[While at Highgate, Coleridge contributed some short pieces of poetry, which may be regarded as his Autumn Leaves, to the Annals got up by Alaric Alexander Watts and F. M. Reynolds, to which Sir Walter Scott and the other leading literary men of the time were induced to send their less ambitious pieces. Fine steel engravings accompanied the poems and novelettes; and one of these by Stoddart, entitled the Garden of Boccaccio, was the subject of a poem by Coleridge in the Keepsake of 1829. For this poem and some trifling epigrams Coleridge received the sum of £50 (Life of Alaric Watts, i, 292). The name of Coleridge must have stood high to command so large a fee for the things given to the Keepsake. The Lines on Berengarius appeared in the Literary Souvenir of 1827, and Youth and Age and Work without Hope in the Bijou of 1828.

Some conception of the importance of these annuals may be gathered from stating that the Literary Souvenir of 1827, got up by Alaric Watts, sold to the number of 7,712 copies in England, between November and April, and 700 in America of the ordinary edition, and 528 of a large-paper edition. There were other annuals besides these already mentioned, called the Forget-me-Not, Friendship’s Offering, The Amulet, The Winter’s Wreath, The Anniversary, The Gem, and other kindred publications (Life of Alaric Watts, i, 305).The most finished production of Coleridge’s latest period is Alice Du Clos, a ballad of the Romantic Movement. Much speculation as to the date of its origin has been put forth, some thinking it belongs to the time when the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and the Three Graves were written, others placing it between the publication of the last two Editions of the Collected Poems, 1829–1834. But in Letter 205 of date 8th October 1822, the quotation of the two lines

seems to imply that the ballad was then extant. Coleridge, as we know (see Letters, ii, 717), was engaged between 1822 and 1825 writing his Aids to Reflection, and the following curious passage occurs in Aphorism XXXI (Moral and Religious Aphorisms). Speaking of slander, he says: “It is not expressible how deep a wound a tongue sharpened to this work will give, with no noise and a very little word. This is the true white gunpowder, which the dreaming projectors of silent mischief and insensible poisons sought for in the laboratories of art and nature, in a world of good; but which was to be found in its most destructive form, in the world of evil, the Tongue” (Bohn Library edition, p. 70). Alice Du Clos, or the Forked Tongue, is the full title of the ballad; and it looks as if it had been written to illustrate the passage, though it has an affinity with Lewis’s Ellen of Eglantine and The Troubadour, or Lady Alice’s Bower (Tales of Terror and Wonder).[142]

In a letter to William Blackwood of 20th October 1829 Coleridge says he has among other poems for the Magazine, “a Lyrical Tale, 250 lines,” which he could give if desired (William Blackwood and his Sons, by Mrs. Oliphant, i, 415). The date of the poem may therefore be put down as 1822–1829.

Alice Du Clos ranks with the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan, Love and the Ballad of the Dark Ladye, among Coleridge’s poems in which he rises out of his own subjectivity into the clear realm of objective art. The remark of Thomas Ashe (Preface to the Aldine Edition of the Poems, cxxxvi), that “the great fault of Coleridge is that he puts too much of himself, unidealized, into his verses,” is perfectly true. Coleridge was himself aware of this defect, and in Letter 167, speaking of the Hymn before Sunrise, he admits that there is in the Hymn too much of the idiosyncratic for true poetry, a piece of self-criticism that can be alleged against a great number of his poems, beautiful of their kind yet savouring too often of the Ego. The Lime Tree Bower, Dejection, an Ode, the Lines to Wordsworth, the Pains of Sleep, the Tombless Epitaph, Youth and Age, the Garden of Boccaccio, Work without Hope, are not exceptions. It is only in the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan, The Three Graves, Love, The Ballad of the Dark Ladye, and Alice Du Clos, that Coleridge succeeds in hiding his own personal identity behind his melodious utterance, and attains to that simplicity which is truly classical. Most of his other poems are autobiographical, and can be thoroughly understood only as part of his epistolary correspondence. His finest ode, Dejection, is only a versified letter to Wordsworth, afterwards denuded of its most personal references, and addressed to a “Lady,” to give it a more artistic cast.

The relationship between Coleridge and Alaric Watts was not confined to the contributions to the Annuals. An agreeable social intimacy sprang up between the Highgate household and the Watts; and a correspondence between Mr. and Mrs. Watts and Coleridge took place. Five fine letters by Coleridge are contained in the Life of Alaric Watts, from which it seems Coleridge and Mr. Watts intended to collaborate in the issue of an edition of Shakespeare, which would have been a congenial task to Coleridge, and one can feel regret that it was not carried out. A feature of the edition was to be “properly critical notes, prefaces, and analyses, comprising the results of five and twenty years’ study: the object being to ascertain and distinguish what Shakespeare possessed in common with other great men of his age, or differing only in degree, and what was his, peculiar to himself” (Life of Alaric Watts, i, 243). This, of course, as any one acquainted with Coleridge’s Lectures on Shakespeare knows, was one of Coleridge’s favourite topics, and one which could have been better illustrated in an annotated edition than in popular lectures.

In one of his letters to Alaric Watts Coleridge gives the best account of the lack of voluntary power to open letters sent him; and counsels Watts if he wishes an immediate answer to his letters to send them under cover to Mrs. Gillman, who is his “outward conscience.” In another letter, sending contributions for the Annual, he encloses his poem entitled Limbo, which he says is a pretended fragment of the poet Lee.]