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 Sea-side, 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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
Sophia Pringle. Probably the subject of a Catnach or other popular broadside. I have not found it.
Izaak Walton. Lamb returns to praises of The Compleat Angler in his letter to Robert Lloyd referred to on page 215.