[253] Ib. i. 2.
[254] The lines are taken, with some alterations, from a kind of l’envoy or epilogue which Bruno affixed to his long philosophical poem, Jordani Bruni Nolani de Innumerabilibus Immenso et Infigurabili; seu de Universo et Mundis libri octo. Francofurti, 1591, p. 654.
[255] John Hamilton Mortimer, 1741-1779. He painted King John granting Magna Charta, the Battle of Agincourt, the Conversion of the Britons, and other historical subjects.
[256] Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, Song 22, 1-17.
[257] The Latin Iambics, in which Dean Ogle celebrated the little Blyth, which ran through his father’s park at Kirkley, near Ponteland, deserve the highest praise; but Bowles’s translation is far from being execrable. He may not have caught the peculiar tones of the Northumbrian burn which awoke the memories of the scholarly Dean, but his irregular lines are not without their own pathos and melody. Bowles was a Winchester boy, and Dr. Newton Ogle, then Dean of Winchester, was one of his earliest patrons. It was from the Dean’s son, his old schoolfellow, Lieutenant Ogle, that he claimed to have gathered the particulars of Coleridge’s discovery at Reading and discharge from the army. “Poems of William Lisle Bowles,” Galignani, 1829, p. 131; “The Late Mr. Coleridge a Common Soldier,” Times, August 13, 1834.
[258] One of a series of falls made by the Dash Beck, which divides the parishes of Caldbeck and Skiddaw Forest, and flows into Bassenthwaite Lake.
The following minute description is from an entry in a note-book dated October 10, 1800:—
“The Dash itself is by no means equal to the Churnmilk (sic) at Eastdale (sic) or the Wytheburn Fall. This I wrote standing under and seeing the whole Dash; but when I went over and descended to the bottom, then I only saw the real Fall and the curve of the steep slope, and retracted. It is, indeed, so seen, a fine thing. It falls parallel with a fine black rock thirty feet, and is more shattered, more completely atomized and white, than any I have ever seen.... The Fall of the Dash is in a horse-shoe basin of its own, wildly peopled with small ashes standing out of the rocks. Crossed the beck close by the white pool, and stood on the other side in a complete spray-rain. Here it assumes, I think, a still finer appearance. You see the vast rugged net and angular points and upright cones of the black rock; the Fall assumes a variety and complexity, parts rushing in wheels, other parts perpendicular, some in white horse-tails, while towards the right edge of the black [rock] two or three leisurely fillets have escaped out of the turmoil.”
[259] I have been unable to discover any trace of the MS. of this translation.
[260] The “Ode to Dejection,” of which this is the earliest version, was composed on Sunday evening, April 4, and published six months later, in the Morning Post of October 4, 1802. It was reprinted in the Sibylline Leaves, 1817. A comparison of the Ode, as sent to Sotheby, with the first printed version (Poetical Works, Appendix G, pp. 522-524) shows that it underwent many changes before it was permitted to see the “light of common day” in the columns of the Morning Post. The Ode was begun some three weeks after Coleridge returned to Keswick, after an absence of four months. He had visited Southey in London, he had been a fellow guest with Tom Wedgwood for a month at Stowey, he had returned to London and attended Davy’s lectures at the Royal Institution, and on his way home he had stayed for a fortnight with his friend T. Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s brother-in-law, at Gallow Hill.