NB. Excerpts from Coleridge's Notebooks have been lightly edited to remove passages shown as deleted in K. Coburn's edition. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor:
The Table Talk and Omniana, ed. T. Ashe (London: George Bell, 1909), p. 87 (May 31, 1830).
Mrs. Barbauld once told me that she admired the Ancient Mariner very much, but that there were two faults in it, -- it was improbable, and had no moral. As for the improbability, I owned that that might admit some question; but as to the want of a moral, I told her that in my own judgment the poem had too much; and that the only, or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination. It to have had no more moral than the Arabian Night's tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up, and says he must kill the aforesaid merchant, because one of the date shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son. [to discussion]
Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross, 2 vols. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1907), 2: 207-8 (opening of Chapter XXIX).
It sometimes happens that we are punished for our faults by incidents, in the causation of which these faults had no share: and this I have always felt the severest punishment. The wound indeed is of the same dimensions; but the edges are jagged, and there is a dull underpain that survives the smart which it had aggravated. For there is always a consolatory feeling that accompanies the sense of a proportion between antecedents and consequents. The sense of Before and After becomes both intelligible and intellectual when, and only when, we contemplate the succession in the relations of Cause and Effect, which, like the two poles of the magnet manifest the being and unity of the one power by relative Opposites, and give, as it were, a substratum of permanence, of identity, and therefore of reality, to the shadowy flux of Time. It is Eternity revealing itself in the phenomena of Time: and the perception and acknowledgment of the proportionality and appropriateness of the Present to the Past, prove to the afflicted Soul, that it has not yet been deprived of the sight of God, that it can still recognise the effective presence of a Father, though through a darkened glass and a turbid atmosphere, though of a Father that is chastising it. [to discussion]
Collected Letters, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1956-1971), i.352-55.
From autobiographical Letter to Thomas Poole, 16 October 1797, last paragraph (p. 355):
Towards the latter end of September 1781 my Father went to Plymouth with my Brother Francis, who was to go as Midshipman under Admiral Graves; the Admiral was a friend of my Father's. -- My Father settled my Brother; & returned Oct. 4th, 1781 -- . He arrived at Exeter about six o'clock -- & was pressed to take a bed there by the Harts -- but he refused -- and to avoid their intreaties he told them -- that he had never been superstitious -- but that the night before he had had a dream which had made a deep impression. He dreamt that Death had appeared to him, as he is commonly painted, & touched him with his Dart. Well he returned home -- & all his family, I excepted, were up. He told my mother his dream --; but he was in high health & good spirits -- & there was a bowl of Punch made -- & my Father gave a long & particular account of his Travel, and that he had placed Frank under a religious Captain &c -- / At length, he went to bed, very well, & in high Spirits. -- A short time after he had lain down he complained of a pain in his bowells, which he was subject to, from the wind -- my mother got him some peppermint water -- and after a pause, he said -- 'I am much better now, my dear!' -- and lay down again. In a minute my mother heard a noise in his throat -- and spoke to him -- but he did not answer -- and she spoke repeatedly in vain. Her shriek awaked me -- & I said, 'Papa is dead.' -- I did not know [of] my Father's return, but I knew that he was expected. How I came to think of his Death, I cannot tell; but so it was. -- Dead he was -- some said it was the Gout in the Heart -- probably, it was a fit of Apoplexy / -- He was an Israelite without guile; simple, generous, and, taking some scripture texts in their literal sense, he was conscientiously indifferent to the good & the evil of this world. --
God love you & S. T. Coleridge [to discussion]
Notebooks, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 3 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957-1973), ii.2398.
Note of January 1805, given below except for the final paragraph:
It is a most instructive part of my Life the fact, that I have been always preyed on by some Dread, and perhaps all my faulty actions have been the consequence of some Dread or other on my mind / from fear of Pain, or Shame, not from prospect of Pleasure / -- so in my childhood & Boyhood the horror of being detected with a sorehead; afterwards imaginary fears of having the Itch in my Blood -- / then a short-lived Fit of Fears from sex -- then horror of DUNS, & a state of struggling with madness from an incapability of hoping that I should be able to marry Mary Evans (and this strange passion of fervent tho' wholly imaginative and imaginary Love uncombinable by my utmost efforts with (any regular) Hope -- / possibly from deficiency of bodily feeling, of tactual ideas connected with the image) had all the effects of direct Fear, & I have lain for hours together awake at night, groaning & praying -- Then came that stormy time / and for a few months America really inspired Hope, & I became an exalted Being -- then came Rob. Southey's alienation / my marriage -- constant dread in my mind respecting Mrs Coleridge's Temper, &c -- and finally stimulants in the fear & prevention of violent Bowel-attacks from mental agitation / then (almost epileptic) night-horrors in my sleep / & since then every error I have committed, has been the immediate effect of the Dread of these bad most shocking Dreams -- any thing to prevent them / -- all this interwoven with its minor consequences, that fill up the interspaces -- the cherry juice running in between the cherries in a cherry pie / procrastination in dread of this -- & something else in consequence of that procrast. &c / -- and from the same cause the least languor expressed in a Letter from S.H. drives me wild / & it is most unfortunate that I so fearfully despondent should have concentered my soul thus on one almost as feeble in Hope as myself. 11 Jan. 1805.-- [to discussion]
This note, written during the voyage to Malta, in part reads:
Tuesday Morning, May Day, 1804!! In the Mediterranean plying wearily to the Windward off Carthegena -- a wet foggy oppressive Weather, with the wind impotent or against us! And the Captn begins to look round for the Jonas in the Fleet. Mem. One advantage of sailing in a Convoy. On a single Vessel the Jonas must have been sought out amongst ourselves. Hamburgh packet/did not like his giving up his Bed but thought now that he was only a Fool / not the Devil. But he has muster enough. For Top Sails and top gallant Sails, & Royals / The Devil has help'd him to a Commodore's Share / Aye! aye! the Devil knows his Relations &c &c/ Here Vexation, which in a Sailor's mind is always linked on to Reproach and Anger, makes the Superstitious seek out an Object of his Superstition, that can feel his anger Else the Star, that dogged the Crescent or my "Cursed by the last Look of the waning moon," were the better What an extensive subject would not superstition form taken in its philos. and most comprehen. sense for that mood of Thought & Feeling which arises out of the having placed our summum bonum (what we think so, I mean) in an absolute Dependence on Powers & Events, over which we have no Controll. [to discussion]
Notebooks, ii.2078. [to quotation and discussion]
R. C. Bald cited another dream of 1820 in connection with Life-in-Death, from the unpublished Notebook 23, p. 31: "Coleridge and The Ancient Mariner: Addenda to The Road to Xanadu," in Herbert Davis, W. C. DeVane, and R. C. Bald, eds., Nineteenth Century Studies (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1940), p. 34.
A note on a dream, written at Malta in March 1805:
Monday Morning, which I ought not to have known not to be Sunday Night, 2 o'clock, March 4 -- had been playing with Souter's pretty children / but went to bed with bad bowels -- dreams interfused with struggle and fear, tho' till the very last not Victors -- and the very last which awoke me, & which was a completed Night-mair, as it gave the idea and sensation of actual grasp or touch contrary to my will, & in apparent consequence of the malignant will of the external Form, actually appearing or (as sometimes happens) believed to exist / in which latter case tho' I have two or three times felt a horrid touch of Hatred, a grasp, or a weight, of Hate and Horror abstracted from all (Conscious) form or supposal of Form / an abstract touch / an abstract grasp -- an abstract weight! -- Quam nihil ad genium, Papiliane, tuum! i.e. This Mackintosh would prove to be Nonsense by a Scotch Smile. -- / The last that awoke me, I was saying, tho' a true Night-mair was however a mild one. I cried out early, like a scarcely-hurt Child who knows himself within hearing of his Mother. But anterior to this I had been playing with Children, especially with one most lovely Child, about 2 years old or 2½ -- and had repeated to her in my Dream, "The Dews were falling fast" &c -- and I was sorely frightened by the sneering and fiendish malignity of the beautiful creature / from the beginning there had been a Terror about it, and proceeding from it / -- I shall hereafter read the Visions in Macbeth with increased admiration. [to discussion]
Notebooks, ii.3078. [to quotation and discussion]
Opus Maximum, ed. Alice D. Snyder, Coleridge on Logic and Learning (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1929), p. 132. [to discussion]
William Wordsworth
Wordsworth, William, "Prospectus" to The Recluse, lines 66-68. [to discussion]
Written by 1800; published with The Excursion in 1814. Here is a longer extract from "The Prospectus" that includes the quoted lines:
-- Beauty -- a living Presence of the earth,
Surpassing the most fair ideal Forms
Which craft of delicate Spirits hath composed
From earth's materials -- waits upon my steps;
Pitches her tents before me as I move,
An hourly neighbour. Paradise, and groves
Elysian, Fortunate Fields -- like those of old
Sought in the Atlantic Main -- why should they be
A history only of departed things,
Or a mere fiction of what never was?
For the discerning intellect of Man,
When wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion, shall find these
A simple produce of the common day.
-- I, long before the blissful hour arrives,
Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse
Of this great consummation:-- and, by words
Which speak of nothing more than what we are,
Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep
Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain
To noble raptures; while my voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual Mind,
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external World
Is fitted:-- and how exquisitely, (66)
Theme this but little heard of among men --
The external World is fitted to the Mind;
And the creation (by no lower name
Can it be called) which they with blended might
Accomplish: this is our high argument.