chapter i

. p. 70, _n._

[225] Mrs. Robinson (“Perdita”) contributed two poems to the _Annual Anthology_ of 1800, “Jasper” and “The Haunted Beach.” The line which caught Coleridge’s fancy, the first of the twelfth stanza, runs thus:--

“Pale Moon! thou Spectre of the Sky.”

_Annual Anthology_, 1800, p. 168.

[226] _St. Leon_ was published in 1799. _William Godwin, his Friends and Contemporaries_, i. 330.

[227] See “Mr. Coleridge’s Report of Mr. Pitt’s Speech in Parliament of February 17, 1800, On the continuance of the War with France.” _Morning Post_, February 18, 1800; _Essays on His Own Times_, ii. 293. See, too, Mrs. H. N. Coleridge’s note, and the report of the speech in _The Times_. _Ibid._ iii. 1009-1019. The original notes, which Coleridge took in pencil, have been preserved in one of his note-books. They consist, for the most part, of skeleton sentences and fragmentary jottings. How far Coleridge may have reconstructed Pitt’s speech as he went along, it is impossible to say, but the speech as reported follows pretty closely the outlines in the note-book. The remarkable description of Buonaparte as the “child and champion of Jacobinism,” which is not to be found in _The Times_ report, appears in the notes as “the nursling and champion of Jacobinism,” and, if these were the words which Pitt used, in this instance, Coleridge altered for the worse.

[228] “The Beguines I had looked upon as a religious establishment, and the only good one of its kind. When my brother was a prisoner at Brest, the sick and wounded were attended by nurses, and these women had made themselves greatly beloved and respected.” Southey to Rickman, January 9, 1800. _Life and Correspondence_, ii. 46. It is well known that Southey advocated the establishment of Protestant orders of Sisters of Mercy.

[229] In a letter from Southey to Coleridge, dated February 15, 1800 (unpublished), he proposes the establishment of a Magazine with signed articles. But a “History of the Levelling Principle,” which Coleridge had suggested as a joint work, he would only publish anonymously.

[230] See Letter from Southey to Coleridge, December 27, 1799. _Life and Correspondence_, ii. 35.

[231] “Concerning the French, I wish Bonaparte had staid in Egypt and that Robespierre had guilloteened Sieyès. These cursed complex governments are good for nothing, and will ever be in the hands of intriguers: the Jacobins were the men, and one house of representatives, lodging the executive in committees, the plain and common system of government. The cause of republicanism is over, and it is now only a struggle for dominion. There wants a Lycurgus after Robespierre, a man loved for his virtue, and bold and inflexible, who should have levelled the property of France, and then would the Republic have been immortal--and the world must have been revolutionized by example.” From an unpublished letter from Southey to Coleridge, dated December 23, 1799.

[232] “Alas, poor human nature! Or rather, indeed, alas, poor Gallic nature! For Γραῖοι ἀεὶ μαῖδες the French are always children, and it is an infirmity of benevolence to wish, or dread, aught concerning them.” S. T. C., _Morning Post_, December 31, 1797; _Essays on His Own Times_, i. 184.

[233] See _Poetical Works_, Appendix K, pp. 544, 545. Editor’s Note, pp. 646-649.

[234]

“The _winter_ Moon upon the sand A silvery Carpet made, And mark’d the sailor reach the land-- And mark’d _his Murderer_ wash his hand Where the green billows played!”

_Annual Anthology_, 1800: “The Haunted Beach,” sixth stanza, p. 256.

[235] These letters, under the title of “Monopolists” and “Farmers,” appeared in the _Morning Post_, October 3-9, 1800. Coleridge wrote the first of the series, and the introduction to No. III. of “Farmers,” “In what manner they are affected by the War” _Essays on His Own Times_, ii. 413-450; _Thomas Poole and his Friends_, ii. 15, 16.

[236] It is impossible to explain this statement, which was repeated in a letter to Josiah Wedgwood, dated November 1, 1800. The printed “Christabel,” even including the conclusion to Part II., makes only 677 lines, and the discarded portion, if it ever existed, has never come to light. See Mr. Dykes Campbell’s valuable and exhaustive note on “Christabel,” _Poetical Works_, pp. 601-607.

[237] A former title of “The Excursion.”

[238] “Sunday night, half past ten, September 14, 1800, a boy born (Bracy).

“September 27, 1800. The child being very ill was baptized by the name of Derwent. The child, hour after hour, made a noise exactly like the creaking of a door which is being shut very slowly to prevent its creaking.” (_MS._) S. T. C.

My father’s life was saved by his mother’s devotion. “On the occasion here recorded,” he writes, “I had eleven convulsion fits. At last my father took my mother gently out of the room, and told her that she must make up her mind to lose this child. By and by she heard the nurse lulling me, and said she would try once more to give me the breast.” She did so; and from that time all went well, and the child recovered.

[239] Afterwards Sir Anthony, the distinguished surgeon, 1768-1840.

[240] According to Dr. Davy, the editor of _Fragmentary Remains of Sir H. Davy_, London, 1858, the reference is to the late Mr. James Thompson of Clitheroe.

[241] William, the elder brother of Raisley Calvert, who left Wordsworth a legacy of nine hundred pounds. In that mysterious poem, “Stanzas written in my Pocket Copy of Thomson’s Castle of Indolence,” it would seem that Wordsworth begins with a blended portrait of himself and Coleridge, and ends with a blended portrait of Coleridge and William Calvert. Mrs. Joshua Stanger (Mary Calvert) maintained that “the large gray eyes” and “low-hung lip” were certainly descriptive of Coleridge and could not apply to her father; but she admitted that, in other parts of the poem, Wordsworth may have had her father in his mind. Of this we may be sure, that neither Coleridge nor Wordsworth had “inventions rare,” or displayed beetles under a microscope. It is evident that Hartley Coleridge, who said “that his father’s character and habits are here [that is, in these stanzas] preserved in a livelier way than in anything that has been written about him,” regarded the first and not the second half of the poem as a description of S. T. C. “The Last of the Calverts,” _Cornhill Magazine_, May, 1890, pp. 494-520.

[242] On page 210 of vol. ii. of the second edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_ (1800), there is a blank space. The omitted passage, fifteen lines in all, began with the words, “Though nought was left undone.” _Works of Wordsworth_, p. 134, II. 4-18.

[243] During the preceding month Coleridge had busied himself with instituting a comparison between the philosophical systems of Locke and Descartes. Three letters of prodigious length, dated February 18, 24 (a double letter), and addressed to Josiah Wedgwood, embodied the result of his studies. They would serve, he thought, as a preliminary excursus to a larger work, and would convince the Wedgwoods that his _wanderjahr_ had not been altogether misspent. Mr. Leslie Stephen, to whom this correspondence has been submitted, is good enough to allow me to print the following extract from a letter which he wrote at my request: “Coleridge writes as though he had as yet read no German philosophy. I knew that he began a serious study of Kant at Keswick; but I fancied that he had brought back some knowledge of Kant from Germany. This letter seems to prove the contrary. There is certainly none of the transcendentalism of the Schelling kind. One point is, that he still sticks to Hartley and to the Association doctrine, which he afterwards denounced so frequently. Thus he is dissatisfied with Locke, but has not broken with the philosophy generally supposed to be on the Locke line. In short, he seems to be at the point where a study of Kant would be ready to launch him in his later direction, but is not at all conscious of the change. When he wrote the _Friend_ [1809-10] he had become a Kantian. Therefore we must, I think, date his conversion later than I should have supposed, and assume that it was the study of Kant just after this letter was written which brought about the change.”

[244] Nothing is known of these lines beyond the fact that in 1816 Coleridge printed them as “Conclusion to Part II.” of “Christabel.” It is possible that they were intended to form part of a distinct poem in the metre of “Christabel,” or, it may be, they are the sole survival of an attempted third part of the ballad itself. It is plain, however, that the picture is from the life, that “the little child, the limber elf,” is the four-year-old Hartley, hardly as yet “fitting to unutterable thought, The breeze-like motion, and the self-born carol.”

[245] George Hutchinson, the fourth son of John Hutchinson of Penrith, was at this time in occupation of land at Bishop’s Middleham, the original home of the family. He migrated into Radnorshire in 1815, being then about the age of thirty-seven; but between that date and his leaving Bishop’s Middleham he had resided for some time in Lincolnshire, at Scrivelsby, where he was engaged probably as agent on the estate of the “Champion.” His first residence after migration was at New Radnor, where he married Margaret Roberts of Curnellan, but he subsequently removed into Herefordshire, where he resided in many places, latterly at Kingston. He died at his son’s house, The Vinery, Hereford, in 1866. It would seem from a letter dated July 25, 1801 (Letter CXX.), that at this time Sarah Hutchinson kept house for her brother George, and that Mary (Mrs. Wordsworth) and Joanna Hutchinson lived with their elder brother Tom at Gallow Hill, in the parish of Brompton, near Scarborough. The register of Brompton Church records the marriage of William Wordsworth and Mary Hutchinson, on October 4, 1802; but in the notices of marriages in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_, of October, 1802, the latter is described as “Miss Mary Hutchinson of Wykeham,” an adjoining parish.

[From information kindly supplied to me by Mr. John Hutchinson, the keeper of the Library of the Middle Temple.]

[246] The historian William Roscoe (afterwards M. P. for Liverpool), and the physician James Currie, the editor and biographer of Burns, were at this time settled at Liverpool and on terms of intimacy with Dr. Peter Crompton of Eaton Hall.

[247] The Bristol merchant who lent the manor-house of Racedown to Wordsworth in 1795.

[248] In the well-known lines “On revisiting the Sea-shore,” allusion is made to this “mild physician,” who vainly dissuaded him from bathing in the open sea. Sea-bathing was at all times an irresistible pleasure to Coleridge, and he continued the practice, greatly to his benefit, down to a late period of his life and long after he had become a confirmed invalid. _Poetical Works_, p. 159.

[249] Francis Wrangham, whom Coleridge once described as “admirer of me and a pitier of my political principles” (Letter to Cottle [April], 1796), was his senior by a few years. On failing to obtain, it is said on account of his advanced political views, a fellowship at Trinity Hall, he started taking pupils at Cobham in Surrey in partnership with Basil Montagu. The scheme was of short duration, for Montagu deserted tuition for the bar, and Wrangham, early in life, was preferred to the benefices of Hemmanby and Folkton, in the neighborhood of Scarborough. He was afterwards appointed to a Canonry of York, to the Archdeaconry of Cleveland, and finally to a prebendal stall at Chester. He published a volume of _Poems_ (London, 1795), in which are included Coleridge’s Translation of the “Hendecasyllabli ad Bruntonam e Grantâ exituram,” and some “Verses to Miss Brunton with the preceding Translation.” He died in 1842. _Poetical Works_, p. 30. See, too, Editor’s Note, p. 569; _Reminiscences of Cambridge_, by Henry Gunning, London, 1855, ii. 12 _seq._

[250] “I took a first floor for him in King Street, Covent Garden, at my tailor’s, Howell’s, whose wife is a cheerful housewife of middle age, who I knew would nurse Coleridge as kindly as if he were her son.” D. Stuart, _Gent. Mag._, May, 1838. See, too, _Letters from the Lake Poets_, p. 7.

[251] Captain Luff, for many years a resident at Patterdale, near Ulleswater, was held in esteem for the energy with which he procured the enrolment of large companies of volunteers. Wordsworth and Coleridge were frequent visitors at his house, For his account of the death of Charles Gough, on Helvellyn, and the fidelity of the famous spaniel, see _Coleorton Letters_, i. 97. _Letters from the Lake Poets_, p. 131.

[252] _Ciceronis Epist. ad Fam._ iv. 10.

[253] _Ib._ i. 2.

[254] The lines are taken, with some alterations, from a kind of _l’envoy_ or epilogue which Bruno affixed to his long philosophical poem, _Jordani Bruni Nolani de Innumerabilibus Immenso et Infigurabili; seu de Universo et Mundis libri octo_. Francofurti, 1591, p. 654.

[255] John Hamilton Mortimer, 1741-1779. He painted _King John granting Magna Charta_, the _Battle of Agincourt_, the _Conversion of the Britons_, and other historical subjects.

[256] Drayton’s _Poly-Olbion_, Song 22, 1-17.

[257] The Latin Iambics, in which Dean Ogle celebrated the little Blyth, which ran through his father’s park at Kirkley, near Ponteland, deserve the highest praise; but Bowles’s translation is far from being execrable. He may not have caught the peculiar tones of the Northumbrian burn which awoke the memories of the scholarly Dean, but his irregular lines are not without their own pathos and melody. Bowles was a Winchester boy, and Dr. Newton Ogle, then Dean of Winchester, was one of his earliest patrons. It was from the Dean’s son, his old schoolfellow, Lieutenant Ogle, that he claimed to have gathered the particulars of Coleridge’s discovery at Reading and discharge from the army. “Poems of William Lisle Bowles,” _Galignani_, 1829, p. 131; “The Late Mr. Coleridge a Common Soldier,” _Times_, August 13, 1834.

[258] One of a series of falls made by the Dash Beck, which divides the parishes of Caldbeck and Skiddaw Forest, and flows into Bassenthwaite Lake.

The following minute description is from an entry in a note-book dated October 10, 1800:--

“The Dash itself is by no means equal to the Churnmilk (_sic_) at Eastdale (_sic_) or the Wytheburn Fall. This I wrote standing under and seeing the whole Dash; but when I went over and descended to the bottom, then I only _saw_ the real _Fall_ and the curve of the steep slope, and retracted. It is, indeed, so seen, a fine thing. It falls parallel with a fine black rock thirty feet, and is more shattered, more completely atomized and white, than any I have ever seen.... The Fall of the Dash is in a horse-shoe basin of its own, wildly peopled with small ashes standing out of the rocks. Crossed the beck close by the white pool, and stood on the other side in a complete spray-_rain_. Here it assumes, I think, a still finer appearance. You see the vast rugged net and angular points and upright cones of the black rock; the Fall assumes a variety and complexity, parts rushing in wheels, other parts perpendicular, some in white horse-tails, while towards the right edge of the black [rock] two or three leisurely fillets have escaped out of the turmoil.”

[259] I have been unable to discover any trace of the MS. of this translation.

[260] The “Ode to Dejection,” of which this is the earliest version, was composed on Sunday evening, April 4, and published six months later, in the _Morning Post_ of October 4, 1802. It was reprinted in the _Sibylline Leaves_, 1817. A comparison of the Ode, as sent to Sotheby, with the first printed version (_Poetical Works_, Appendix G, pp. 522-524) shows that it underwent many changes before it was permitted to see the “light of common day” in the columns of the _Morning Post_. The Ode was begun some three weeks after Coleridge returned to Keswick, after an absence of four months. He had visited Southey in London, he had been a fellow guest with Tom Wedgwood for a month at Stowey, he had returned to London and attended Davy’s lectures at the Royal Institution, and on his way home he had stayed for a fortnight with his friend T. Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s brother-in-law, at Gallow Hill.

He left Gallow Hill “on March 13 in a violent storm of snow, wind, and rain,” and must have reached Keswick on Sunday the 14th or Monday the 15th of March. On the following Friday he walked over to Dove Cottage, and once more found himself in the presence of his friends, and, once again, their presence and companionship drove him into song. The Ode is at once a confession and a contrast, a confession that he had fled from the conflict with his soul into the fastnesses of metaphysics, and a contrast of his own hopelessness with the glad assurance of inward peace and outward happiness which attended the pure and manly spirit of his friend.

But verse was what he had been wedded to, And his own mind did like a tempest strong Come thus to him, and drove the weary wight along.

A MS. note-book of 1801-2, which has helped to date his movements at the time, contains, among other hints and jottings, the following almost illegible fragment: “The larches in spring push out their separate bundles of ... into green brushes or pencils which ... small tassels;”--and with the note may be compared the following lines included in the version contained in the letter, but afterwards omitted:--

In this heartless mood, To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo’d, _That pipes within the larch-tree, not unseen The larch that pushes out in tassels green Its bundled leafits--woo’d to mild delights, By all the tender sounds and gentle sights Of this sweet primrose-month, and vainly woo’d!_ O dearest Poet, in this heartless mood--

Another jotting in the same note-book: “A Poem on the endeavour to emancipate the mind from day-dreams, with the different attempts and the vain ones,” perhaps found expression in the lines which follow “My shaping spirit of Imagination,” which appeared for the first time in print in _Sibylline Leaves_, 1817, but which, as Mr. Dykes Campbell has rightly divined, belonged to the original draft of the Ode. _Poetical Works_, p. 159. Appendix G, pp. 522-524. Editor’s Note, pp. 626-628.

[261] “A lovely skye-canoe.” _Morning Post._ The reference is to the Prologue to “Peter Bell.” Compare stanza 22,

“My little vagrant Form of light, My gay and beautiful Canoe.”

Wordsworth’s _Poetical Works_, p. 100.

[262] For Southey’s reply, dated Bristol, August 4, 1802, see _Life and Correspondence_, ii. 189-192.

[263] The Right Hon. Isaac Corry, Chancellor of the Exchequer for Ireland, to whom Southey acted as secretary for a short time.

[264] “On Sunday, August 1st, ½ after 12, I had a shirt, cravat, 2 pairs of stockings, a little paper, and half dozen pens, a German book (Voss’s Poems), and a little tea and sugar, with my night cap, packed up in my natty green oil-skin, neatly squared, and put into my net knapsack, and the knapsack on my back and the besom stick in my hand, which for want of a better, and in spite of Mrs. C. and Mary, who both raised their voices against it, especially as I left the besom scattered on the kitchen floor, off I sallied over the bridge, through the hop-field, through the Prospect Bridge, at Portinscale, so on by the tall birch that grows out of the centre of the huge oak, along into Newlands.” MS. Journal of tour in the Lake District, August 1-9, 1802, sent in the form of a letter to the Wordsworths and transcribed by Miss Sarah Hutchinson.

[265] “The following month, September (1802), was marked by the birth of his first child, a daughter, named after her paternal grandmother, Margaret.” _Southey’s Life and Correspondence_, ii. 192.

[266] Southey’s reply, which was not in the affirmative, has not been preserved. The joint-residence at Greta Hall began in September, 1803.

[267] Charles and Mary Lamb’s visit to Greta Hall, which lasted three full weeks, must have extended from (about) August 12 to September 2, 1802. _Letters of Charles Lamb_, i. 180-184.

[268]

“_Here melancholy, on the pale crags laid, Might muse herself to sleep_; or Fancy come, Watching the mind with tender cozenage And shaping things that are not.”

“Coombe-Ellen, written in Radnorshire, September, 1798.” “Poems of William Lisle Bowles,” _Galignani_, p. 139. For “Melancholy, a Fragment,” see _Poetical Works_, p. 34.

[269] I have not been able to verify this reference.

[270] “O my God! what enormous mountains there are close by me, and yet below the hill I stand on.... And here I am, _lounded_ [i. e., sheltered],--so fully lounded,--that though the wind is strong and the clouds are hastening hither from the sea, and the whole air seaward has a lurid look, and we shall certainly have thunder,--yet here (but that I am hungered and provisionless), _here_ I could be warm and wait, methinks, for to-morrow’s sun--and on a nice stone table am I now at this moment writing to you--between 2 and 3 o’clock, as I guess. Surely the first letter ever written from the top of Sca Fell.”

“After the thunder-storm I shouted out all your names in the sheep-fold--where echo came upon echo, and then Hartley and Derwent, and then I laughed and shouted Joanna. It leaves all the echoes I ever heard far, far behind, in number, distinctness and humanness of voice; and then, not to forget an old friend, I made them all say Dr. Dodd etc.” _MS. Journal_, August 6, 1802. Compare Lamb’s Latin letter of October 9, 1802:--

“Ista tua Carmina Chamouniana satis grandia esse mihi constat; sed hoc mihi nonnihil displicet, quod in iis illæ montium Grisosonum inter se responsiones totidem reboant anglicé, _God, God_, haud aliter atque temet audivi tuas [sic] montes Cumbrianas [sic] resonare docentes, _Tod, Tod_, nempe Doctorem infelicem: vocem certe haud Deum sonantem.” _Letters of Charles Lamb_, i. 185. See, too, Canon Ainger’s translation and note, _ibid._ p. 331. See, also, Southey’s Letter to Grosvenor Bedford, January 9, 1804. _Life and Correspondence_, ii. 248.

[271] “The Spirit of Navigation and Discovery.” “Bowles’s Poetical Works,” _Galignani_, p. 142.

[272] These lines form part of the poem addressed “To Matilda Betham. From a Stranger.” The date of composition was September 9, 1802, the day before they were quoted in the letter to Sotheby. _Poetical Works_, p. 168.

[273] The “Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni” was first printed in the _Morning Post_, September 11, 1802. It was reprinted in the original issue of _The Friend_, No. xi. (October 16, 1809, pp. 174-176), and again in _Sibylline Leaves_, 1817. As De Quincey was the first to point out, Coleridge was indebted to the Swiss poetess, Frederica Brun, for the framework of the poem and for many admirable lines and images, but it was his solitary walk on Scafell, and the consequent uplifting of spirit, which enabled him “to create the dry bones of the German outline into the fulness of life.”

Coleridge will never lose his title of a _Lake Poet_, but of the ten years during which he was nominally resident in the Lake District, he was absent at least half the time. Of his greater poems there are but four, the second part of “Christabel,” the “Dejection: an Ode,” the “Picture,” and the “Hymn before Sunrise,” which take their colouring from the scenery of Westmoreland and Cumberland.

He was but twenty-six when he visited Ottery for the last time. It was in his thirty-fifth year that he bade farewell to Stowey and the Quantocks, and after he was turned forty he never saw Grasmere or Keswick again. Ill health and the _res angusta domi_ are stern gaolers, but, if he had been so minded, he would have found a way to revisit the pleasant places in which he had passed his youth and early manhood. In truth, he was well content to be a dweller in “the depths of the huge city” or its outskirts, and like Lamb, he “could not _live_ in Skiddaw.” _Poetical Works_, p. 165, and Editor’s Note, pp. 629, 630.

[274] Coleridge must have presumed on the ignorance of Sotheby and of his friends generally. He could hardly have passed out of Boyer’s hands without having learned that Ἔστησε signifies, “He hath placed,” not “He hath stood.” But, like most people who have changed their opinions, he took an especial pride in proclaiming his unswerving allegiance to fixed principles. The initials S. T. C., Grecised and mistranslated, expressed this pleasing delusion, and the Greek, “Punic [sc. punnic] Greek,” as he elsewhere calls it, might run the risk of detection.

[275] Parts III. and IV. of the “Three Graves”--were first published in _The Friend_, No. vi. Sept. 21, 1809. Parts I. and II. were published for the first time in _The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge_, Macmillan, 1893. The final version of this stanza (ll. 509-513) differs from that in the text. “A small blue sun” became “A tiny sun,” and for “Ten thousand hairs of colour’d light” Coleridge substituted “Ten thousand hairs and threads of light.” See _Poetical Works_, p. 92, and Editor’s Note, pp. 589-591.

[276] The six essays to which he calls Estlin’s attention are reprinted in _Essays on His Own Times_, ii. 478-585.

[277] The residence of Josiah Wedgwood.

[278] Paley’s last work, “_Natural Theology_; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of A Deity, collected from the Appearances of Nature,” was published in 1802.

[279] For Southey’s well known rejoinder to this “ebullience of schematism,” see _Life and Correspondence_, ii. 220-223.

[280] Southey’s correspondence contains numerous references to the historian Sharon Turner [1768-1847], and to William Owen, the translator of the _Mabinogion_ and author of the _Welsh Paradise Lost_.

[281] It may be interesting to compare the following unpublished note from Coleridge’s Scotch Journal with the well known passage in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal of her tour in the Highlands (_Memoir of Wordsworth_, i. 235): “Next morning we went in the boat to the end of the lake, and so on by the old path to the Garrison to the Ferry House by Loch Lomond, where now the Fall was in all its fury, and formed with the Ferry cottage, and the sweet Highland lass, a nice picture. The boat gone to the preaching we stayed all day in the comfortless hovel, comfortless, but the two little lassies did everything with such sweetness, and one of them, 14, with such native elegance. Oh! she was a divine creature! The sight of the boat, full of Highland men and women and children from the preaching, exquisitely fine. We soon reached E. Tarbet--all the while rain. Never, never let me forget that small herd-boy in his tartan-plaid, dim-seen on the hilly field, and long heard ere seen, a melancholy voice calling to his cattle! nor the beautiful harmony of the heath, and the dancing fern, and the ever-moving birches. That of itself enough to make Scotland visitable, its fields of heather giving a sort of shot silk finery in the apotheosis of finery. On Monday we went to Arrochar. Here I left W. and D. and returned myself to E. Tarbet, slept there, and now, Tuesday, Aug. 30, 1803, am to make my own way to Edinburgh.”

Many years after he added the words: “O Esteese, that thou hadst from thy 22nd year indeed made thy _own_ way and _alone_!”

[282]

A sweet and playful Highland girl, As light and beauteous as a squirrel, As beauteous and as wild!

Her dwelling was a lonely house, A cottage in a heathy dell; And she put on her gown of green And left her mother at sixteen, And followed Peter Bell. _Peter Bell, Part III._

[283] Margaret Southey, who was born in September, 1802, died in the latter part of August, 1803.

[284] The “Pains of Sleep” was published for the first time, together with “Christabel” and “Kubla Khan,” in 1816. With the exception of the insertion of the remarkable lines 52-54, the first draft of the poem does not materially differ from the published version. A transcript of the same poem was sent to Poole in a letter dated October 3, 1803. _Poetical Works_, p. 170, and Editor’s Note, pp. 631, 632.

[285] The Rev. Peter Elmsley, the well known scholar, who had been a school and college friend of Southey’s, was at this time resident at Edinburgh. The _Edinburgh Review_ had been founded the year before, and Elmsley was among the earliest contributors. His name frequently recurs in Southey’s correspondence.

[286] Compare Southey’s first impressions of Edinburgh, contained in a letter to Wynn, dated October 20, 1805: “You cross a valley (once a loch) by a high bridge, and the back of the old city appears on the edge of this depth--so vast, so irregular--with such an outline of roofs and chimneys, that it looks like the ruins of a giant’s palace. I never saw anything so impressive as the first sight of this; there was a wild red sunset slanting along it.” _Selections from the Letters of R. Southey_, i. 342.

[287] Compare _Table Talk_, for September 26, 1830, where a similar statement is made in almost the same words.

[288] The same sentence occurs in a letter to Sir G. Beaumont, dated September 22, 1803. _Coleorton Letters_, i. 6.

[289] The MS. of this letter was given to my father by the Rev. Dr. Wreford. I know nothing of the person to whom it was addressed, except that he was “Matthew Coates, Esq., of Bristol.”

[290] Dr. Joseph Adams, the biographer of Hunter, who in 1816 recommended Coleridge to the care of Mr. James Gillman.