1796

SOUTHEY'S "JOAN OF ARC"

21

thro' life, tho' mine will be loss if your lot is to be cast at Bristol or at Nottingham or any where but London. Our loves to Mrs. C. L.

NOTE

[Southey's Joan of Arc, with contributions to Book II. by Coleridge, had been published in quarto by Cottle. Coleridge contributed to Book II. the first 450 lines, with the exception of 141-143, 148-222, 266-272 and 286-291. He subsequently took out his lines and gave them new shape as the poem "The Destiny of Nations," printed in Sibylline Leaves, 1817. All subsequent editions of Southey's poem appeared without Coleridge's portion. The passages on page 26 and page 28 were Southey's. Those at the beginning of the second book were Coleridge's. The simile of the Laplander may be read in "The Destiny of Nations" (lines 63-79). These were the reasons given by Coleridge for monarchs making war:—

When Luxury and Lust's exhausted stores
No more can rouse the appetites of KINGS;
When the low Flattery of their reptile Lords
Falls flat and heavy on the accustomed ear;
When Eunuchs sing, and Fools buffoon'ry make,
And Dancers writhe their harlot limbs in vain :
Then War and all its dread vicissitudes

Pleasingly agitate their stagnant hearts. . . .

The 447th line was Coleridge's. This is the passage:—

Whether thy Law with unrefracted Ray
Beam on the PROPHET's purged Eye, or if

Diseasing Realms the ENTHUSIAST, wild of thought,
Scatter new frenzies on the infected Throng,
THOU, Both inspiring and foredooming, Both
Fit INSTRUMENTS and best of perfect END.

Lines 446-451.

With page 98 we come to Southey again, the remaining references being to him. "Cold is Cadwallo's tongue" is from Gray's Bard; “with all their trumpery" is from Paradise Lost, III., 475. The maid baffles the doctors in Book III.; page 126 is in Book IV.; the personifications are in Book VI.; the converse between Joan and Conrade is in Book IV.; page 313 is at the beginning of Book IX.; and pages 315, 347 and 361 are also in Book IX. Southey in the preface to Joan of Arc, speaking of Homer, says: "Pope has disguised him in fop-finery and Cowper has stripped him naked." 'Crazy Kate" is an episode in The Task ("The Sofa ").

The "Monody on John Henderson," by Joseph Cottle, was printed anonymously in a volume of poems in 1795, and again in The Malvern Hills. John Henderson (1757-1788) was an eccen

tric scholar of Bristol. The lines praised by Lamb are the 4th, 12th and 64th. The poem must not be confused with the Monody on Henderson, the actor, by G. D. Harley. Lamb misquotes the line in "Hamlet": see Act I., Sc. 4, 44, 45. Lamb now turns again to Coleridge's Poems. The poem on the 13th and 14th pages of this little volume was "To the Rev. W. J. H." The 21st Effusion was that entitled "Composed while Climbing the Left Ascent of Brockley Coomb." The 35th Effusion is known as "The Æolian Harp." The letter from Shurton Bars is the poem beginning

Nor travels my meand'ring eye.

The 4th Epistle is that to Joseph Cottle, Coleridge's publisher and the author of the "Monody on Henderson," referred to in Coleridge's verses. The lines which Lamb quotes are Cottle's. The poem by Sara Coleridge is "The Silver Thimble." The passage in the "Religious Musings," for which Lamb is thankful as a "child of fancy," is the last paragraph:

Contemplant Spirits! ye that hover o'er
With untired gaze the immeasurable fount
Ebullient with creative Deity!

And ye of plastic power, that interfused
Roll through the grosser and material mass
In organising surge! Holies of God!
(And what if Monads of the infinite mind?)
I haply journeying my immortal course
Shall sometime join your mystic choir !
Till then

I discipline my young noviciate thought
In ministeries of heart-stirring song,
And aye on Meditation's heaven-ward wing
Soaring aloft I breathe the empyreal air
Of Love, omnific, omnipresent Love,
Whose day-spring rises glorious in my soul
As the great Sun, when he his influence

Sheds on the frost-bound waters-The glad stream
Flows to the ray and warbles as it flows.

"You came to Town . . . "" Soon after his engagement with Sara Fricker, his heart being still not wholly healed of its passion for Mary Evans, Coleridge had gone to London from Bristol, nominally to arrange for the publication of his Fall of Robespierre, and had resumed intercourse with Lamb and other old Christ's Hospital friends. There he remained until Southey forcibly took him back in January, 1795. From what Lamb says of the loss of two friends we must suppose, in default of other information, that he had to give up his Anna at the same time. The loss of reason, however, to which he refers did not come until the end of the year

Which mourning soothes the mourner on his way!

quoted by Coleridge in the preface to his Poems, 1796.

The 19th Effusion, afterwards called "On a Discovery Made Too Late;" the 28th, "The Kiss;" the 29th, "Imitated from Ossian." "How blest with Ye the Path Lines 1 and 2 of Bowles' sonnet "In Memoriam."

"Your monody." This, not to be confounded with Cottle's "Monody on Henderson," was Coleridge's "Monody on Chatterton." Lamb's emendations were not accepted. As regards "The Man of Ross," the couplet beginning "Friend to the friendless" ultimately had a place both in that poem and in the Monody, but the couplet "and o'er the dowried virgin" was never replaced in either. The lines on spring, page 28, are "Lines to a Beautiful Spring." Dr. Forster (Faustus) was the hero of the nursery rhyme, whose scholars danced out of England into France and Spain and back again. The epitaph on an infant was in The Watchman, No. IX. (see note on page 63). The poem "Edmund" is called "Lines on a Friend who died of a frenzy fever induced by calumnious reports." The lines in "Absence" are those in the second stanza of the poem. They run thus :—

Ah fair Delights! that o'er my soul
On Memory's wing, like shadows fly!
Ah Flowers! which Joy from Eden stole
While Innocence stood smiling by!—

But cease, fond Heart! this bootless moan:
Those Hours on rapid Pinions flown
Shall yet return, by ABSENCE crowned,
And scatter livelier roses round.

The 19th Effusion, beginning, "Thou bleedest, my poor heart," is known as "On a Discovery Made Too Late." The 20th Effusion is the sonnet to Schiller. The lines which were sent to Lamb, written in December, 1794, are called "To a Friend, together with an unfinished poem " ("Religious Musings "). Coleridge's "Restless Gale" is the imitation of Össian, beginning, "The stream with languid murmur creeps." "Foodful " occurs thus in the lines

"To an Infant"

Alike the foodful fruit and scorching fire

Awake thy eager grasp and young desire.

Coleridge did not alter the phrase.

Lamb contributed four effusions to this volume of Coleridge's: the 7th, to Mrs. Siddons (written in conjunction with Coleridge),

the 11th, 12th and 13th. All were signed C. L. Coleridge had permitted himself to make various alterations. The following parallel will show the kind of treatment to which Lamb objected :—

In Effusion 12 Lamb had written :—

Or we might sit and tell some tender tale
Of faithful vows repaid by cruel scorn,

A tale of true love, or of friend forgot;
And I would teach thee, lady, how to rail
In gentle sort, on those who practise not
Or Love or pity, though of woman born.

But ah! sweet scenes of fancied bliss, adieu !
On rose-leaf beds amid your faery bowers
I all too long have lost the dreamy hours!
Beseems it now the sterner Muse to woo,
If haply she her golden meed impart
To realize the vision of the heart.

Again in the 13th Effusion, "Written at Midnight, by the Seaside, after a Voyage," Lamb had dotted out the last two lines. Coleridge substituted the couplet :—

How Reason reel'd! What gloomy transports rose!

Till the rude dashings rock'd them to repose.

1796

WILLIAM EVANS

25

"Thinking on divers things foredone." Adapted from Burton's "Author's Abstract of Melancholy," prefixed to the Anatomy :When I go musing all alone,

Thinking of divers things fore-known.

"Ask my friend the aiding verse.”

"To a Friend" (Lamb), line 4:

From Coleridge's lines

I ask not now, my friend! the aiding verse.

“Propino tibi alterandum . . ."-"I pass it on to you for alteration," etc. Probably a modification of Terence (Eun., V., 9, 57), "hunc comedendum et deridendum vobis propino."

Effusion 2, which Lamb would omit, was the sonnet "To Burke;" Effusion 3, "To Mercy" (on Pitt); Effusion 5, "To Erskine;" Effusion 7, Lamb and Coleridge's joint sonnet "To Mrs. Siddons;" and Effusion 8, "To Koskiusko." The "Lines Written in Early Youth" were afterwards called "Lines on an Autumnal Evening." The poem called "Recollection," in The Watchman, was reborn as "Sonnet to the River Otter." The lines on the early blossom were praised by Lamb in a previous letter (see page 8). The 10th Effusion was the sonnet to Earl Stanhope.

Godwin was William Godwin, the philosopher. We shall later see much of him. It was Allen's wife, not Stoddart's, who had a grown-up daughter.

I have not identified the prosodist, but Ned Evans was a novel in four volumes, published in 1796, an imitation of Tom Jones, which presumably Coleridge was reviewing for the Critical Review. A notice, a very short one, appeared in the November number.

Young W. Evans is said by Mr. Dykes Campbell to have been the only son of the Mrs. Evans who befriended Coleridge when he was at Christ's Hospital, the mother of his first love, Mary Evans. Evans was at school with Coleridge and Lamb. We shall meet with him again.

"On life's wide plain, friendless." Oxford, 1786":

From Bowles' sonnet "At

Yet on life's wide plain

Left fatherless, where many a wanderer sighs
Hourly, and oft our road is lone and long.

William Lisle Bowles (1762-1850), the sonneteer, who had exerted so powerful a poetical influence on Coleridge's mind, was at this time rector of Cricklade in Wiltshire (1792-1797), but had been ill at Bath. The elegy in question was "Elegiac Stanzas written during sickness at Bath, December, 1795." The lines quoted by Lamb are respectively in the 6th, 4th, 5th and 19th Stanzas. This was Lamb's sonnet to Innocence :