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The Scribner English Classics

EDITED BY

FREDERICK H. SYKES, PH.D.
TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY



COLERIDGE'S ANCIENT MARINER AND SELECT POEMS



1908




PREFATORY NOTE


The text of the poems in this volume is that of J. <DW18>s Campbell in the
Globe edition of Coleridge's poems. For the introduction I have depended
also largely upon his Memoir of Coleridge, and upon the two volumes of
the "Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge," edited by the poet's grandson,
Mr. E.H. Coleridge. In the Notes, as will be seen, I am indebted
particularly to the general editor of this series, Dr. F.H. Sykes, to
Dr. Lane Cooper of Cornell University, and again to Mr. Coleridge,
through whose kindness I have been able to get a reproduction of the
Marshmills crayon, undoubtedly the most satisfactory portrait of the
poet in existence, for the frontispiece.

H.M.B.




CONTENTS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INTRODUCTION:

  I. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
  II. COLERIDGE'S POEMS

  TEXT:

  THE ANCIENT MARINER
  CHRISTABEL
  KUBLA KHAN
  LOVE
  FRANCE: AN ODE
  DEJECTION: AN ODE
  YOUTH AND AGE
  WORK WITHOUT HOPE
  EPITAPH

  NOTES




*SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY*


EDITIONS:

Globe Edition. Edited by J. <DW18>s Campbell. 1 vol. Muses' Library.
Edited by Richard Garnett.

LIFE AND CRITICISM:

Stephen, Leslie, Article "Coleridge" in "The Dictionary of National
Biography."

H.D. Traill, "Coleridge" ("English Men of Letters Series").

Caine, T.H., "Coleridge" ("Great Writers Series").

Coleridge, S.T., "Biographia Literaria" ("Everyman's Library").

De Quincey, T., "Lake Poets."

Hazlitt, W., "First Acquaintance with Poets."

Cottle, J., "Reminiscences of Coleridge and Southey."

Pater, W., "Appreciations."

Shairp, J.C., "Studies in Poetry and Philosophy."

Sarrazin, Gabriel, "La Renaissance de la Poesie Anglaise, 1798-1889."

Brandl, Alois, "S.T. Coleridge and the English Romantic School."

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Haney, J.L., "A Bibliography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge."




INTRODUCTION


I. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


I. THE BEGINNINGS


Coleridge lived in what may safely be called the most momentous period
of modern history. In the year following his birth Warren Hastings was
appointed first governor-general of India, where he maintained English
empire during years of war with rival nations, and where he committed
those acts of cruelty and tyranny which called forth the greatest
eloquence of the greatest of English orators, in the famous impeachment
trial at Westminster, when Coleridge was a sixteen-year-old schoolboy in
London. A few years before his birth the liberal philosophy of France
had found a popular voice in the writings of Rousseau, which became the
gospel of revolution throughout Europe in Coleridge's youth and early
manhood. "The New Heloise" in the field of sentiment and of the relation
of the sexes, "The Social Contract" In political theory, and "Emile" in
matters of education, were books whose influence upon Coleridge's
generation it would be hard to estimate. When Coleridge was four years
old the English colonies in America declared their independence and
founded a new nation upon the natural rights of man,--a nation that has
grown to be the mightiest and most beneficent on the globe. Coleridge
was seventeen when the French Revolution broke out; he was forty-three
when Napoleon was sent to St. Helena. He saw the whole career of the
greatest political upheaval and of the greatest military genius of the
modern world. Fox, Pitt, and Burke,--the greatest Liberal orator, the
greatest Parliamentary leader, and the greatest philosophic statesman
that England has produced--were at the height of their glory when
Coleridge went up to Cambridge in 1791.

In literature--naturally, since literature is but an interpretation of
life--the age was not less remarkable. Dr. Johnson was still alive when
Coleridge came up to school at Christ's Hospital, Goldsmith had died
eight years before. But a new spirit was abroad in the younger
generation. Macpherson's "Fingal," alleged to be a translation from the
ancient Gaelic poet Ossian, had appeared in 1760; Thomas Percy's
"Reliques of Ancient English Poetry," a collection of folk-ballads and
rude verse-romances such as the common people cherished but critics had
long refused to consider as poetry, was published in 1765. These two
books were of prime importance in fostering a new taste in
literature,--a love of natural beauty, of simplicity, and of rude
strength. The new taste hailed with delight the appearance of a native
lyric genius in Burns, whose first volume of poems was printed in 1786.
It welcomed also the homely, simple sweetness, what Coleridge and Lamb
called the "divine chit-chat," of Cowper, whose "Task" appeared in the
preceding year. But it was in Coleridge himself and his close
contemporaries and followers that the splendor of the new poetry showed
itself. He was two years younger than Wordsworth, a year younger than
Scott; he was sixteen at the birth of Byron, twenty at that of Shelley,
twenty-four at that of Keats; and he outlived all of them except
Wordsworth. His genius blossomed early. "The Ancient Mariner," his
greatest poem, was published some years before Wordsworth's "Ode on the
Intimations of Immortality" was written, or Scott's "Lay of the Last
Minstrel." He was in the prime of life, or what should have been the
prime of life--forty years old--when Byron burst into sudden fame with
the first two cantos of "Childe Harold" in 1812; he was forty-six when
Keats published "Endymion"; he was fifty-one when Shelley was drowned.
And of all this gifted company Coleridge, though not the strongest
character or the most prolific poet, was the profoundest intellect and
the _most originative poetic spirit_.

There was little hint, however, of future greatness or of fellowship
with great names in his birth and early circumstances. His father was a
country clergyman and schoolmaster in the village of Ottery St. Mary, in
Devonshire, a simple-hearted unworldly man, full of curious learning and
not very attentive to practical affairs. His mother managed the
household and brought up the children. Both his parents were of simple
West-country stock; but his father, having a natural turn for study and
having done well in his early manhood as a schoolmaster, went at the age
of thirty-one as a sizar, or poor student, to Sidney-Sussex College,
Cambridge, took orders, and was afterwards given the living of Ottery
St. Mary. Here he continued his beloved work of teaching, in addition to
his pastoral duties, and by means of this combination won the humble
livelihood which, through his wife's careful economy, sufficed for
rearing his large family. Coleridge tells us that his father "had so
little of parental ambition in him that he had destined his children to
be blacksmiths, etc." (though he had "resolved that I should be a
parson"), "and had accomplished his intention but for my mother's pride
and spirit of aggrandizing her family." Several of the children rewarded
their mother's care by distinguishing themselves in a modest way in the
army or in the church, but the only one about whom the world is curious
now was the youngest of the ten, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was born
at Ottery St. Mary, October 21, 1772.

The essential traits of his later character appeared in his early
childhood. Almost from infancy he lived in his imagination rather than
in the world of reality. "The schoolboys drove me from play, and were
always tormenting me, and hence I took no pleasure in boyish sports, but
read incessantly.... I became a _dreamer_, and acquired an indisposition
to all bodily activity; and I was fretful, and inordinately
passionate." "Sensibility, imagination, vanity, sloth," were "prominent
and manifest" in his character before he was eight years old. Such is
his own account of his childhood, written to his friend Poole in 1797;
and it is an accurate description, as far as it goes, of the grown man.
But of the religious temper, too, the love of freedom and of virtue, the
hatred of injustice, cruelty, and falsehood that guided his uneven steps
through all the pitiful struggle of his middle life, of the conscience
that made his weakness hell to him--of these, too, we may be sure that
the beginnings were to be seen in the boy at Ottery St. Mary, as indeed
they were before his eyes in the person of his father, who, if not a
first-rate genius, was, says his son, "a first-rate Christian."

The good vicar died in 1781; and the next year, a "presentation" to
Christ's Hospital having been secured for him, little Samuel, not yet
eleven years old, went up to London to enter the famous old city school.
Here,

  "In the great city, pent'mid cloisters dim,"

where he

  "Saw nought lovely but the sky and stars,"

one of some seven hundred Blue-Coat boys, Coleridge lived for nine
years.

Most of the boys at Christ's Hospital, then as now, were given a
"commercial" education (which none the less included a very thorough
training in Latin); but a few of the most promising students were each
year selected by the masters for a classical training in preparation for
the universities, whence they were known as Grecians. Coleridge was
elected a Grecian in 1788. The famous Boyer--famous for his enthusiasm
alike in teaching the classics and in wielding the birch--laid the
foundation of Coleridge's later scholarship. Here, too, Coleridge did a
great amount of reading not laid down in the curriculum,--Latin and
Greek poetry and philosophy, mediaeval science and metaphysics--and won
the approval of his teachers by the excellence of his verses in Greek
and Latin, such as boys at school and students at the universities were
expected to write in those days. In the great city school, as in the
Devonshire vicarage, he lived in the imagination, inert of body and
rapacious of intellect; but he was solitary no longer, having found his
tongue and among his more intellectual schoolfellows an interested
audience. While yet a boy, he would hold an audience spellbound by his
eloquent declamation or the fervor of his argument till, as Lamb, who
was one of his hearers, tells us, "the walls of the old Grey Friars
re-echoed to the accents of the _inspired charity boy_!" That is the way
his conversation,--or monologue, as it often was,--affected not boys
only, but men, and especially young men, to his dying day. He cast a
spell upon men by his speech; upon his schoolfellows, upon young men at
the universities in the Pantisocracy days, upon Lloyd and Poole at
Nether Stowey, upon earnest young thinkers in his last days at Highgate;
so that even if he had never written "The Ancient Mariner" and the
_Biographia, Literaria_ he would still be remembered for the inspiration
of his talk.

Further details of the life at Christ's Hospital must be sought in
Lamb's two essays, especially that on "Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty
Years Ago." In 1791, having secured a Christ's Hospital "exhibition," he
entered Jesus College, Cambridge.

His university life extended over three years, from October, 1791, to
December, 1794. It was an unhappy time for him and an uneasy time for
his respectable relatives, for reasons that were partly in his own
nature and partly in the temper of the times.

Even Boyer's severe training, while it had made him a hard student and
an unusual scholar for his years, had failed to give him what he most
needed as a balance to his intellect and imagination, stability of
character. There is evidence that after the first few months, during
which the habits of his hard school life had not yet broken, the new
liberty of university life led him into extravagance, if not
dissipation. Work he doubtless did (he won the Browne medal for a Greek
ode on the slave-trade in 1792), but fitfully, giving less and less
attention to his regular studies and more to conviviality and, above
all, to dreams of literary fame. He wrote verses after various models,
sentimental, fanciful, or gallant; he was enthusiastic in praise of a
contemporary sonneteer, the Rev. William Bowles, whose "divine
sensibility" seemed to him the height of poetic feeling; and in
connection with Wordsworth's younger brother Christopher, who entered
Cambridge in 1793, he formed a literary society that discussed, among
other things, Wordsworth's volume of early poetry, "Descriptive
Sketches," published in that year. Wordsworth himself was a Cambridge
man, but had taken his degree in 1791 and gone abroad, so that the two
men whose personal friendship was to mean so much in English poetry did
not meet until 1796. Already in 1793, however, Coleridge had developed
political theories, or rather sympathies, which were preparing him for
fellowship with Wordsworth.

The French Revolution, which, after years of preparation, took concrete
shape in 1789, did not look to young Englishmen in 1791-4 as it looks to
us now, nor even as it was to look to those same Englishmen in 1800. In
those first years warm-hearted young enthusiasts at the universities saw
in the violence of their fellow-men across the Channel only the
struggles of the beautiful Spirit of Liberty bursting the chains of
age-long tyranny and corruption and calling men up to the heights to
breathe diviner air.

  "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
  But to be young was very Heaven!"

wrote Wordsworth afterwards; and in the glow of his young idealism he
had gone over to France in the autumn of 1791 and was on the point of
throwing in his lot with the revolutionists, when his parents compelled
his return by cutting off his supplies. And many who, like Coleridge,
merely watched from afar shared his faith that a new order of things was
to be established, wherein Love should be Law and man's inhumanity to
man become but a memory of things outworn.

Less generous men, with a selfish interest in established privileges;
timid men, who looked with terror upon any prospect of change; older and
wiser men, who better understood the foundations of social order and the
nature of man--all these looked with distrust upon the revolutionary
idealism that was spreading from France through the younger generation
of Englishmen. The new notions of liberty, it was felt, threatened not
only the vested rights of property and the prescriptions of rank, but
the Church, too, and religion. Some of the would-be reformers were
avowed atheists; some (Coleridge and his friends, for instance, in the
Pantisocracy period) were communists. In general, they ascribed all the
evils of society to "institutions," and wanted them abolished.

Just how far Coleridge had gone in this direction by the autumn of 1793
we do not know; far enough at least to disturb his view of the future,
to worry his elder brother George, a clergyman and school-teacher, who
had in some measure filled a father's place to the young genius, and,
most important of all, to alarm and distress a gentle girl in London.
For before he left Christ's Hospital for Cambridge he had become
intimate at the house of a Mrs. Evans, and most of the letters preserved
from his first two years at the University were addressed to her or to
one of her two daughters, Anne and Mary. With the latter Coleridge was
in love; and that she had some regard for him is apparent from a letter
she sent him in 1794. Before that, however, Coleridge had taken a step
that seemed likely to close at once his college career and his prospects
of literary fame. The reasons have not been recorded: probably pecuniary
embarrassment, the yeasty state of his religious and political ideas,
and impatience or despondency over his love-affair with Mary Evans,
combined to precipitate his flight; what we know is that he ran away
from Cambridge and in December, 1793, enlisted as a dragoon in the
army.

Coleridge had hardly taken the step before he repented of it. His
letters to his brother George, who with other friends bestirred himself
for Coleridge's release as soon as his whereabouts was discovered, are
rather distressing in their self-abasement. The efforts of his friends
were successful and in April he returned to the University, where a
public admonition was the extent of his punishment, and he continued in
receipt of his Christ's Hospital exhibition.

But Coleridge's college days were practically over. He was now nearly
twenty-two years old, and the revolutionary unrest which had doubtless
contributed to his first escapade soon resulted in the formation of
schemes that took him away from Cambridge for good and all. In June,
1794, he made a visit to an old schoolfellow at Oxford. Here he met
Robert Southey of Balliol