The present Editors have been guided in the general arrangement of this edition by those of 1817 and 1828, which may be held to represent the author's matured judgment upon the larger and more important part of his poetical productions. They have reason, indeed, to believe, that the edition of 1828 was the last upon which he was able to bestow personal care and attention. That of 1834, the last year of his earthly sojourning, a period when his thoughts were wholly engrossed, so far as the decays of his frail outward part left them free for intellectual pursuits and speculations, by a grand scheme of Christian Philosophy, to the enunciation of which in a long projected work his chief thoughts and aspirations had for many years been directed, was arranged mainly, if not entirely, at the discretion of his earliest Editor, H. N. Coleridge . . . Such alterations only have been made in this final arrangement of the Poetical and Dramatic Works of S. T. Coleridge, by those into whose charge they have devolved, as they feel assured, both the Author himself and his earliest Editor would at this time find to be either necessary or desirable. The observations and experience of eighteen years, a period long enough to bring about many changes in literary opinion, have satisfied them that the immature essays of boyhood and adolescence, not marked with any such prophetic note of genius as certainly does belong to the four school-boy poems they have retained, tend to injure the general effect of a body of poetry. That a writer, especially a writer of verse, should keep out of sight his third-rate performances, is now become a maxim with critics; for they are not, at the worst, effectless: they have an effect, that of diluting and weakening, to the reader's feelings, the general power of the collection. Mr. Coleridge himself constantly, after 1796, rejected a certain portion of his earliest published Juvenilia: never printed any attempts of his boyhood, except those four with which the present publication commences, and there can be no doubt that the Editor of 1834 would ere now have come to the conclusion, that only such of the Author's early performances as were sealed by his own approval ought to form a permanent part of the body of his poetical works.
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It must be added, that time has robbed of their charm certain sportive effusions of Mr. Coleridge's later years, which were given to the public in the first gloss and glow of novelty in 1834, and has proved that, though not devoid of the quality of genius, they possess upon the whole, not more than an ephemeral interest. These the Editors have not scrupled to omit on the same grounds and in the same confidence that has been already explained.
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S. C.
Chester Place, Regent's Park.
March, 1852.
The Contents of 1852 correspond with those of 1844, 1848, with the following omissions: (1) Anthem for the Children of Christ's Hospital; (2) Sonnet, 'Farewell, parental scenes', &c.; (3) To the Muse; (4) With Fielding's Amelia; (5) Sonnet, 'On receiving an account', &c.; (6) Sonnet, 'On seeing a Youth', &c.; (7) Pain; (8) Epigram, 'Hoarse Mævius', &c.; (9) Casimir ad Lyram; (10) 'On the Christening', &c.; (11) Elegy imitated from Akenside; (12) Phantom; (13) Allegoric Vision; (14) Reproof and Reply; (15) Written in an Album, 'Parry', &c.; (16) To the Author of the Ancient Mariner; (17) Job's Luck; (18) On a Volunteer Singer; together with four songs from the dramas.
The additions were (1) Sonnet to Pitt, 'Not always', &c.; (2) Sonnet, 'Not Stanhope', &c.; (3) To the Author of Poems published anonymously at Bristol; (4) The Day-Dream, 'If thou wert here', &c.; (5) The Foster-Mother's Tale; (6) A Hymn; (7) The Alienated Mistress. A Madrigal; (8) To a Lady, 'Tis not the lily brow', &c.; (9) Song, 'Tho' veiled', &c.; (10) L'envoy. 'In vain we supplicate', &c.
The Notes, pp. 379-88, contain, inter alia, the Latin original of 'Kisses' (vide ante, p. 46), and the Sonnet, 'No more my visionary Soul shall dwell', attributed by Southey to Favell (vide ante, p. 68).