POEMS COLLECTED IN 1796-1797:-

Preface to Poems published in 1796

Preface to the Second Edition, published in 1797

Postscript to the Edition of 1797

PAGE

39

43

45

47

47

48

50

55

Lines on an Autumnal Evening

The Rose

The Kiss

To a Young Ass

The Sigh

68

69

70

72

Lines on a Friend who died of a frenzy fever

Religious Musings

To a Young Lady, with a poem on the French

Imitated from the Welsh

Lines written at Shurton Bars

Lines to a Friend in answer to a melancholy letter

To the Rev. W. J. H., while teaching a young

lady some song-tunes on his flute.

78

80

80

To a Friend, together with an Unfinished Poem

To the Nightingale

POEMS COLLECTED IN 1796-1797 (continued)

The Hour when we shall meet again

Written after a walk before supper

To Joseph Cottle

The Silver Thimble

SONNETS:-

Introduction to the Sonnets

129

I. "Thou gentle look, that didst my soul beguile" 146

II. To the River Otter

III. "Sweet Mercy! how my very heart has bled"

IV. "Pale roamer thro' the night, thou poor forlorn!"

V. To the Author of The Robbers

VI. Composed on a Journey homeward, the Author

having received intelligence of the birth of a

VII. To a Friend who asked me how I felt when the

Nurse presented my infant to me

VIII. "Thou bleedest, my poor heart, and thy distress"

146

147

148

148

150

151

POEMS COLLECTED IN 1796-1797 (continued) :
:-

To an Unfortunate Woman, whom the Author had

known in the days of her innocence

To a Friend, on his proposing to domesticate with

the Author

On observing a Blossom on the first of February

The Eolian Harp

Reflections on having left a place of retirement

To the Rev. George Coleridge

Ode to the Departing Year

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS (1794-1797) :-

Melancholy, a Fragment

Parliamentary Oscillators

Imitation of Casimir

Fragment from an Unpublished Poem

On a late Connubial Rupture in High Life

The Destiny of Nations: A Vision

Lines addressed to a young man of fortune who

abandoned himself to an indolent and cause-

less melancholy

PAGE

152

153

156

157

160

163

187

188

Sonnets of Nehemiah Higginbottom

On the Christening of a Friend's Child

To a Primrose, the first seen in the season

APPENDIX:-

Translation of Coleridge's Greek Ode on Astro-

nomy

Letter to the Monthly Magazine on his Monody on

Chatterton

Note to "Lines on an Autumnal Evening"

Note to "The Silver Thimble"

210

211

214

216

MEMOIR

OF

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

FROM 1760 to 1781, the pleasant little town of Ottery St. Mary in Devonshire had for its vicar the Rev. JOHN Coleridge, who was at the same time head-master of Henry VIII's Free Grammar-School, usually termed the King's School. Before Coleridge's his appointment to the School at Ottery, he Father. had been head-master of the School at South Molton. He had assisted Dr. Kennicott in his Hebrew Bible, had published on his own account a Dissertation on part of the Book of Judges,* and some elementary Latin books for the use of his school, and was known beyond the narrow limits of his vicarage as a man of great learning and at the same time of great eccentricity. His profound erudition, combined with an equally profound ignorance and inexperience of the world and its usages, his primitive manners and guileless simplicity, made him a living realization of Parson Adams, with whom his illustrious son was wont in after life to compare him.† One of the learned Vicar's

* Miscellaneous Dissertations arising from the 17th and 18th Chapters of the Book of Judges. By the Rev. Mr. John Coleridge, Vicar of, and Schoolmaster at, Ottery St. Mary, Devon. London: Printed for the Author, 1768.

+ De Quincey, in Tait's Magazine, Sept. 1834, p. 518; The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, by James Gillman. Lond., William Pickering, 1838, p. 2.

mar.

elementary books on the Latin language made somewhat higher pretensions than a common school gram"In particular," says De Quincey, "an attempt is made to reform the theory of the cases; and it gives a pleasant specimen of the rustic scholar's naïveté, that he seriously proposes to banish such vexatious terms as the ablative; and, by way of simplifying the matter to tender minds, that we should call it, in all time to come, the “quale-quare-quidditive” case.* He used regularly to delight his village flock, on Sundays, with Hebrew quotations in his Sermons, which he always introduced as the "immediate language of the Holy Ghost." This proved unfortunate to his successor; he also was a learned man, and his parishioners admitted it, but generally with a sigh for past times and a sorrowful complaint that he was still

* A Critical Latin Grammar, containing clear and distinct rules for boys just initiated; and Notes Explanatory of almost every antiquity and obscurity in the Language, for youth somewhat advanced in Latin Learning. By John Coleridge, Vicar and Schoolmaster at Ottery St. Mary, Devon. London: Printed for the Author, 1772.

"The Quale-quare-quidditive Case is so called, because it denotes the manner of doing, how, the cause why, or the instrument with which the prior case effects its end."

The good Schoolmaster and Vicar also published :— Sententiæ Excerptæ, explaining the Rules of Grammar, and the Various Signification of all the Prepositions, and

Government not originally proceeding from Human Agency, but Divine Institution, shewn in a Sermon preached at Ottery St. Mary, Devon, December 13, 1776, on the FastDay, appointed by reason of our much-to-be-lamented American War, and published at the request of the hearers. By John Coleridge, Vicar of, and Schoolmaster at Ottery St. Mary, Devon. London: Printed for the Author, 1777. 4to., pp. 15.