FOOTNOTES:
[1091:1] First published in The Courier, Saturday, August 31, 1811: included in 1829, 1834-5, &c. (3 vols.), and in 1844 (1 vol.). Lines 1-56 were first published as part of the 'Introduction' to A Lay Sermon, &c., 1817, pp. xix-xxxi.
The 'Allegoric Vision' dates from August, 1795. It served as a kind of preface or prologue to Coleridge's first Theological Lecture on 'The Origin of Evil. The Necessity of Revelation deduced from the Nature of Man. An Examination and Defence of the Mosaic Dispensation' (see Cottle's Early Recollections, 1837, i. 27). The purport of these Lectures was to uphold the golden mean of Unitarian orthodoxy as opposed to the Church on the one hand, and infidelity or materialism on the other. 'Superstition' stood for and symbolized the Church of England. Sixteen years later this opening portion of an unpublished Lecture was rewritten and printed in The Courier (Aug. 31, 1811), with the heading 'An Allegoric Vision: Superstition, Religion, Atheism'. The attack was now diverted from the Church of England to the Church of Rome. 'Men clad in black robes,' intent on gathering in their Tenths, become 'men clothed in ceremonial robes, who with menacing countenances drag some reluctant victim to a vast idol, framed of iron bars intercrossed which formed at the same time an immense cage, and yet represented the form of a human Colossus. At the base of the Statue I saw engraved the words "To Dominic holy and merciful, the preventer and avenger of soul-murder".' The vision was turned into a political jeu d'esprit levelled at the aiders and abettors of Catholic Emancipation, a measure to which Coleridge was more or less opposed as long as he lived. See Constitution of Church and State, 1830, passim. A third adaptation of the 'Allegorical Vision' was affixed to the Introduction to A Lay Sermon: Addressed to the Higher and Middle Classes, which was published in 1817. The first fifty-six lines, which contain a description of Italian mountain scenery, were entirely new, but the rest of the 'Vision' is an amended and softened reproduction of the preface to the Lecture of 1795. The moral he desires to point is the 'falsehood of extremes'. As Religion is the golden mean between Superstition and Atheism, so the righteous government of a righteous people is the mean between a selfish and oppressive aristocracy, and seditious and unbridled mob-rule. A probable 'Source' of the first draft of the 'Vision' is John Aikin's Hill of Science, A Vision, which was included in Elegant Extracts, 1794, ii. 801. In the present issue the text of 1834 has been collated with that of 1817 and 1829, but not (exhaustively) with the MS. (1795), or at all with the Courier version of 1811.
[1092:1] From the Ode to the Rain, 1802, ll. 15-16:—
O Rain! with your dull two-fold sound,
The clash hard by, and the murmur all round!