on Scafell. It is, as De Quincey was the first to point out, an expansion-here and there a translation-of a striking and admirable poem by Friederike Brun. Coleridge sent it, together with a fictitious preface, to the 'Morning Post' in 1802, and afterwards included it by way of, or for want of, copy in "The Friend' in 1809, and, finally, in 1817 published it Sheds its loose purple bells, or on the gust, The place is surely an upland valley or mountainbottom. The belated hay-crop-" tedded" (a Miltonic word which Coleridge had already made his own), tedded, spread out in thin discoloured swaths— would strike a Southerner, to whom hay in October was strange enough; while the foxglove, which blooms late in the North, and the rose-bush with its scarlet haws, are familiar sights by "rivulet or spring or wet roadside." This is the late autumn of the North, "more beautiful" with lingering fruits and foliage, exuberant in comparison with the drouthy and discoloured aftergrowth of a Southern summer. To the autumn of 1800 belong, too, "The Stranger Minstrel" and "The Mad Monk," poems written to and for the poetess Mary Robinson, that "boasted beauty of past years," the onceenchanting Perdita, now sick and dying. We know her face, for Reynolds and Gainsborough and Romney painted her (are not the "counterfeit presentments" in the Hertford Gallery ?), and of her poor pitiful story we know more than enough. She had been telling Coleridge she would dearly love to look once more on Skiddaw, and he rejoins : "Thou ancient Skiddaw, by thy helm of cloud, Those sunny islands on thy smooth green height,- I would, I would that she were here." Here, perhaps, in the "shadows that for ever sleep," is a comment on, if not an anticipation of, Wordsworth's august image "the sleep that is among the lonely hills;" and here, per accidens, is an unconscious prophecy of "those sunny islets of the blest and the intelligible," which Carlyle allowed were now and again distinguishable and distinct. amid the iridescent mists of Coleridge's transcendental monologue. "The Mad Monk" need not detain us save for one remarkable stanza which seems to have rested on Wordsworth's poetic consciousness-and to have given the key-note of his great harmony,-The Ode to Immortality. "There was a time when earth, and sea, and skies, The bright green vale and forest's dark recess, With all things lay before mine eyes In steady loveliness. But now," etc.* Here, surely, is the germ of "There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparell'd in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now," etc. * There is, too, so I am informed by my friend Mr. T. Hutchinson, a remarkable conformity of the metrical scheme of "The Mad Monk' to the metrical scheme of Wordsworth's lines, ""Tis said that some have died for love," which was written in 1800-a proof how carefully "Coleridge studied Wordsworth's metrical methods, sometimes adopting, sometimes varying, and sometimes improving upon them." |