By what I have effected, am I to be judged by my fellow-men; what I could have done is a question for my own conscience.—S. T. C.

As the Biographia Literaria does not mention all Mr. Coleridge’s writings, it will be proper to give some account of them here.

The Poetical Works in three volumes include the Juvenile Poems, Sibylline Leaves, Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Remorse, Zapolya, and Wallenstein.

The first volume of Juvenile Poems was published in the Spring of 1796. It contains three sonnets by Charles Lamb, and a poetical Epistle which he called “Sara’s,” but of which my Mother told me she wrote but little. Indeed it is not very like some simple affecting verses, which were wholly by herself, on the death of her beautiful infant, Berkeley, in 1799. In May, 1797, Mr. C. put forth a collection of poems, containing all that were in his first edition, with the exception of twenty pieces and the addition of ten new ones and a considerable number by his friends, Lloyd and Lamb. The Ancient Mariner, Love,[47] The Nightingale, The Foster Mother’s Tale first appeared with the Lyrical Ballads of Mr. Wordsworth in the summer of 1798. There was a third edition of the Juvenile Poems by themselves in 1803, with the original motto from Statius, Felix curarum, etc. Silo. Lib. iv. A spirit of almost child-like sociability seemed to reign among these young poets—they were fond of joint publications.

Wallenstein, a Play translated from the German of Schiller, appeared in 1800. Christabel was not published till April 1816, but written, the first part at Stowey in 1797, the second at Keswick in 1800. It went into a third edition in the first year. The fragment called Kubla Khan, composed in 1797,[48] and the Pains of Sleep, which was annexed to the former by way of contrast, were published with the first edition of Christabel, in 1816.

The Tragedy called Remorse was written in the summer and autumn of 1797, but not represented on the stage till 1813, when it was performed at Drury Lane—on the authority of an old play-bill of the Calne Theatre, “with unbounded applause thirty successive nights.” On “the success of the Remorse,” Mr. Coleridge wrote thus to his friend Mr. Poole, on the 14th of February, 1813:

Letter 152.

“The receipt of your heart-engendered lines was sweeter than an unexpected strain of sweetest music;—or in humbler phrase, it was the only pleasurable sensation which the success of the Remorse has given me. I have read of, or perhaps only imagined, a punishment in Arabia, in which the culprit was so bricked up as to be unable to turn his eyes to the right or to the left, while in front was placed a high heap of barren sand glittering under the vertical sun. Some slight analogue of this, I have myself suffered from the mere unusualness of having my attention forcibly directed to a subject which permitted neither sequence of imagery, nor series of reasoning. No grocer’s apprentice, after his first month’s permitted riot, was ever sicker of figs and raisins than I of hearing about the Remorse. The endless rat-a-tat-tat at our black-and-blue bruised door, and my three master fiends, proof sheets, letters (for I have a raging epistolophobia), and worse than these—invitations to large dinners, which I cannot refuse without offence and imputation of pride, nor accept without disturbance of temper the day before, and a sick aching stomach for two days after—oppress me so that my spirits quite sink under it.

“I have never seen the Play since the first night. It has been a good thing for the Theatre. They will get £8,000 or £10,000 by it, and I shall get more than all my literary labours put together, nay, thrice as much, subtracting my heavy losses in The Watchman and The Friend, including the copyright.”[49]

The manuscript of the Remorse, immediately after it was written, was shown to Mr. Sheridan, “who,” says my Father, in the Preface to the first Edition, “by a twice conveyed recommendation (in the year 1797) had urged me to write a Tragedy for his theatre, who, on my objection that I was utterly ignorant of all stage tactics, had promised that he would himself make the necessary alterations, if the piece should be at all representable.” He however neither gave him any answer, nor returned him the manuscript, which he suffered to wander about the town from his house, and my Father goes on to say, “not only asserted that the Play was rejected because I would not submit to the alteration of one ludicrous line, but finally, in the year 1806, amused and delighted (as who was ever in his society, if I may trust the universal report, without being amused and delighted?) a large company at the house of a highly respectable Member of Parliament, with the ridicule of the Tragedy, as a fair specimen of the whole of which he adduced a line:

In the original copy of the Play, in the first scene of the fourth act, Isidore had commenced his soliloquy in the cavern with the words:

Drip! drip! a ceaseless sound of water-drops,—

as far as I can at present recollect: for, on the possible ludicrous association being pointed out to me, I instantly and thankfully struck out the line.” I repeat this story as told by Mr. C. himself, because it has been otherwise told by others. I have little doubt that it was more pointedly than faithfully told to him, and can never believe that Mr. S. represented a ludicrous line as a fair specimen of the whole Play, or his tenacious adherence to it as the reason for its rejection. I dare say he thought it, as Lord Byron afterwards thought Zapolya, “beautiful but not practicable.” Mr. Coleridge felt that he had some claim to a friendly spirit of criticism in that quarter, because he had “devoted the firstlings of his talents,” as he says in a marginal note, “to the celebration of Sheridan’s genius,”[50] and after the treatment described “not only never spoke unkindly or resentfully of it, but actually was zealous and frequent in defending and praising his public principles and conduct in the Morning Post”—of which, perhaps, Mr. S. knew nothing. However, in lighter moods, my Father laughed at Sheridan’s joke as much as any of his auditors could have done in 1806, and repeated with great effect and mock solemnity “Drip!—Drip!—Drip!—nothing but dripping.” I suppose it was at this time,—the winter of 1806–7—that he made an unsuccessful attempt to bring out the Tragedy at Drury Lane.[51]

When first written this Play had been called Osorio, from the principal character, whose name my Father afterwards improved into Ordonio. I believe he in some degree altered, if he did not absolutely recast, the three last acts after the failure with Mr. Sheridan, who probably led him to see their unfitness for theatrical representation.[52] But of this point I have not certain knowledge. It was when Drury Lane was under the management of Lord Byron and Mr. Whitbread, and through the influence of the former, that it was produced upon the stage. Mr. Gillman says, “Although Mr. Whitbread did not give it the advantage of a single new scene, yet the popularity of the Play was such, that the principal actor, (Mr. Roe,) who had performed in it with great success, made choice of it for his benefit night, and it brought an overflowing house.” This was some time after Mr. Coleridge took up his residence at Highgate, in April, 1816. After all I am happy to think that this drama is a strain of poetry, and like all, not only dramatic poems, but highly poetic dramas, not to be fully appreciated on the stage.

Zapolya came before the public in 1817. The stage fate of this piece is alluded to in the B. L. Mr. Gillman mentions that it was Mr. Douglas Kinnaird, then the critic for Drury Lane, who rejected the Play, and complained of its “metaphysics”—a term which is not, upon all occasions, to be strictly construed, but, when used in familiar talk, seems merely to denote whatever is too fine-spun, in the texture of thought and speech, for common wear; whatever is not readily apprehensible and generally acceptable. Schoolboys call everything in books or discourse, which is graver or tenderer than they like, “metaphysics.” Mr. Kinnaird may have judged quite rightly that the Play was too metaphysical for our theatres in their present state, though certainly plays as metaphysical were once well received on the stage. Zapolya, however, had a favourable audience from the public as a dramatic poem. Mr. Gillman says this Christmas Tale, which the author “never sat down to write, but dictated while walking up and down the room, became so immediately popular that 2,000 copies were sold in six weeks.”

The collection of poems entitled Sibylline Leaves, “in allusion to the fragmentary and widely scattered state in which they had been long suffered to remain,” appeared in 1817, about the same time with Zapolya, the Biographia Literaria, and the first Lay Sermon.

The Miscellaneous Poems were composed at different periods of the author’s life, many of them in his later years. I believe that Youth and Age was written before he left the North of England in 1810,[53] when he was about seven or eight-and-thirty,—early indeed for the poet to say of himself

The whole of the Poetical Works, with the exception of a few which must be incorporated in a future edition, are contained in that in three volumes.[54] The Fall of Robespierre, an Historic drama, of which the first act was written by Mr. Coleridge, and published September 22, 1794, is printed in the first vol. of the Lit. Remains. This first act contains the Song on Domestic Peace. In the blank verse there are some faint dawnings of his maturer style, as in these lines:

and in these:

but it contains scarcely anything of his peculiar original powers, and some of the lines are in schoolboy taste; for instance,

Yet three years after the date of this composition, in 1797, which has been called his Annus Mirabilis, he had reached his poetical zenith. But perhaps it may be said that, from original temperament, and the excitement of circumstances, my Father lived fast.

He had four poetical epochs, which represented, in some sort, boyhood, youthful manhood, middle age, and the decline of life. The first commenced a little on this side childhood, when he wrote Time real and Imaginary, and ended in 1796. This period embraces the Juvenile Poems, concluding with Religious Musings, written on the Christmas Eve of 1794, a few months after The Fall of Robespierre: The Destiny of Nations was composed a little earlier. Lewti, written in 1795, The Æolian Harp, and Reflections on having left a place of Retirement, written soon after, are more finished poems, and exhibit more of his peculiar vein than any which he wrote before them; though one poet, Mr. Bowles, has said that he never surpassed the Religious Musings! Fire, Famine, and Slaughter belongs to 1796. The Lines to a Friend (Charles Lamb) who had declared his intention of writing no more poetry, and those To a Young Friend (Charles Lloyd) were composed in the same year. These poems of 1794–5-6 may be considered intermediate in power as in time, and so forming a link between the first epoch and the next.[55]

Then came his poetic prime, which commenced with the Ode to the Departing Year, composed at the end of December, 1796. The year following, the five-and-twentieth of his life, produced the Ancient Mariner, Love, and The Dark Ladie, the first part of Christabel, Kubla Khan, Remorse, in its original cast, France, and This Lime-tree bower. Fears in Solitude, The Nightingale, and The Wanderings of Cain, were written in 1798. Frost at Midnight,[56] The Picture,[57] the Lines to the Rev. G. Coleridge,[58] and those To W. Wordsworth,[59] are all of this same Stowey period. It was in June, 1797, that my Father began to be intimate with Mr. Wordsworth, and this doubtless gave an impulse to his mind. The Hymn before Sunrise,[60] and other strains produced in Germany, link this period to the next. The Hexameters written during a temporary blindness, and the Catullian Hendecasyllables (which are freely translated from Matthisson’s Milesisches MÄhrchen) Mr. Cottle seems to place in 1797,[61] but the Author has marked the former as produced in 1799, and I believe that the latter are of the same date. The Night Scene, Myrtle leaf that ill besped,[62] Maiden that with sullen brow, are of this period, and so I believe are Lines composed in a concert-room, and some others.

The poems which succeed are distinguished from those of my Father’s Stowey life by a less buoyant spirit. Poetic fire they have, but not the clear bright mounting flame of his earlier poetry. Their meditative vein is graver, and they seem tinged with the sombre hues of middle age; though some of them were written before the Author was thirty-five years old. A characteristic poem of this period is Dejection, an Ode: composed at Keswick, April 4, 1802. Wallenstein had been written in London in 1800. The Three Graves was composed in 1805 or 6;[63] the second part of Christabel soon after the Author’s settling in the Lake country (in 1801);[64] Youth and Age not long before he quitted it as a residence for ever (in 1810).[65] Recollections of Love must have been written on his return to Keswick from Malta in 1806: The Happy Husband at that time, or earlier. The small fragment called The Knight’s Tomb probably belongs to the North. The Devil’s Thoughts appeared in The Morning Post in 1800.[66] This production certainly has in it more of youthful sprightliness than of middle-aged soberness; still it is less fantastic and has more of world-wisdom in its satire than the War Eclogue of 1796. The Complaint and Reply first appeared in 1802. The Ode to Tranquillity was published in The Friend, March, 1809.

The poems of his after years, even when sad, are calmer in their melancholy than those produced while he was ceasing to be young. We are less heavy-hearted when youth is out of sight than when it is taking its leave. Duty surviving Self-Love, The Pang more sharp than all, Love’s Apparition and Evanishment, The Blossoming of the solitary Date tree, and some other poems of his latter years, have this character of resigned and subdued sadness. Work without Hope was written at fifty-six. The Visionary Hope and The Pains of Sleep,[67] which express more agitation and severer suffering, are of earlier date. These and all in the Sibylline Leaves were written before the end of 1817, when he had completed his forty-fifth year. The productions of the fourth epoch, looked at as works of imagination, are tender, graceful, exquisitely finished, but less bold and animated than those of his earlier day. This may be said of Zapolya, Alice du Clos,[68] The Garden of Boccaccio,[69] The Two Founts, Lines suggested by the last Words of Berengarius, Sancti Dominici Pallium, and other poems written, I believe, when the poet was past forty, the four last-named after he was fifty years old. Love, Hope, and Patience in Education was, I think, one of his latest poetical efforts, if not the very last.

The following prose compositions are included in the poetical volumes, and the Apologetic Preface to Fire, Famine and Slaughter, containing a comparison between Milton and Jeremy Taylor, is placed at the end of Vol. I: An Allegoric Vision, first published in The Courier in 1811, and New Thoughts on Old Subjects, which first appeared in The Keepsake, are inserted in Vol. II.

The whole of the Poetical Works, except a few which have been reprinted in the Literary Remains, are contained in the stereotyped edition in three volumes. The Poems without the Dramas have been collected in a single volume,[70] from which some of the Juvenile Poems, and two or three of later date, are excluded, and which includes a few not contained in the three vol. edition.

I now proceed to Mr. Coleridge’s compositions in Prose. Conciones ad Populum, are two addresses to the People, delivered at the latter end of February,[71] and then thrown into a small pamphlet. “After this,” says Mr. Cottle, “he consolidated two other of his lectures, and published them under the title of The Plot Discovered.” A moral and political Lecture delivered at Bristol by Mr. C. was published in the same year. I do not know whether he printed any of his other Bristol orations of the year ninety-five. The Watchman was carried on in 1796. The first number appeared March 1; the tenth and last, May 13. These were youthful immature productions. Whatever was valuable and of a permanent nature in them was transferred into his later productions, or included in later publications.

The Friend, a Literary, Moral, and Political Weekly Paper, excluding personal and party politics and the events of the day, was written and published at Grasmere. The first number appeared on Thursday, June 1st, 1809, the 27th and last of that edition, March 15, 1810. The Friend next appeared before the public in 3 vols. in 1818. This was “rather a rifacimento,” as the Author said, “than a new edition, the additions forming so large a proportion of the whole work, and the arrangement being altogether new.” (Essays V-XIII, pp. 38–128, treat of the Duty of communicating truth, and the conditions under which it may be safely communicated; Essay V is on the expediency of pious frauds, etc.). The third edition of 1837 gave the Author’s last corrections, an appendix containing the parts thrown out in the recast, with some other miscellanea, and a synoptical table of the contents by the Editor. There is now a fourth edition.

The two Lay Sermons were published, the one in 1816, the other in 1817. The first is entitled The Statesman’s Manual, or The Bible the best Guide to Political skill and foresight: a Lay Sermon addressed to the higher classes of society, with an Appendix, containing comments and essays connected with the study of the inspired writings:—the second A Lay Sermon, addressed to the Higher and Middle Classes, on the existing distresses and discontents. Mr. Gillman says he “had the intention of addressing a third to the lower classes.”

The Biographia Literaria was published in 1817, but parts of the first volume must have been composed some years earlier.[72] The Edinburgh Review in its August number of that year was as favourable to the book as could be expected.”[73]