Imatges de pàgina
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THE

POETICAL WORKS

OF

SAMUEL T. COLERIDGE.

Juvenile Poems.

PREFACE.

Love and the wish of Poets when their tongue
Would teach to others' bosoms, what so charms
Their own.

impelled to seck for sympathy; but a Poet's feelings are all strong. Quicquid amet valde amat. Akenside COMPOSITIONS resembling those here collected are therefore speaks with philosophical accuracy when not unfrequently condemned for their querulous he classes Love and Poetry, as producing the same Egotism. But Egotism is to be condemned then only effects: when it offends against time and place, as in a Hislory or an Epic Poem. To censure it in a Monody or Sonnet is almost as absurd as to dislike a circle. for being round. Why then write Sonnets or Monodies? Because they give me pleasure when perhaps nothing else could. After the more violent emotions of Sorrow, the mind demands amusement, and can End it in employment alone: but, full of its late sufkrings, it can endure no employment not in some measure connected with them. Forcibly to turn away our attention to general subjects is a painful and most often an unavailing effort.

But 0! how grateful to a wounded heart
The tale of Misery to impart
From others' eyes bid artless sorrows flow,
And raise esteem upon the base of Woe!

Shaw.

Pleasures of Imagination. There is one species of Egotism which is truly disgusting; not that which leads us to communicate our feelings to others but that which would reduce the feelings of others to an identity with our own The Atheist, who exclaims "pshaw!" when he glances his eye on the praises of Deity, is an Egotist: an old man, when he speaks contemptuously of Loveverses, is an Egotist: and the sleek Favorites of Fortune are Egotists, when they condemn all "melancholy, discontented" verses. Surely, it would be candid not merely to ask whether the poem pleases ourselves, but to consider whether or no there may not be others, to whom it is well calculated to give an innocent pleasure.

The communicativeness of our Nature leads us to describe our own sorrows; in the endeavor to deI shall only add, that each of my readers will, I scribe them, intellectual activity is exerted; and hope, remember, that these Poems on various subfra intellectual activity there results a pleasure, jects, which he reads at one time and under the inwhich is gradually associated, and mingles as a cor- fluence of one set of feelings, were written at differrective, with the painful subject of the description. ent times and prompted by very different feelings; "True!" (it may be answered) "but how are the PUBLIC interested in your sorrows or your Descripbon?" We are for ever attributing personal Unities imaginary Aggregates. What is the PUBLIC, but a der for a number of scattered individuals? of whom as many will be interested in these sorrows, as have experienced the same or similar.

Holy be the lay

and therefore that the supposed inferiority of one Poem to another may sometimes be owing to the temper of mind in which he happens to peruse it.

My poems have been rightly charged with a pro fusion of double-epithets, and a general turgidness I have pruned the double-epithets with no sparing hand; and used my best efforts to tame the swell and glitter both of thought and diction.* This latter

Which mourning soothes the mourner on his way. If I could judge of others by myself, I should not besitate to affirm, that the most interesting passages *Without any feeling of anger, I may yet be allowed to are those in which the Author develops his own express some degree of surprise, that after having run the feelings? The sweet voice of Cona* never sounds a too ornate and elaborately poetic diction, and nothing havsweetly, as when it speaks of itself; and I should ing come before the judgment-seat of the Reviewers during 4imost suspect that man of an unkindly heart, who ld read the opening of the third book of the Paradise Lost without peculiar emotion. By a Law of our Nature, he, who labors under a strong feeling, is

critical gauntlet for a certain class of faults, which I had, viz.

• Ossian.

the long interval, I should for at least seventeen years, quarter after quarter, have been placed by them in the foremost rank ridicule for faults directly opposite, viz. bald and prosaic language, and an affected simplicity both of matter and manner

of the proscribed, and made to abide the brunt of abuse and

-faults which assuredly did not enter into the character of my compositions.-Literary Life, i 51. Published 1817

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