1. The volume contained also three sonnets by Charles Lamb, one of which was destined to have a somewhat curious history.
2. "Wherefore my bowels shall sound like an harp." – Is. xvi. 11.
3. Take for instance this sentence: "Our own sorrows, like the Princes of Hell in Milton's Pandemonium, sit enthroned 'bulky and vast;' while the miseries of our fellow-creatures dwindle into pigmy forms, and are crowded in an innumerable multitude into some dark corner of the heart." Both in character of imagery and in form of structure we have here the germ of such passages as this which one might confidently defy the most accomplished literary "taster" to distinguish from Jeremy Taylor: "Or like two rapid streams that at their first meeting within narrow and rocky banks mutually strive to repel each other, and intermix reluctantly and in tumult, but soon finding a wider channel and more yielding shores, blend and dilate and flow on in one current and with one voice." – Biog. Lit. p. 155.
4. Perhaps a "correspondence" of which only one side exists may be hardly thought to deserve that name. Lamb's letters to Coleridge are full of valuable criticism on their respective poetical efforts. Unfortunately in, it is somewhat strangely said, "a fit of dejection" he destroyed all Coleridge's letters to him.
5. Lamb's Correspondence with Coleridge, Letter XXXVII.
Chapter III
Coleridge and Wordsworth – Publication of the Lyrical Ballads – The Ancient Mariner – The first part of Christabel – Decline of Coleridge's poetic impulse-Final review of his poetry.
[1797-1799.]
The years 1797 and 1798 are generally and justly regarded as the blossoming-time of Coleridge's poetic genius. It would be scarcely an exaggeration to say that they were even more than this, and that within the brief period covered by them is included not only the development of the poet's powers to their full maturity but the untimely beginnings of their decline. For to pass from the poems written by Coleridge within these two years to those of later origin is like passing from among the green wealth of summer foliage into the well-nigh naked woods of later autumn. During 1797 and 1798 the Ancient Mariner, the first part of Christabel, the fine ode to France, the Fears in Solitude, the beautiful lines entitled Frost at Midnight, the Nightingale, the Circassian Love-Chant, the piece known as Love from the poem of the Dark Ladie, and that strange fragment Kubla Khan, were all of them written and nearly all of them published; while between the last composed of these and that swan-song of his dying Muse, the Dejection, of 1802, there is but one piece to be added to the list of his greater works. This therefore, the second part of Christabel (1800), may almost be described by the picturesque image in the first part of the same poem as