[53] Southey, we may suppose, had contrasted Hucks with Coleridge. “H. is on my level, not yours.”
[54] Poetical Works, p. 33. See, too, Editor’s Note, p. 570.
[55] Hucks records the incident in much the same words, but gives the name of the tune as “Corporal Casey.”
[56] The letter to Martin gives further particulars of the tour, including the ascent of Penmaen Mawr in company with Brookes and Berdmore. Compare Table Talk for May 31, 1830: “I took the thought of grinning for joy in that poem (The Ancient Mariner) from my companion’s remark to me, when we had climbed to the top of Plinlimmon, and were nearly dead with thirst. We could not speak from the constriction till we found a little puddle under a stone. He said to me, ‘You grinned like an idiot.’ He had done the same.” The parching thirst of the pedestrians, and their excessive joy at the discovery of a spring of water, are recorded by Hucks. Tour in North Wales, 1795, p. 62.
[57] Southey’s Poetical Works, 1837, ii. 93.
[58] Southey’s Poetical Works, 1837, ii. 94.
[59] See Letter XLI. p. 110, note 1.
[60] “A tragedy, of which the first act was written by S. T. Coleridge.” See footnote to quotation from “The Fall of Robespierre,” which occurs in the text of “An Address on the Present War.” Conciones ad Populum, 1795, p. 66.
[61] One of six sisters, daughters of John Brunton of Norwich. Elizabeth, the eldest of the family, was married in 1791 to Robert Merry the dramatist, the founder of the so-called Della Cruscan school of poetry. Louisa Brunton, the youngest sister, afterwards Countess of Craven, made her first appearance at Covent Garden Theatre on October 5, 1803, and at most could not have been more than twelve or thirteen years of age in the autumn of 1794. Coleridge’s Miss Brunton, to whom he sent a poem on the French Revolution, that is, “The Fall of Robespierre,” must have been an intermediate sister less known to fame. It is curious to note that “The Right Hon. Lady Craven” was a subscriber to the original issue of The Friend in 1809. National Dictionary of Biography, articles “Craven” and “Merry.” Letters of the Lake Poets, 1885, p. 455.
[62] This sonnet, afterwards headed, “On a Discovery made too late,” was “first printed in Poems, 1796, as Effusion XIX., but in the Contents it was called, ‘To my own Heart.’” Poetical Works, p. 34. See, too, Editor’s Note, p. 571.