“Ista tua Carmina Chamouniana satis grandia esse mihi constat; sed hoc mihi nonnihil displicet, quod in iis illæ montium Grisosonum inter se responsiones totidem reboant anglicé, God, God, haud aliter atque temet audivi tuas [sic] montes Cumbrianas [sic] resonare docentes, Tod, Tod, nempe Doctorem infelicem: vocem certe haud Deum sonantem.” Letters of Charles Lamb, i. 185. See, too, Canon Ainger’s translation and note, ibid. p. 331. See, also, Southey’s Letter to Grosvenor Bedford, January 9, 1804. Life and Correspondence, ii. 248.
[271] “The Spirit of Navigation and Discovery.” “Bowles’s Poetical Works,” Galignani, p. 142.
[272] These lines form part of the poem addressed “To Matilda Betham. From a Stranger.” The date of composition was September 9, 1802, the day before they were quoted in the letter to Sotheby. Poetical Works, p. 168.
[273] The “Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni” was first printed in the Morning Post, September 11, 1802. It was reprinted in the original issue of The Friend, No. xi. (October 16, 1809, pp. 174-176), and again in Sibylline Leaves, 1817. As De Quincey was the first to point out, Coleridge was indebted to the Swiss poetess, Frederica Brun, for the framework of the poem and for many admirable lines and images, but it was his solitary walk on Scafell, and the consequent uplifting of spirit, which enabled him “to create the dry bones of the German outline into the fulness of life.”
Coleridge will never lose his title of a Lake Poet, but of the ten years during which he was nominally resident in the Lake District, he was absent at least half the time. Of his greater poems there are but four, the second part of “Christabel,” the “Dejection: an Ode,” the “Picture,” and the “Hymn before Sunrise,” which take their colouring from the scenery of Westmoreland and Cumberland.
He was but twenty-six when he visited Ottery for the last time. It was in his thirty-fifth year that he bade farewell to Stowey and the Quantocks, and after he was turned forty he never saw Grasmere or Keswick again. Ill health and the res angusta domi are stern gaolers, but, if he had been so minded, he would have found a way to revisit the pleasant places in which he had passed his youth and early manhood. In truth, he was well content to be a dweller in “the depths of the huge city” or its outskirts, and like Lamb, he “could not live in Skiddaw.” Poetical Works, p. 165, and Editor’s Note, pp. 629, 630.
[274] Coleridge must have presumed on the ignorance of Sotheby and of his friends generally. He could hardly have passed out of Boyer’s hands without having learned that Ἔστησε signifies, “He hath placed,” not “He hath stood.” But, like most people who have changed their opinions, he took an especial pride in proclaiming his unswerving allegiance to fixed principles. The initials S. T. C., Grecised and mistranslated, expressed this pleasing delusion, and the Greek, “Punic [sc. punnic] Greek,” as he elsewhere calls it, might run the risk of detection.
[275] Parts III. and IV. of the “Three Graves”—were first published in The Friend, No. vi. Sept. 21, 1809. Parts I. and II. were published for the first time in The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Macmillan, 1893. The final version of this stanza (ll. 509-513) differs from that in the text. “A small blue sun” became “A tiny sun,” and for “Ten thousand hairs of colour’d light” Coleridge substituted “Ten thousand hairs and threads of light.” See Poetical Works, p. 92, and Editor’s Note, pp. 589-591.
[276] The six essays to which he calls Estlin’s attention are reprinted in Essays on His Own Times, ii. 478-585.
[277] The residence of Josiah Wedgwood.