MSS. and the First Edition. It is inconceivable that in Coleridge's lifetime and while his pen was still busy, his nephew should have meddled with, or remodelled, the master's handiwork.

The poems have been printed, as far as possible, in chronological order, but when no MS. is extant, or when the MS. authority is a first draft embodied in a notebook, the exact date can only be arrived at by a balance of probabilities. The present edition includes all poems and fragments published for the first time in 1893. Many of these were excerpts from the Notebooks, collected, transcribed, and dated by myself. Some of the fragments (vide post, p. 996, n. 1) I have since discovered are not original compositions, but were selected passages from elder poets—amongst them Cartwright's lines, entitled 'The Second Birth', which are printed on p. 362 of the text; but for their insertion in the edition of 1893, for a few misreadings of the MSS., and for their approximate date, I was mainly responsible.

In preparing the textual and bibliographical notes which are now printed as footnotes to the poems I was constantly indebted for information and suggestions to the Notes to the Poems (pp. 561-654) in the edition of 1893. I have taken nothing for granted, but I have followed, for the most part, where Dykes Campbell led, and if I differ from his conclusions or have been able to supply fresh information, it is because fresh information based on fresh material was at my disposal.

No apology is needed for publishing a collation of the text of Coleridge's Poems with that of earlier editions or with the MSS. of first drafts and alternative versions. The first to attempt anything of the kind was Richard Herne Shepherd, the learned and accurate editor of the Poetical Works in four volumes, issued by Basil Montagu Pickering in 1877. Important variants are recorded by Mr. Campbell in his Notes to the edition of 1893; and in a posthumous volume, edited by Mr. Hale White in 1899 (Coleridge's Poems, &c.), the corrected parts of 'Religious Musings', the MSS. of 'Lewti', the 'Introduction to the Dark Ladié', and other poems are reproduced in facsimile. Few poets have altered the text of their poems so often, and so often for the better, as Coleridge. He has been blamed for 'writing so little', for deserting poetry for metaphysics and theology; he has been upbraided for winning only to lose the 'prize of his high calling'. Sir Walter Scott, one of his kindlier censors, rebukes him for 'the caprice and indolence with which he has thrown from him, as if in mere wantonness, those unfinished scraps of poetry, which like the Torso of antiquity defy the skill of his poetical brethren to complete them'. But whatever may be said for or against Coleridge as an 'inventor of harmonies', neither the fineness of his self-criticism nor the laborious diligence which he expended on perfecting his inventions can be gainsaid. His erasures and emendations are not only a lesson in the art of poetry, not only a record of poetical growth and development, but they discover and reveal the hidden springs, the thoughts and passions of the artificer.

But if this be true of a stanza, a line, a word here or there, inserted as an afterthought, is there use or sense in printing a number of trifling or, apparently, accidental variants? Might not a choice have been made, and the jots and tittles ignored or suppressed?

My plea is that it is difficult if not impossible to draw a line above which a variant is important and below which it is negligible; that, to use a word of the poet's own coining, his emendations are rarely if ever 'lightheartednesses'; and that if a collation of the printed text with MSS. is worth studying at all the one must be as decipherable as the other. Facsimiles are rare and costly productions, and an exhaustive table of variants is the nearest approach to a substitute. Many, I know, are the shortcomings, too many, I fear, are the errors in the