And Gout that howls the frequent curse;
With Apoplex of heavy head
That surely aims his dart of lead.”
Whether we can follow him or not into intimacy with those “beings of higher class than man,” Fire, Famine, Slaughter, Woes, and Young-eyed Joys, the more or less than fleshly creatures of his later poems may owe something to that early dressing up, as well as to the honeydew-fed raptures of Nether Stowey.
Some of the early poems reveal underneath the dismal tawdry vesture of contemporary diction the beginnings of what we now know as Coleridge. It is to be seen in the sonnet, “To the Autumnal Moon,” written in 1788 when he was sixteen, which begins,—
“Mild Splendour of the various-vested Night,
Mother of Wildly-working visions hail;”
and then again more subtly in 1795, when he is looking for a Pantisocratic dell,—
“Where Virtue calm with careless step may stray,
And dancing to the moonlight roundelay,