ANIMA POETÆ

FROM THE UNPUBLISHED
NOTE-BOOKS OF
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

EDITED BY
ERNEST HARTLEY COLERIDGE

LONDON

WILLIAM HEINEMANN

MDCCCXCV

All rights reserved

Entered at Stationers' Hall

Entered at the Library of Congress, Washington

Copyright, 1895

When shall I find time and ease to reduce my pocket-books and memorandums to an Index or Memoriæ Memorandorum? If—aye! and alas! if I could see the last sheet of my Assertio Fidei Christianæ, et eterni temporizantis, having previously beheld my elements of Discourse, Logic, Dialectic, and Noetic, or Canon, Criterion, and Organon, with the philosophic Glossary—in one printed volume, and the Exercises in Reasoning as another—if—what then? Why, then I would publish all that remained unused, Travels and all, under the title of Excursions Abroad and at Home, what I have seen and what I have thought with a little of what I have felt, in the words in which I told and talked them to my pocket-books, the confidants who have not betrayed me, the friends whose silence was not detraction, and the inmates before whom I was not ashamed to complain, to yearn, to weep, or even to pray! To which are added marginal notes from many old books and one or two new ones, sifted through the Mogul Sieve of Duty towards my Neighbour—by 'Εστησε.

    21 June, 1823.

PREFACE

Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which the poet's nephew and son-in-law, Henry Nelson Coleridge, published in 1835, was a popular book from the first, and has won the approval of two generations of readers. Unlike the Biographia Literaria, or the original and revised versions of The Friend, which never had their day at all, or the Aids to Reflection, which passed through many editions, but now seems to have delivered its message, the Table Talk is still well known and widely read, and that not only by students of literature. The task which the editor set himself was a difficult one, but it lay within the powers of an attentive listener, possessed of a good memory and those rarer gifts of a refined and scholarly taste, a sound and luminous common sense. He does not attempt to reproduce Coleridge's conversation or monologue or impassioned harangue, but he preserves and notes down the detached fragments of knowledge and wisdom which fell from time to time from the master's lips. Here are "the balmy sunny islets of the blest and the intelligible," an unvexed and harbourous archipelago. Very sparingly, if at all, have those pithy "sentences" and weighty paragraphs been trimmed or pruned by the pious solicitude of the memorialist, but it must be borne in mind that the unities are more or less consciously observed, alike in the matter of the discourse and the artistic presentation to the reader. There is, in short, not merely a "mechanic" but an "organic regularity" in the composition of the work as a whole. A "myriad-minded" sage, who has seen men and cities, who has read widely and shaped his thoughts in a peculiar mould, is pouring out his stores of knowledge, the garnered fruit of a life of study and meditation, for the benefit of an apt learner, a discreet and appreciative disciple. A day comes when the marvellous lips are constrained to an endless silence, and it becomes the duty and privilege of the beloved and honoured pupil to "snatch from forgetfulness" and to hand down to posterity the great tradition of his master's eloquence. A labour of love so useful and so fascinating was accomplished by the gifted editor of the Table Talk,