roses suffuse his blushes meek!" very beautiful. The Pixies is a perfect thing, and so are the lines on the spring, page 28. The Epitaph on an Infant, like a Jack of lanthorn, has danced about (or like Dr. Forster's scholars) out of the Morn Chron into the Watchman, and thence back into your Collection. It is very pretty, and you seem to think so, but, may be o'er looked its chief merit, that of filling up a whole page. I had once deemd Sonnets of unrivalled use that way, but your epitaphs, I find, are the more diffuse. Edmund still holds its place among your best verses. "Ah! fair delights" to round" in your Poem called Absence recall (none more forcibly) to my mind the tones in which you recited it. I will not notice in this tedious (to you) manner verses which have been so long delightful to me, and which you already know my opinion of. Of this kind are Bowles, Priestly, and that most exquisite and most Bowles-like of all, the 19th Effusion. It would have better ended with " agony of care." The last 2 lines are obvious and unnecessary and you need not now make 14 lines of it, now it is rechristend from a Sonnet to an Effusion. Schiller might have written the 20 Effusion. "Tis worthy of him in any sense. I was glad to meet with those lines you sent me, when my Sister was so ill. I had lost the Copy, and I felt not a little proud at seeing my name in your verse. The complaint of Ninathoma (1st stanza in particular) is the best, or only good imitation, of Ossian I ever saw-your restless gale excepted. "To an infant" is most sweet-is not "foodful," tho', very harsh! would not "dulcet" fruit be less harsh, or some other friendly bi-syllable ? In Edmund, "Frenzy fierce-eyed child," is not so well as frantic-tho' that is an epithet adding nothing to the meaning. Slander couching was better than squatting. In the Man of Ross it was a better line thus "If 'neath this roof thy wine-chear'd moments pass" than as it stands now. Time nor nothing can reconcile me to the concluding 5 lines of Kosciusko call it any thing you will but sublime. In my 12th Effusion I had rather have seen what I wrote myself, tho' they bear no comparison with your exquisite lines "On rose-leaf'd beds amid your faery bowers," &c.-I love my sonnets because they are the reflected images of my own feelings at different times. To instance, in the 13th "How reason reel'd," &c.-are good lines but must spoil the whole with ME who know it is only a fiction of yours and that the rude dashings did in fact NOT ROCK me to REPOSE. I grant the same objection applies not to the former sonnet, but still I love my own feelings. They are dear to memory, tho' they now and then wake a sigh or a tear. "Thinking on divers things foredone," I charge you, Col., spare my ewe lambs, and tho' a Gentleman may borrow six lines in an epic poem (I should have no objection to borrow 500 and without acknowledging) still in a Sonnet-a per 1796 "SPARE MY EWE LAMBS" 19 sonal poem-I do not "ask my friend the aiding verse." I would not wrong your feelings by proposing any improvements (did I think myself capable of suggesting 'em) in such personal poems as "Thou bleedest my poor heart"-'od so, I am catchd, I have already done it--but that simile I propose abridging would not change the feeling or introduce any alien ones. Do you understand me? In the 28th however, and in the "Sigh" and that composed at Clevedon, things that come from the heart direct, not by the medium of the fancy, I would not suggest an alteration. When my blank verse is finished, or any long fancy poems, "propino tibi alterandum, cut-up-andum, abridg-andum," just what you will with it--but spare my EWE LAMBS! That to Mrs. Siddons now you were welcome to improve, if it had been worth it. But I say unto you again, Col., spare my EWE LAMBS. I must confess were they mine I should omit, in Editione secundâ, Effusions 2-3, because satiric, and below the dignity of the poet of Religious Musings, 5-7, half of the 8th, that written in early Youth, as far as "Thousand eyes," tho' I part not unreluctantly with that lively line "Chaste Joyance dancing in her bright-blue eyes and one or 2 more just thereabouts. But I would substitute for it that sweet poem called "Recollection" in the 5th No. of the Watchman, better I think than the remainder of this poem, tho' not differing materially. As the poem now stands it looks altogether confused. And do not omit those lines upon the "early blossom," in your 6th No. of the Watchman, and I would omit the 10th Effusion-or what would do better, alter and improve the last 4 lines. In fact, I suppose if they were mine I should not omit 'em. But your verse is for the most part so exquisite, that I like not to see aught of meaner matter mixed with it. Forgive my petulance and often, I fear, ill founded criticisms, and forgive me that I have, by this time, made your eyes and head ach with my long letter. But I cannot forego hastily the pleasure and pride of thus conversing with you. You did not tell me whether I was to include the Conciones ad Populum in my remarks on your poems. They are not unfrequently sublime, and I think you could not do better than to turn 'em into verse, if you have nothing else to do. Allen I am sorry to say is a confirmed Atheist. Stodart, or Stothard, a cold hearted well bred conceited disciple of Godwin, does him no good. His wife has several daughters (one of 'em as old as himself). Surely there is something unnatural in such a marriage. How I sympathise with you on the dull duty of a reviewer, and heartily damn with you Ned Evans and the Prosodist. I shall however wait impatiently for the articles in the Crit. Rev., next month, because they are yours. Young Evans (W. Evans, a branch of a family you were once so intimate with) is come into our office, and sends his love to you. Coleridge, I devoutly wish that Fortune, who has made sport with you so long, may play one freak more, throw you into London, or some spot near it, and there snug-ify you for life. "Tis a selfish but natural wish for me, cast as I am " on life's wide plain, friend-less." Are you acquainted with Bowles? I see, by his last Elegy (written at Bath), you are near neighbours. "And I can think I can see the groves again-was it the voice of theeTwas not the voice of thee, my buried friend-who dries with her dark locks the tender tear". -are touches as true to nature as any in his other Elegy, written at the hot wells, about poor Russell, &c.— You are doubtless acquainted with it. Thursday. I do not know that I entirely agree with you in your stricture upon my Sonnet to Innocence. To men whose hearts are not quite deadend by their commerce with the world, Innocence (no longer familiar) becomes an awful idea. So I felt when I wrote it. Your other censures (qualified and sweeten'd, tho', with praises somewhat extravagant) I perfectly coincide with. Yet I chuse to retain the word "lunar "—indulge a "lunatic" in his loyalty to his mistress the moon. I have just been reading a most pathetic copy of verses on Sophia Pringle, who was hanged and burn'd for coining. One of the strokes of pathos (which are very many, all somewhat obscure) is "She lifted up her guilty forger to heaven." A note explains by forger her right hand with which she forged or coined the base metal! For pathos read bathos. You have put me out of conceit with my blank verse by your Religious Musings. I think it will come to nothing. I do not like 'em enough to send 'em. I have just been reading a book, which I may be too partial to, as it was the delight of my childhood; but I will recommend it to you-it is "Izaak Walton's Complete Angler!" All the scientific part you may omit in reading. The dialogue is very simple, full of pastoral beauties, and will charm you. Many pretty old verses are interspersed. This letter, which would be a week's work reading only, I do not wish you to answer in less than a month. I shall be richly content with a letter from you some day early in July-tho' if you get any how settled before then pray let me know it immediately-'twould give me such satisfaction. Concerning the unitarian chapel, the salary is the only scruple that the most rigid moralist would admit as valid. Concerning the tutorage-is not the salary low, and absence from your family unavoidable? London is the only fostering soil for Genius. Nothing more occurs just now, so I will leave you in mercy one small white spot empty below, to repose your eyes upon, fatigued as they must be with the wilderness of words they have by this time painfully travell'd thro'. God love you, Coleridge, and prosper you 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. CC. 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 ... The 447th line was Coleridge's. This is the passage :— Whether thy Law with unrefracted Ray Diseasing Realms the ENTHUSIAST, wild of thought, 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 Eolian 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 And ye of plastic power, that interfused I discipline my young noviciate thought Whose day-spring rises glorious in my soul Sheds on the frost-bound waters-The glad stream "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 |