Coleridge and the Annuals

Coleridge and the AnnualsAuthor(s): Morton D. PaleySource: Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Winter, 1994), pp. 1-24Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3817643 .

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Coleridge and the Annuals

by Morton D. Paley An important phenomenon of the British publishing world of the 1820s and '30s, one frequently overlooked today, was the literary annual. An- nuals attracted important contributors of both prose and verse and

appealed to a large audience, including a high proportion of women.

They especially deserve attention for their role in the expansion of a

reading public for new poetry, and they played a peculiarly important role in the last phase of the poetic career of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. More than twenty of Coleridge's poems were published in annuals.

Although some of these were not new, among them were some of the most important poems of Coleridge's last years. Before considering these

poems and their relationship to the medium in which they appeared, we should take a brief overview of the annuals themselves.1

The literary annual was imported to England from Germany by the

publisher Rudolph Ackermann with his Forget-Me-Not in 1823. The other chief examples during the 1820s and '30s were The Literary Souvenir, edited by Alaric Watts; The Amulet, edited by S. C. Hall; The Keepsake, edited

by F. M. Reynolds; The Anniversary, edited by Allan Cunningham; The

Bijou, edited by W. Fraser; and Friendship's Offering, edited by Thomas

Pringle. Although we may think of them as coffee-table books, early annuals were not large volumes even when published as quartos. The

grandest of them, the silk-bound gilt-edged Keepsake, measured only 7 1/4 x 4 3/4 inches, and its rivals were smaller. (Some annuals published luxury editions with a higher price than the ordinary ones, but even the large- paper Keepsake measured 9 3/8 x 6 inches.) Engravings were nonetheless an important feature, and texts that could accompany designs were fre-



Engraving by F. Englehart after Thomas Stothard, published with

Coleridge's "The Garden of Boccaccio" in The Keepsake for 1829.

ii ,~'.. .,c ~;,./-~ ~.. ,i:~.:~, ........... r- ~i,



THE HUNTINGTON LIBRARY QUARTERLY

quently solicited from authors. The production of an annual represented a considerable investment for a publisher, but it was priced accordingly and sales were large. For example, it cost approximately ?2,620 to publish The Literary Souvenir for 1827, but more than eight thousand copies were sold at prices varying from 8s.6d. to 12s. (depending on when an order was placed or a sale made); The Keepsake, published by the engraver Charles Heath, claimed sales of fifteen thousand copies in 1827. (In contrast Coleridge's Poetical Works of 1828 was published by William Picker-

ing in an edition of three hundred!) Authors and artists were offered high fees in a competitive market: Walter Scott received five hundred pounds for a contribution of his own choice, and the engraver Le Keux received 180 guineas for a 7 x 4 inch Crucifixion after John Martin. As an annual had to be published in the autumn of the year preceding its cover date in order to be available for the holiday gift market, the summer was a particularly active time for editors, who vigorously competed with each other in a manner familiar today but novel in the nineteenth century.

While some annuals continued into the midcentury-The Keepsake sur- vived to publish works by Tennyson and Ruskin-their earlier years, from the mid 1820s to the mid 1830s, were their most successful. The

Bijou ceased with its volume for 1830, The Literary Souvenir for 1835 was the last, the last Amulet was the one for 1836. On the whole, literary his-

tory has not been kind to the phenomenon. Virgil Nemoianu, in his

interesting study The Taming of Romanticism, calls annuals "a typical example of Biedermeier popular diffusion of lyricism."2 Ian Jack re- gards the annuals' targeting of female readers as detrimental-"one's wife, one's fiancee, one's maiden aunt"-and uncritically endorses Wordsworth's statement that "the ornamented annuals, those greedy receptacles of trash," damaged the sale of more serious literature.3 One may wonder which other periodicals publishing poetry at this time presented alternatives to "Biedermeier withdrawal,"4 and one may seriously question the implication that the inclusion of wives, fiancees, and aunts (whether maiden or otherwise) in the reading public injured the development of English literature. (Coleridge, at any rate, unabashedly addressed "intelligent female readers of poetry" in a note to the "Frag- ments from the Wreck of Memory" that he contributed to Friendship's Offering; and Winter's Wreath: A Christmas and New Year's Present, for MDCCCXXXIV.)

The Keepsake for 1829, in which Coleridge published "The Garden of Boccaccio," provides a fair example of an annual's contents. This volume contained among much else some posthumous works of Shelley: three poems, including "The Aziola," and the essay "On Love";5 five minor poems by Wordsworth, two stories by Walter Scott, two by Mary Shelley, and two engravings after Turner. It is true that political and reli-

2



COLERIDGE AND THE ANNUALS

gious controversy is absent, as is explicit erotic content; The Keepsake published a fairly narrow range of material, a limitation it shared with

many other publications of its time. In general, the annuals, published so as to be timely Christmas gifts, manifested, slightly in advance of that

period, part of the enlargement of the reading public that we now think of as Victorian.

The golden age of annuals coincided with a late resurgence in Cole-

ridge's poetic career. His increased poetic productivity began in the 1820s, when he was domiciled with James and Anne Gillman at Highgate with the intent, at least partially realized, of controlling his drug habit. Al-

though in these late poems he may not have equaled the greatest efforts of his early years, he did produce some memorable poems of very high quality. However, he now had no immediate outlet for his new poetry. "I have no connection with any magazine, paper, or periodical publication of any kind," he lamented on 2 September 1826.6 The annuals were about to give him a much-needed connection with a readership who knew him

through some of his earlier works, and this in turn would have an effect

upon the poems he chose to publish in them (and possibly even upon the

poems he completed). The tastes of this reading public had some points in common with the poetic interests of Coleridge at this time. In particular, the fact that annuals were frequently love-gifts and were given close to the end of the year made them appropriate vehicles for poems con- cerned with the yearning for love and with the passage of time.

Coleridge's association with annuals began with The Literary Souvenir, edited by Alaric A. Watts, a minor poet who had been Coleridge's ac-

quaintance and correspondent for several years. Watts hoped to publish a number of poems by Coleridge, and he began by accepting "Lines Sug- gested by the Last Words of Berengarius" and the poem later entitled "Sancti Dominici Pallium." However, Watts did not print the latter in The

Literary Souvenir because of its religiously controversial nature, being "advised," as Coleridge put it to J. Blanco White, "that it would probably expose his book to a persecution by the Catholics and Liberals."7 "Beren- garius" presented no such difficulty, at least not to a predominantly Anglican readership, particularly as the controversy over transubstantiation in which the medieval theologian was involved is not even directly mentioned. The poem, on a subject that had long interested Cole- ridge, appeared, probably late in the autumn of 1826, in The Literary Souvenir for 1827.8

The nature of Coleridge's sympathy for Berengarius of Tours (c. 1000- 1088) is succinctly expressed in a Notebook entry of 1821.9 In the course of a long discussion of symbolism and the sacrament, Coleridge writes of "the persecution of Berengarius" in connection with disputes about the view of the Eucharist held by "the Monkish and Papal Faction," and

3




he continues: "Berengarius asserts and vindicates the real Presence (and in the same words as our Church Catechism) as earnestly as he rejects the total changes of the corporeal Elements. Thus neither a Sound nor a

primary Thought can be a Symbol; but a word may." The grounds of

Coleridge's sympathy for Berengar go beyond the poet's interest in the

theological question of transubstantiation, important as that was to

Coleridge, to the proper understanding of symbolism. That Berengar was silenced by Pope Gregory the Seventh, and that he attempted to reassert his views only to recant twice, no doubt further increased

Coleridge's identification with his suffering subject. Coleridge had praised Berengarius in his ninth Philosophical Lecture

in 1819,10 and in the Aids to Reflection of 182511 he had quoted six lines of verse by Berengar's disciple Hildebert, part of an eight-line passage praising his master's virtues and deploring the envy of his enemies that

Coleridge had written down in the Notebook passage already cited.

Coleridge's source for this poem and for much of his information about

Berengar was W. G. Tennemann's Geschichte der Philosophie,12 and he was also almost certainly familiar with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Beren- garius Turonesis,13 though, as we shall see, the verbal influence on his poem comes from a different source. The poem is conjecturally dated 1826,14 though it may be that the four lines that form an introduction to the rest were written a few years earlier,15 after Coleridge had read Hildebert's Latin poem in Tennemann. (In the holograph manuscript in the Huntington Library [HM 12122], the poem begins with Coleridge's own short "Testamentary Epitaph" in Greek and Latin, but Alaric Watts wisely reduced this to a footnote, a decision more than endorsed by the Poetical Works of 1828, 1829, and 1834, where it does not appear at all.)16

The four lines headed "Lines / Suggested by the Last Words of Berengarius / Ob. Anno. Dom. 1088" compose a fine, terse, epigram- matic statement.

No more 'twixt conscience staggering and the Pope; Soon shall I now before my God appear, By him to be acquitted, as I hope; By him to be condemned, as I fear.

As J. C. C. Mays points out, Coleridge's source here is probably Thomas Fuller's "The Life and Death of Berengarius," in Abel Redivivus: "Re- markable are his words wherewith he breathed out his last gaspe, which Illyricus reporteth to this Effect: Now as I am to goe, and appeare before God, either to be acquitted by him as I hope, or condemned by him as Ifeare."17 However, the first line-"No more 'twixt conscience staggering and the Pope," is Coleridge's fine invention and it deeply colors the tone of the rest. This introduction then leads to the thirty-one-line "Reflections on the Above."

4




Beginning "Lynx among moles!" the "Reflections" immediately estab- lishes a sense of intimate presence, as well as making a basic contrast that would have had additional meaning for readers familiar with Coleridge. The lynx, endowed with sharp night vision, is of course con- trasted with the blind moles who live in perpetual darkness, but for Coleridge the latter had a more particular meaning. In the 1818 Friend Coleridge had printed a note attacking "the partizans of a crass and sen- sual materialism, the advocates of the Nihil nisis ab extra," whom he characterized in five lines of verse:

They, like moles, Nature's mute monks, live mandrakes of the ground, Shrink from the light, then listen for a sound; See but to dread, and dread they know not why, The natural alien of their negative eye[.]18

It is a typical Coleridgean strategy to equate Berengarius' antagonists who believed in literal transubstantiation with empiricists advocating "Nothing [in the mind] unless from without," as both to him are crass materialists. The poem goes on to converse with the imagined dying theologian in a manner that, as Max Schulz observes, anticipates Brow- ning's monologues in its "use of implied query and explicit rejoinder."19 Imagery of darkness and light-much of it, as Mays points out, adapted from Thomas Fuller-prevails, and the animal imagery is extended to the glowworm (Berengarius) whose "ray" only serves to guide his enemies, represented as night-birds seeking their prey. Yet this little light is proleptic of increasing degrees of light that finally vanquishes the darkness. In warning against any feelings of smug superiority toward a predecessor who lived in a dark time, Coleridge has in mind Fuller's admo- nition: "This I dare boldly affirme, that if the morning grow so proud so as to scorne the dawning of the day, because mixed with darkness, Midde day will revenge her Quarrell, and may justly take the occasion to condemn the Morning, as in lustre inferiour to her selfe."20 Thus the poem concludes:

Yet not for this, if wise, will we decry The spots and struggles of the timid DAWN:

Lest so we tempt the coming NOON to scorn The mists and painted vapours of our MORN.

The readers of this text, whether or not familiar with the Lay Sermons, Philosophical Lectures, or Aids to Reflection, would have at least known of them by reputation and could be assumed to regard seriously a poem by Coleridge on such a theme. The combination of an encouraging edi-

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tor and the poet's sympathetic identification with Berengarius had stimulated Coleridge to complete and publish one of his best late poems.

Coleridge's further dealings with Alaric Watts were unfortunately something of a comedy of errors. It is true that one poem of major importance, "Youth and Age," was published in The Literary Souvenir for 1828, but Watts was outraged to discover that it would also appear in the first number of William Pickering's competing annual The Bijou. Coleridge explained that this had happened without his knowledge or

permission: Pickering's editor W. Fraser had simply helped himself to five poems given him for the Poetical Works of 1828.21 Two of these were

unpublished earlier works: the second part of the unfinished prose poem of 1797-98 "The Wanderings of Cain" and the beautiful Asra poem of 1802 "A Day-Dream." The others were comparatively recent: "Youth and Age," "Work without Hope" (one of the few later poems to remain an anthology piece today), and "The Two Founts." Coleridge was never

paid by The Bijou for these, though he was fulsomely thanked in the

preface, signed with Fraser's initials, to the 1828 volume:

Where a favor has been conferred in a peculiar manner, it at least demands that it should be peculiarly acknowledged. Mr. Coleridge, in the most liberal manner, permitted the Editor to select what he

pleased from all his unpublished Mss, and it will be seen from 'The

Wanderings of Cain,' though unfinished, and the other pieces bear-

ing that Gentleman's name, that whenever he may favour the world with a perfect collection of his writings he will adduce new and powerful claims upon its respect. [P. vii]

To assure the reader that this prophecy was soon to be realized, among the books advertised by Pickering at the end of the volume appears "The Poetical and Dramatic Works of S. T. Coleridge, with numerous additional Poems now first collected, and revised by the Author, in 4 [sic] vols., crown, 8 vo. Nearly ready."

Although Coleridge was not at fault in the Bijou matter, he tried to make things up with Watts by giving him a version of "Limbo," contain- ing, he wrote on 14 September 1828, "some of the most forcible Lines & with the most original imagery that my niggard Muse ever made me a present of" (CL 6:758). Coleridge claimed he had left the manuscript at Watts's door, but unfortunately Watts never found it there. Was this an unfortunate coincidence or an Essteeceean invention? Watts must have felt further aggrieved to learn from the same letter that Coleridge had contracted with Frederic M. Reynolds, editor of The Keepsake, to contribute to that annual exclusively. According to Coleridge's letter, he had re- served "Limbo" for Watts, even though Reynolds had seen "the rough, & imperfect Poem" at Highgate and had wished to publish it (CL 6:762).

6




However, this could do Watts little good in the absence of a copy text. In December 1828 Coleridge included twenty lines of "Limbo" in a letter to Watts (CL 6:779-80); these were either not enough or not to Watts's liking, for no version of "Limbo"-and indeed no further poems by Coleridge- appeared in The Literary Souvenir.

As "Limbo" was never published in an annual, and as three of the

Bijou poems had been written long before, they are not part of our sub-

ject here. One of the best of Coleridge's late poems, "Work without

Hope" (dated 21 February 1825), was among those in The Bijou, but we cannot certainly tell that Coleridge had promised it to Watts. "Youth and

Age," however, was intended for one annual and published in two. Its

inception dates to the autumn of 1823, and the poem may well owe its stimulus, as Kathleen Coburn has suggested, to Coleridge's meeting Sara Hutchinson at Ramsgate (CN 4:4994n) on 23 October of that year. Using the last draft in his Notebook, Coleridge made two fair copies dif-

fering in some details both from the draft and from each other, and sent the second, on paper watermarked 1826, to Alaric Watts.22 The poem's subsequent textual history is complex, but the text for the purpose of our discussion is the thirty-eight-line version that appeared in The

Literary Souvenir in the autumn of 1827.23 In this extraordinarily musical lyric-Leigh Hunt called it "one of the

most perfect poems, for style, feeling, and everything, that were ever written"24-Coleridge casts himself as an old man fancifully trying to

recapture his youthful self. In memorable lines drawn partly from St. Paul he deplores the change in "This breathing house not built with hands," an allusion to 2 Corinthians: "For know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens" (5.1). Now, in a line reminiscent of Yeats's late poems railing against old age, it is "This body, that does me grievous wrong." The former self is the Coleridge who cele- brated in his poems of the 1790s the joys of community as represented, at that time, by Pantisocracy and by the French Revolution:

O the joys, that came down shower-like, Of FRIENDSHIP, LOVE, and LIBERTY

Ere I was old!

Ironically, the roles of disguise and true appearance are reversed as the imagined speaker desperately tries to delude himself:

It cannot be that thou art gone! Thy vesper bell hath not yet tolled; And thou wert aye a masker bold- What strange disguise hast now put on, To make believe that thou art gone?

7




His depiction of his present appearance, with "locks in silvery slips," owes something to the "Sonet" that concludes George Peele's Poly- hymnia, beginning "His Golden lockes, Time hath to Silver turn'd," and Peele's next five lines are relevant to the whole poem:

O Time too swift, o Swiftenesse never ceasing: His Youth gainst Time and Age hath ever spum'd But spur'd in vain, Youth waineth by increasing.

Beauty, Strength, Youth, are flowers, but fading seen, Dutie, Faith, Love are roots, and ever greene.25

However, instead of accepting his condition, the speaker attempts to cheer himself up by denying it:

Life is but Thought! so think I will, That Youth and I are housemates still!

The final line may have contained a private meaning for Coleridge, who in a Notebook entry (CN 3:3547) relating to Sara Hutchinson had punned in Greek upon "house-mate/grave-mate."26 However, the poem as a whole is accessible in meaning to a wide public and is one of the finest

examples of lyricism and controlled irony among Coleridge's works. It was nevertheless his last contribution to The Literary Souvenir.

In the autumn of 1827, Coleridge also published in another annual, The Amulet; or Christian and Literary Remembrancer for 1828. Its editor, S. C. Hall, acting through the intermediacy of the minor poet Edwin Ather- stone, obtained "The Improvisatore" according to Coleridge on the day that it was written.27 Coleridge was paid merely ten pounds on what the poet thought was the understanding that ten additional pounds would be forthcoming for other works. The presentation of "The Improvisatore" in The Amulet also gave the impression that it was the first of a series. It appeared under the rubric "New Thoughts on Old Subjects; / or Con- versational Dialogues / On Interests and Events of Common Life." There was a two-page preface by Coleridge in which he wrote, "In a series of conversations, of which the following is a specimen, I have attempted to attain this end in reference to the events, customs, opinions, &c. of domestic and ordinary life" (p. 38). Then came the heading "No. I.-The Improvisatore; or 'John Anderson, My Jo, John.'" The work itself com- prised over six pages of prose dialogue and a sixty-seven-line poem-in all, a highly ambitious effort.

"The Improvisatore" is not often reprinted, and when it is, it is usually without the prose dialogue. Coleridge, however, took care to include the dialogue (but not the introductory note) when he had "The Improvisa- tore" printed from the Amulet copy28 in his Poetical Works of 1829.

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Whether or not the dialogue is included makes a considerable difference in tone. Without its original context, "The Improvisatore" is susceptible to the kind of charge made by Max Schulz in The Poetic Voices of Coleridge:

The improvisatore is the product of a relaxed imagination, illustrated by the crystallization of the words, hope, joy, love, and fancy.... With the improvisation poems, the concepts have lost their viability.29

The "Friend" is indeed a stand-in for the poet, for Coleridge's improvisatore role was widely recognized. "He is a real improvisatore on every subject," wrote John Taylor Coleridge after a visit from his uncle in June 1825.30 However, the reader's attitude toward him is qualified by the remarks of his three young interlocutors, who treat him with affectionate respect but also with a certain amusement, and he himself is capable of self-irony. After quoting Tom Moore and (in slightly bowdlerized form) Beaumont and Fletcher31 on the nature of love, he is asked by Catherine

But is there any such true love? Friend. I hope so. Catherine. But do you believe it? Eliza (eagerly). I am sure he does. Friend. From a man turned of fifty, Catherine, I imagine, expects a less confident answer. Catherine. A more sincere one, perhaps. Friend. Even though he should have obtained the nick-name of Improvisatore, by perpetrating charades and extempore verses at Christmas times?

(Pp. 39-40)

It is true that this banter gives way to a serious disquisition on love, but a mixed attitude toward the Friend has been established. He is like Drosselmeyer in the ballet The Nutcracker, set off from the others and oscillating between the roles of magus and clown. In the verses he then recites, much of the weight of meaning is carried by personified abstractions, a feature that complicates our response to the poem.

Personifications had, of course, been endemic to much of Coleridge's early poetry, but there they had been, as Stephen Knapp points out, melodramatic and closely linked with violence.32 In contrast, the personifications of Coleridge's later poems are presented as distanced, self-conscious fictions, wearing the badges of their small capital letters (an important point for Coleridge; see the letter to Thomas Pringle quoted below, p. 19). Instead of the poet's feelings being stated directly, they are acted out by personified abstractions in a kind of pantomime. In "The

9




Improvisatore" the personifications mime a drama concerning food and drink, the deprivation of which brings sickness. At the beginning the

poet tells how he once thought he possessed love-"Crown of his cup, and garnish of his dish! -and that his supply of it had to be continually replenished:

FAITH asks her daily bread, And FANCY must be fed!

For some unknown reason, this nurture stopped-"She missed her wonted food"- and as a result "Poor FANCY stagger'd and grew sickly." The deprived poet must pass through an ordeal while

Poor Fancy on her sick bed lay; Ill at distance, worse when near, Telling her dreams to jealous Fear!

Yet by his own account the speaker learns to survive by giving up the dream of passionate love and accepting in its place friendship, the latter

being represented by the amaranth, the never-dying flower of Greek

mythology:

Late autumn's AMARANTH that more fragrant blows When Passion's flowers all fall or fade[.]

The amaranth has an important meaning for Coleridge, throughout his poetic career. In a variant of line 29 of "To a Young Lady with a Poem on the French Revolution," it is associated with the domestic theme of the last part of the poem: "With wearied thought I seek the amaranth shade" (PW 1:65n). Thomas Chatterton is "An amaranth, which earth scarce seem'd to own" in "On Observing a Blossom on the First of February 1796" (PW 1:149, line 13). The amaranth is associated with the millennium in the passage from "Religious Musings" that

Coleridge quoted in chapter 10 of the Biographia Literaria: from Paradise come "odours snatched from beds of Amaranth" (PW 1:122, line 349). Most recently, in "Work without Hope," one of the poems published in The Bijou for 1828, the poet knows "the banks where amaranths blow," but says "For me ye bloom not!" (PW 1:447, lines 7 and 10). Yet in this poem he does possess "Late autumn's Amaranth." The amaranth has meanings subject to change by context and by the poet's attitude. In "The Improvisatore" that meaning may also derive from the twentieth of Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets: "For you, fair Friendship's amaranth shall blow, / And Love's own thorless roses, bind your head!"33 In both poems the amaranth of friendship is set off from the rose of love.

"The Improvisatore" was highly regarded by Coleridge himself, who told Watts in August 1827 that "in sentiment and music of verse it was

10




equal to anything I ever wrote" (CL 6:698-99). It has been praised by George Whalley, one of the most perceptive critics of Coleridge's later works, for the "affectionately noted passages of natural detail," "shafts of half-bitter-playfulness," and "ingenious argumentation" of its verse, as well as for its "flexible and colloquial" prose, "arguing much more

strongly than any of his verse dramas or his journalistic writing does that Coleridge could write the vigorous plain prose that Dryden or Swift would commend."34 "The Improvisatore" is indeed among the best of the later Coleridge. It is hard to imagine it as being intended for any publication other than an annual, given its length, its hybrid nature, its

subject matter, and its elegiac tone. Indeed, Catherine and Eliza may be

imagined as the implied readers, taken up with the themes of love, friendship, hope, and the passage of time.

Coleridge's relations with The Amulet and its editor soon turned sour. It may have been the poet's fault that no further "New Thoughts on Old

Subjects" were produced, but Hall rejected "Love's Burial-place," then entitled "The Alienated Mistress," because, according to Coleridge, Hall thought it referred to "a kept Woman!!!"35 Hall also rejected "The Butterfly," "A Thought Suggested by a View of Saddleback in Cumber- land," and three letters that Coleridge had written in Germany. How- ever, Hall took copies of this material, and in The Amulet for 1829 he published without Coleridge's permission parts of two letters as "Over the Brocken"; he then published the three previously rejected poems in The Amulet for 1833. Coleridge received no payment for these contributions. Hall compounded this bad treatment by telling Frederic M. Rey- nolds, editor of The Keepsake, that he had obtained "The Improvisatore" for merely ten pounds without mentioning that Coleridge had accepted this arrangement with the understanding that there would be further payment for his other contributions.36 The poet, who needed the money for Mary Morgan and Charlotte Brent (wife and sister-in-law of his bankrupt friend J. J. Morgan), was reduced to pressing Hall for payment for "The Improvisatore" on 4 December 1828 (CL 6:775). This was the last of his dealings with The Amulet, though not, as we have seen, of The Amulet's dealings with him.

At first Coleridge's relations with Frederic Reynolds and The Keepsake seemed very promising, as Reynolds offered the impressive sum of fifty pounds for several prospective contributions. Of these the most important was "The Garden of Boccaccio," in effect written on commission in the late summer of 1828 and published in The Keepsake for 1829. The origin of the poem has been recounted by Lucy Watson, grand-daughter of the Gillmans:

Perceiving one day that the Poet was in a dejected mood, my grandmother silently placed an engraving of this garden on his

11




desk; and the poem was the result. The lines from the eleventh to the sixteenth verses [beginning "O Friend! long wont to notice yet conceal"] are addressed to her, as my father told me.37

While this accords with Coleridge's account in the poem itself, both seem to be masking what was essentially an invitation to a commercial transac- tion. Reynolds appears to have approached Coleridge for this purpose through the Gillmans. Presumably the engraving had already been com-

pleted, and Reynolds had chosen Coleridge to write the poem to accom-

pany it. Summer, as mentioned, was the time that editors of annuals were most active in soliciting contributions from authors. On 8 August 1828 we find Coleridge inviting Reynolds to take a glass of wine and a sand- wich at Highgate and to see the poems he had in "calligraphic fitness for the Press" (CL 6:749). In September 1828 Coleridge was correcting proof and writing to Reynolds that he was greatly reducing a footnote as

requested. In the autumn the poem duly appeared in The Keepsake for 1829, accompanying the engraving by F. Englehart after Thomas Stot- hard that Anne Gillman had shown to the dejected poet.

Thomas Stothard was an artist whose work Coleridge genuinely, if not

unreservedly, admired. "If it were not for a certain tendency to affecta- tion," he said, "scarcely any praise could be too high for Stothard's de-

signs."38 The picture on which Englehart's engraving was based was a watercolor now in the British Museum entitled A Fete Champetre [sic]. Stothard had exhibited a number of paintings on subjects from The Decameron at the Royal Academy from 1811 on, in a style that was, especially after 1817, intended to evoke associations of Watteau. These paintings were a popular success,39 and in 1825 the artist executed ten water- colors based on them. These were engraved by Augustus Fox for the

publisher William Pickering, who issued the set of engravings in two forms: as a portfolio entitled Illustrations of the Decameron of Boccaccio and as plates bound into his Decamerone di Messer Giovanni Boccaccio (1825). Given his interests both in Italian literature and in the visual arts, it is

possible that Coleridge knew the Fox engraving of this scene, perhaps even likely, as by 1827 arrangements had been made for Pickering to

publish his own Poetical Works. If so, Coleridge would have appreciated the greater delicacy of Englehart's engraving as well as its subtler atmo-

spheric quality. The commission, for such it actually was, to write "The Garden of

Boccaccio" stimulated Coleridge in several ways. His response to the design would have stirred memories of his own experience of the Italian campagna and may also have caused him to revisit his description of the landscape of Tuscany in a Notebook of 1806; he also may have reread with new appreciation the relevant part of The Decameron, in which Nefile brings the others to the garden on the third day.40 The result was

12




to counteract the poet's "dreary mood," his sense of a life empty of "all

genial power," of being the victim of a "numbing spell," and the feeling of "my own vacancy" that has left him as a spectator of his feelings, "as I watch'd the dull continuous ache, / Which, all else slumbering seem'd alone to wake." All these elements have caused critics to compare this

poem to "Dejection: An Ode," with its sense of vacuity and its failure of

genial spirits.41 However, this poem takes a different turn when the

poet's discreet muse lays the "exquisite design" on his desk. Immedi-

ately the vocabulary enters a different realm, with words like "faery,"42 "love," "joyaunce," and "gallantry," evocative of the fictive world that

Coleridge's imagination now enters. The picture is internalized in a per- ceptual process that Coleridge sometimes, in writing about animal mag- netism, called "single touch":43

A tremulous warmth crept gradual o'er my chest, As though an infant's finger touch'd my breast.

(Lines 25-26)

That this was a highly charged moment in the composition of the poem is attested by the Huntington Library manuscript [HM 360], where the

passage (fol. lr) is much reworked, being written in ink over a different

passage written in pencil and then heavily revised. This surge of imagination enables the poet to make contact with his past identity, a process embodied once more in a special vocabulary: "selfless," "wonder," "charm'd," "kindled," "loved," "love," and "lustre." Much as in his rec- ollection in the Biographia Literaria of reading The Arabian Nights as a child, Coleridge reexperiences his early response to myth and romance, with evocations of bardic "Scalds ... in the sea-worn caves," the Teu- tonic Hertha,44 and a Christabel-like "minstrel lay, that cheer'd the baron's feast" (line 39). These fantasy images are not, however, left to inhabit a realm of their own but are integrated with the reality of Philos-

ophy. For this purpose Coleridge uses in lines 49-56 a slightly different version of a passage that he had originally drafted in a Notebook of 1819 declaring that Poesy was but Philosophy in an unconscious form,45 and thus Philosophy was known to him from childhood. This gives Cole- ridge an opportunity to introduce one of the favorite images of his later poems, the child at its mother's knee. The child Poesy has grown up to become the matron Philosophy. Therefore the magical vocabulary that is used to characterize the first-"a faery child" who is "with elfin playfel- lows well known"-can be employed for Philosophy, "radiant" and "with no earthly sheen," as well.

In the third division of the poem, the poet has moved from the reverie of the previous part to wakefulness and a sense of mastery. Like Gaston Bachelard's spectator who learns to inhabit an engraving,46 the poet

13




declares "I see no longer! I myself am there" (line 65). As in "Kubla Khan," reverie becomes reality. It is the fusion of art, text, and memory that makes this possible. Although the three elements are virtually indis- tinguishable at this point, some of their overlapping details are worth

considering. One of the elements that figures prominently in all three is water. Coleridge's Tuscan Notebook describes "The waterfall of Teri" and "the river Negra meandring thro' it" (CN 2:2849). The Stothard- Englehart illustration gives dramatic prominence to the play of the fountain described in Boccaccio's text:

In the centre of this meadow was a fountain of white marble, beau-

tifully carved ... and from a figure standing on a column in the midst of the fountain, a jet of water spouted up, which made a most agreeable sound in its fall: the water which came thence ran

through the meadow by a secret passage; when, being received into canals, it appeared again and was carried to every part of the garden, uniting into one stream at its going out, and falling with such force into the plain, as to turn two mills before it got thither.47

In Coleridge's poem we have water in several manifestations: the nymph's "restless pool," "the Tuscan fields and hills, / And famous Aro, fed with all their rills"; and "many a gorgeous flower ... duly fed / With its own rill" (lines 64, 75-76, 88-89). Once more, we are reminded of "Kubla Khan," where "there were gardens bright with sinuous rills" (PW 1:297).

At other points, too, we see the interplay of details in verbal description, picture, and recorded memory. The arches of the plant-overgrown, aqueduct-like structure in the design must have recalled to Coleridge his walk "under a pretty arch, half-man half-nature into the orange walk" as well as "the beautiful bridge of earth over the joined river"-all of which merge in the poem as "Gardens, where flings the bridge its airy span" (line 86). On the other hand, "The golden corn, the olive, and the vine" (line 79) seem less closely related to anything in Boccaccio's account or the design than to Coleridge's own walk in 1806: "through the vineyard, small fields of wheat, vines & olive Trees / Corn, Wine Oil!" becomes "The golden corn, the olive, and the vine" (line 80). As Herbert Wright remarks, Coleridge "blends his own memories of the Tuscan landscape in the spring of 1806 with his impressions drawn from Boccaccio, in a delicate evocation of the urbane charm and cultural grace of Italy."48 In the last part of the poem, moreover, all attempt at ekphrasis is abandoned in favor of the poet's own invention, first in his depiction of Bocccaccio in lines 97-100 and its accompanying footnote, then in his concluding self-presentation.

In lines 97-100 the poet draws attention to the figure of Boccaccio, who is of course not in the picture but is Coleridge's own invention. The author

14




is seen "unfolding on his knees / The new-found roll of old Maeonides," but with Ovid's Ars Amoris closer to his heart. Susan Luther astutely observes that "'Boccace' . . . metonymically figures S. T. Coleridge, the

present ideal, great reader who 'unfolds' the text."49 In his own note to this passage, printed in The Keepsake with the poem (p. 205n), Coleridge passes from The Decameron to The Filocopo, "where the sage instructor, Racheo, as soon as the young prince and the beautiful girl Biancofiore had learned their letters, sets them to study the Holy Book, Ovid's ART OF LOVE" (PW 1:480 n. 2). Having identified himself with Boccaccio as a conveyor of the tradition of courtly love, Coleridge now becomes the reader of an erotic text as well as the inhabitant of an engraving:

Long be it mine to con thy mazy page, Where half conceal'd, the eye of fancy views Fauns, nymphs, and winged saints, all gracious to thy muse!

(Lines 102-4)

The introduction of the word "mazy" recalls both the "mazy motion" of "Kubla Khan" and, perhaps with a slight attendant ambiguity, part of Milton's description of Paradise:

Brooks, Rolling on Orient Pearl and sands of Gold, With mazy error under pendant shades Ran Nectar, visiting each plant....

(Paradise Lost 4:237-40)

Although Coleridge elsewhere insisted "The holy book-Ovid's Art of Love!! This is not the result of mere Immorality,"50 a persistent element of erotic fantasy pervades the poet's depiction of himself as a voyeur watching nymphs and associated with "that sly satyr peeping through the leaves!" in the last line. Despite Coleridge's use of the demonstrative

adjective, which suggests that we have returned to the picture, there is no satyr in either Stothard's drawing or the engravings after it. The sly satyr is an invention of the sly poet, like Eliot's Mr Apollinax, that sly satyr whose laughter tinkled among teacups.

"The Garden of Boccaccio" is one of Coleridge's most successful later poems, but even here there seems to have been a doomed quality about his relations with the editors of annuals. At Reynolds's request Cole- ridge had cut the length of the prose note to the poem, and this later led to difficulties when the poet learned that the editor expected the space to be made up in verse, without additional payment, in the following year. Despite two highly professional letters from the poet to Reynolds, the editor, who seems to have dealt as sharply with Wordsworth and with

15




Southey, in effect received gratis Coleridge's contributions to The Keepsake for 1830.51 These were to have included "Alice du Clos," part of which Reynolds had seen at Highgate in 1828, but that poem was withdrawn. Instead, there appeared a six-line "Song, ex Improviso" and, under the title "The Poet's Answer, To a Lady's Question respecting the accom- plishments most desirable in an instructress of Children," a poem that Coleridge had written in his friend Emily Trevenen's album on 1 July 1829. No further poems by Coleridge appeared in The Keepsake.

Coleridge lost in several ways as a result of his agreement with Reynolds. In addition to not being paid for the poems published in 1829, he had foregone attractive offers from The Literary Souvenir. He had also missed a chance to publish in Rudolph Ackermann's Forget-Me-Not. When asked to do so by his friend Charles Aders, he could only offer a poem he had originally written in Mrs. Aders's album, already published in The Bijou for 1828 and in the Poetical Works of 1828 as "The Two Founts," or a not-yet-completed poem on the Rhine that has never been discovered.52

Thanks to Thomas Pringle, editor of Friendship's Offering, Coleridge's relations with the annuals concluded on a different note. Pringle, though a highly professional editor, had a life that went beyond the publishing world.53 After a brief stint as coeditor of The Edinburgh Monthly Maga- zine, the predecessor of Blackwell's, he emigrated to South Africa in 1820. There he edited a newspaper and came into conflict with the governor over censorship ("He must needs publish a whig journal in the Cape of Good Hope!" wrote Walter Scott in his journal). Pringle returned to England in 1826. He wrote poems largely on African subjects, became a friend of William Wilberforce, and was secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society when he and Coleridge became acquainted in the spring of 1828. In 1831 he was among those friends who tried to have Coleridge's annu- ity, discontinued after the death of George IV, restored. According to his biographer, "Pringle's intimacy with 'the old man eloquent' was con- stant and familiar."54

On 3 August 1833 Coleridge wrote to Pringle concerning poems intended for Friendship's Offering for 1834 (CL 6:949-51). Among these were "My Baptismal Birth-day" and four pieces headed "Lighthearted- ness in Rhyme," which included the sixty-three-line "The Reproof and the Reply."55 But by far the most important was "Love's Apparition and Evanishment," dated August 1833 by Coleridge. In a letter to Charles Aders dated 18 August 1833, Coleridge refers to "a little poem I composed from a rude conception which I accidentally found in one of my old 'Fly-catchers' (Flieger-fanger) or Mss Day Books for impounding (Einsperrung) Stray Thoughts, as I was lying in my bed, some three or four mornings ago, after my Gruel" (CL 6:956). Earlier that month he

16




had sent a copy of the poem to Thomas Pringle (CL 6:952), and it was

published in Friendship's Offering for 1834 as "Love's Ghost and Evan- ition."56 At first Coleridge subtitled the poem "A Madrigal" (CL 6:952), no doubt thinking of the spontaneous effect and lightness of movement that he associated with that lyric form. In a long Notebook entry likely made in 1805 (CN 2:2599 and note) Coleridge had written of the six-

teenth-century madrigals of Giovanni Strozzi: "Of this exquisite Polish, of this perfection of Art, the following Madrigals are given as specimens, and as mementos to myself, if ever I should be happy enough to resume

poetic composition, to attempt a union of these-taking the whole of the latter, and as much of the former as is compatible with a poem's being perused with greater pleasure the second or the 20th time, than the first."57 However, the poet soon realized the inappropriateness of the term, which usually applies to a short lyric-Strozzi's typically comprise 9-11 lines. After sending Pringle the poem, he furnished revised copy and asked the editor to change the subtitle to "An Allegoric Romance" (CL 6:954). Although the initial manuscript is not extant, we know that Coleridge preferred the revision because it had less "irregularity in the distances of the corresponding Rhymes" and "greater perspicuity in the Allegory" (letter endorsed 13 August 1833, CL 6:952).

Coleridge's tone toward his new poem is, as frequently in his late period, equivocal. We have seen that he referred to it jocularly to Charles Aders, and in the letter to Pringle just cited, after asking that it not appear among the Levities" (i.e., the group called "Light-Heartedness in Rhyme," he added "But n'importe. This is a trifle. It is light enough, God wot!" Yet he troubled to revise it for Friendship's Offering, to take a spirit- ed interest in the very typography in which it appeared (see below, p. 19), and to revise it again for the 1834 Poetical Works. On 5 November 1833 he sent a copy of it to J. G. Lockhart because "Henry Nelson Coleridge thought so highly of the grace and metrical movement" (CL 972). Such double messages are characteristic of Coleridge's statements about his late poetry. By deflecting the praise to H. N. Coleridge and by writing about the poem as if it were "light," Coleridge moves to minimize any possible criticism, while his actions show he takes the poem very seriously indeed.

The poem begins with an image encountered elsewhere in Coleridge: the blind Arab, who also appears in "The Blossoming of the Solitary Date-Tree (CN 1:1244): "Mother listening for the sound of a still-born child-blind Arab list'ning in the wilderness." (Coburn compares a letter to William Sotheby dated 13 July 1802: "He [a great poet] must have the ear of a wild Arab listening in the silent desert ... the Touch of a Blind Man feeling the face of a darling Child.")58 The image suggests one whose vocation is to roam freely and whose ability to do so is limit- ed in scope by his blindness while at the same time his other perceptions

17




are sharpened. It is appropriate to Coleridge's idea of himself as yet hav-

ing the gift of poetic intuition although his physical being, as in "Youth and Age," does him grievous wrong. This Arab, left behind by the others of his Caravan, may owe something to a source in Coleridge's early reading of the Arabian Nights or other "Oriental tales." Like him, the

poet "in languid mood and vacant hour" sometimes lifts his head to the heavens and sometimes droops toward earth. The situation created by the trope has its unseen dangers, for "Dipsads," a Miltonic word glossed by the poet as "asps of the desert," bask around him. He is in a "lan-

guid" mood, and the word "vacant" recalls the sense of "vacancy" of "The Garden of Boccaccio" (line 8). Yet, as in that poem, his "languid mood" somewhere between sleeping and waking is creative; and once more the poet is borne back to his personal past.

The poet, in the protected imaginative space of his garden bower

(again recalling "The Garden of Boccaccio") is sitting "upon its Couch of Camomile"-reminiscent of "the sod-built Seat of Camomile"of the "Letter to Sara Hutchinson" written more than thirty years earlier.59 The emotional crisis that the present poem records is probably linked with Anne Gillman rather than Asra, and probably dates to the time in 1824 when the poet wrote to Thomas Allsop: "I am content, well knowing that the genial glow of Friendship once deadened can never be rekin- dled."60 Nevertheless, the image of the one woman became easily super- imposed on that of the other for Coleridge, and George Whalley con-

vincingly suggests that the real seat in the garden at Highgate suddenly recalled to Coleridge other seats associated with Sara Hutchinson, such as the "soft Seat" under the sycamore in "Inscription on a jutting Stone, over a Spring" (Sara's Poets no. 5, entitled from 1817 forward "Inscrip- tion for a Fountain on a Heath").61 In the reverie that ensues, the poet sees an allegorical enactment of his own emotional state.

The participants in the drama that unfolds are the inmates of the poet's heart, HOPE and her sister, LOVE. While HOPE lies seemingly dead, LOVE "in maiden form" approaches the poet's arbor and kisses her, "As she was wont to do"; but LOVE then undergoes, in the words of the original title, re-evanition. Evanition, the OED tells us, is derived from "evanish"-a much older word-on the model of "abolition"; its first example is quoted from Horace Walpole, 1797. (In retitling this poem "Love's Apparition and Evanishment" in the Poetical Works of 1834, either the poet or Henry Nelson Coleridge was preferring an older word to a comparatively recent coinage.) These personifications enact a drama with ghastly results:

Alas! 'twas but a chilling Breath, That woke enough of life in death

To make HOPE die anew.

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The Rime of the Ancient Mariner had, of course, been republished in the Poetical Works of 1828 and 1829, and the poet could surely expect the reader to recognize here his own famous creation:

The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she, Who thicks men's blood with cold.

Coleridge is here his own Ancient Mariner, but with a difference, for instead of suffering inner desiccation because of an arbitrary act against life, he is the victim of the death of hope cause by the withdrawal of another's love.

The use of personifications in a bitter "Allegorical Romance" enables the poet to establish his meaning and at the same time cushions both him and the reader from that meaning, as if his own emotional death were being enacted by marionettes with himself and his audience look-

ing on. The trope of personification was especially congenial to Cole-

ridge's imagination. It should be noted that the Ancient Mariner passage just quoted did not appear in the Lyrical Ballads version. There was a

deathly woman in the first published version, but she only became an

allegorized personification, named in small capitals, in Sibylline Leaves.

Coleridge was especially conscious of the importance of manifesting by typographical signs the existence of such beings in another dimension. In August 1833, after his poem had been set up in type, Coleridge wrote to Thomas Pringle:

I sadly quarrel with our modern Printers for their levelling spirit of

antipathy to all ancient Capitals, thus ruin'd well for ruin'd Well. I

greatly approve of the German rule of distinguishing all Noun- Substantives by a Capital: & at least, all Personifications shall be in small Capitals sec HOPE-(CL: 6:955.)

Evidently Pringle's printer had reduced to lower case nouns that

Coleridge had wanted to distinguish through capitalization and had fur- thermore eliminated some of the small capitals by which the poet meant to identify personifications. Pringle, ever the sympathetic editor and friend, rectified the typography in Friendship's Offering.

The poems published in Friendship's Offering compose Coleridge's last voluntary contribution to annuals. It is touching to find the poet writing to Pringle on 24 October 1833 to express surprise at receiving an unex- pected payment (amount unspecified) for them (CL 6:962), in remarkable contrast to the poet's dealings with some other editors. This forms a fit- ting conclusion to a period (1826-33) during which Coleridge's contributions to annuals made his poetry available to an audience significantly larger than ever before. His new readers must necessarily have regarded him as a contemporary poet rather than one of a past generation, and the

19




poems they read in the annuals established Coleridge's poetic persona in their minds. These factors surely played a role in the demand both for a second edition of the Poetical Works of 1828 in the following year and for the "deathbed edition" of 1834. Taken together, Coleridge's publications in annuals form an important late chapter in the poetic career of one of the central figures of British Romanticism.

University of California, Berkeley

NOTES

1. The chief sources for my information about annuals are: F. W. Foxon, Literary Annuals and Gift-Books (Boston, 1912); Andrew Boyle, An Index to the Annuals

(Worcester, 1967); Berard Warrington, "William Pickering, His Authors and Interests: A Publisher and the Literary Scene in the Early Nineteenth Century," Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 69 (1987): 572-625

(esp. 591-96); Alison Adburgham, Silver Fork Society (London, 1983), 246-60; and Alaric Alfred Watts, Alaric Watts: A Narrative of His Life, 2 vols. (London, 1884); The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (hereafter cited in the text as CL), ed. E. L. Griggs, vols. 1-6 (Oxford, 1956-71). For their criticism of a previous draft of this essay, I am grateful to Tim Fulford, J. C. C. Mays, and Carl Woodring.

2. Nemoianu, The Taming of Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 72.

3. Jack, English Literature 1815-1832 (Oxford, 1963), 174-75.

4. Nemoianu, The Taming of Romanticism, 36.

5. These were furnished by Mary Shelley, a frequent contributor to annuals.

6. Letter to T. J. Ousely, CL 6:608.

7. Letter dated 28 November 1827, CL 6:713. On 1 January 1827 Coleridge wrote

Watts, "You have decided wisely as well as prudently in omitting the Lampoon" (CL 6:660). It subsequently appeared in two newspapers that Watts was associated with, the Standard and the St. James Chronicle, for 21 May and 19-22 May 1827

respectively (CL 6:713n).

8. It should be remembered that annuals appeared for sale during the latter part of the year before their dates. In the preface to The Literary Souvenir for 1827, Watts remarks that the publication of this particular volume was delayed and

promises to have future volumes ready on 1 November (p. xvi).

9. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (hereafter cited as CN), ed. Kathleen Cobur (London and Princeton, N.J., 1957-), vol. 4, 4831 and note.

10. The Philosophical Lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn

(London, 1949), 272.

11. "Aphorisms on Spiritual Religion" in Aids to Reflection (London, 1825), 205.

Aphorism CVC, n. 3.; CN 4:5062 and note. Kathleen Coburn provides an English translation in her note.

20




12. Tennemann, Geschichte der Philosophie, 12 vols. (Leipzig, 1798-1819), 8:98-105.

Coleridge's copy is in the British Library.

13. In the edition of Lessing that Coleridge owned (now in the British Library), Berengarius Turonesis is in part 13, published 1793, pp. 1-211.

14. See The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (hereafter cited as

PW), vol. 1, ed. E. H. Coleridge (Oxford, 1912), 461. The text cited here, however, is that of The Literary Souvenir (with due comparison with the manuscript in the

Huntington Library, quoted by permission).

15. As suggested by Professor J. C. C. Mays in his forthcoming edition of

Coleridge's poetry for The Collected Works. I am grateful to Professor Mays for

generously allowing me to consult his typescript.

16. These lines were printed separately in Literary Remains (1836) and in Sara

Coleridge's edition of 1844. They appear in PW 1:462 as "Epitaphium Testamentarium."

17. Mays, editorial commentary; Thomas Fuller, Abel Redivivus /or / The dead yet speaking (London, 1652). "The Life and Death of Berengarius" is the first chapter, pp. 1-8 [p. 7]. Although Coleridge's copy of Abel Redivivus is

untraced, in Coleridge's marginalia there are annotations to seven other books

by Fuller, only two dated by Coleridge (1824 and 1829). George Whalley considers the hand "late" rather than "early"; see Marginalia (hereafter cited as

CM), ed. George Whalley (London and Princeton, N.J., 1980-93), 2:804. Coleridge ranked Fuller as a man of Genius with Jeremy Taylor and Shakespeare (CN 5, ca. Oct.-Dec. 1829). There are also a number of references to Fuller in the Notebooks of 1823.

18. The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke (London, 1969), 1:494n. These lines, with minor variants, are part of a long Notebook entry (CN 3:4073) that includes the

poem published as "Limbo" in PW 1:429-31.

19. Schulz, The Poetic Voices of Coleridge (Detroit, 1963), 164.

20. Abel Redivivus, 5.

21. Letter to Watts dated 24 November 1827, CL 6:710-11; for details see Griggs's note, and Bernard Warrington, "William Pickering: His Authors and Interests," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 69 (1987): 592-96.

22. Information communicated by Professor J. C. C. Mays.

23. This is basically the text that appeared in the Poetical Works of 1828 and of 1829, but the Poetical Works of 1834 prints a version with eleven additional lines. See PW 1:439n and 582-85; CN 4:4993 and note, 4994 and note, and 4996 and note. A complete account must await the publication of Professor Mays's edition.

24. Hunt, Imagination and Fancy (New York, [1844} 1845), 213.

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25. David H. Home, The Life and Minor Works of George Peele (New Haven, Conn., 1952), 244. As Home notes, the attribution to Peele has been questioned.

26. See T. J. Fulford, Coleridge's Figurative Language (Basingstoke, 1991), 96.

27. See Coleridge's letter of August 1827 to Alaric Watts (CL 6:699).

28. See Eric W. Nye, "Coleridge and the Publishers: Twelve New Manuscripts," Modern Philology 87 (1989): 66.

29. The Poetic Voices of Coleridge, 165. Schulz groups "The Improvisatore" with a number of other "improvisation poems" and valuably discusses these in the context of a vogue for improvisation in the 1820s.

30. See Carl Woodring, "Editor's Introduction" to Table Talk (Princeton, N.J., 1991), 1:51.

31. Ernest Hartley Coleridge pointed out that Coleridge substituted "neighbour vines" for "wanton vines" in the passage quoted from The Elder Brother (PW 1:463n).

32. See Knapp, Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 33-38.

33. Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets, 7th ed. (London, 1795), 20. Cf. also "Thirty- Eight," in the same book (p. 84):

Tho' Time's inexorable sway, Has torn the myrtle bands away, For other wreaths 'tis not too late,

The amaranth's purple glow survives....

34. Whalley, "'Late Autumn's Amaranth': Coleridge's Late Poems," Transactions

of the Royal Society of Canada 2, ser. 4 (June 1964): 171-72.

35. Letter to Alaric Watts, August 1827, CL 6:699. E. L. Griggs's notes to this letter summarize Coleridge's dealings with Atherstone and Hall.

36. See Coleridge's letter to Reynolds of late July 1829, CL 6:801.

37. Lucy E. Watson, Coleridge at Highgate (London, 1925), 137.

38. Said of Stothard's illustrations to Peter Wilkins by Robert Paltock, Table Talk 2:295. Coleridge probably knew Peter Wilkins, originally published in 1751, at an early age; Reginald Watters, citing the authority of Charles Lamb, says it was one of the "Christ's Hospital Classics" ("The Tribe of Sam: Formative Images & Role-Models from Coleridge's Christ's Hospital," The Coleridge Bulletin, n.s, 1 [1992-93]: 16-17). Coleridge could even have known the Stothard illustrations at that time, for they were published in The Novelist's Magazine edition of 1783. They were later used in a new edition in 1816, by which time Coleridge had met Stothard. See Carl Woodring, Table Talk 1:494-95, nn. 7 and 9.

39. See Shelley M. Bennett, Thomas Stothard: The Mechanisms of Art Patronage in

22




England circa 1800 (Columbia, Mo., 1988), 53-55, 98-99. The drawing on which the Keepsake engraving is based is reproduced as fig. 50.

40. Coleridge's admiration of Boccaccio had not in the past extended to The Decameron. Herbert G. Wright points out that Coleridge had expressed distaste for it in his lecture of 3 February 1818 (Boccaccio in England from Chaucer to

Tennyson [London, 1957], 339). In September 1814 Coleridge had tried without success to interest John Murray in a translation of Boccaccio's prose works

excluding The Decameron. See CL 3:529, 562; 4:570, 592; and Whalley, ed., CM 1:542.

41. See George Whalley, "'Late Autumn's Amaranth': Coleridge's Late Poems," 173; George M. Ridenour, "Source and Allusion in Some Poems of

Coleridge," Studies in Philology 60 (1963): 82; and Susan Luther, "The Lost Garden of Coleridge," The Wordsworth Circle 22 (1992): 25-66.

42. The special meaning of "faery" and of some related words in this poem is discussed by Susan Luther in "The Lost Garden of Coleridge"; and by Jeanie Watson in Risking Enchantment: Coleridge's Symbolic World of Faery (Lincoln, Neb., and London, 1990), 202-8.

43. "Double touch" and "single touch" are discussed by John Beer; see "A Stream by Glimpses: Coleridge's Later Imagination," in Beer, ed., Coleridge's Variety (Pittsburgh, 1975 [1974]), 227-28. See also Beer, Coleridge's Variety (London and Basingstoke, 1977), 256-57.

44. Hertha is mentioned twice, both times in connection with the mysterious, in Coleridge's 1818 Lectures on European Literature; see Lectures 1808-1819 on

Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes (London and Princeton, 1987), 2:56, 72, with Tacitus

given as a source in the first instance; cf. The Complete Works of Tacitus, trans. Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb (New York, 1942), 728.

45. See CN 4:4623. The eight lines printed by E. H. Coleridge from an unidenti- fied manuscript (PW 1:479n) are close to but not identical with the corresponding Notebook verses.

46. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Marie Jolas (New York, 1964), 50.

47. The Decameron, trans. W. K. Kelley (London, 1855), 135.

48. Boccaccio in Englandfrom Chaucer to Tennyson, 342.

49. "The Lost Garden of Coleridge," 28.

50. In a note about the passage from Il Filocopo quoted above, written by Coleridge in his copy of Boccaccio's Opere (see PW 1:480 n. 2 and CM 1:544).

51. See letters of Coleridge to Reynolds of late July 1829 (CL 6:800-801) and 6 August 1829 (CL 6:805-9), with Griggs's notes.

52. See letters to Aders of 14 August 1828 (CL 6:752-53) and September 1828

(CL 6:757).

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53. Information on Pringle from Leitch Ritchie, The Poetical Works of Thomas

Pringle with a Sketch of his Life (London, 1839), ix-cxlix. See also DNB, s.v., and E. L. Griggs, "Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Pringle," Quarterly Bulletin

of the South African Library 6 (1951): 1-6.

54. Ritchie, Poetical Works, cix.

55. The others in this group were "In Answer to a Friend's Question" (retitled "Love and Friendship Opposite" in 1834), "Lines to a Comic Author, on an Abusive Review," and two short satires about Cologne. There were also five short "Fragments from the Wreck of memory; or, Portions of Portions of Poems

composed in early Manhood," some of which were translations of German

poetry; and "A Thought Suggested by a View of Saddleback in Cumberland" was reprinted.

56. On pages 355-56. That is the text to which reference is made here. For the Poetical Works some revisions were made, and in Sara Coleridge's edition of 1852 four lines headed "L'Envoy" were added at the end. These four lines, written in 1824 (see CL 5:360), however closely related both to this poem and to the experience that prompted it, do not form part of it in any edition of Coleridge's works

published in his lifetime, including that of 1834, and so probably should be

regarded as a separate poem.

57. As Coburn notes nine of these translated madrigals were published in

chapter 16 of the Biographia Literaria.

58. CL 2:810; see Cobur in CN 1:1244n.

59. See Coleridge: Poems, ed. John Beer (London, 1986), p. 274, line 85.

60. 27 April 1824, CL 5:360. This letter includes a six-line variant of the lines now known as "L'Envoy."

61. Whalley, Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson (London, 1955), 138. See also Charles

Bouslog, "The Symbol of the Sod-Seat in Coleridge," PMLA 60 (1945): 802-10.

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Documents

Coleridge and the Annuals