PREFACES TO THE COLLECTED EDITION OF TEN VOLUMES, PUBLISHED IN 1837, 1838. 1 PREFACE ΤΟ THE FIRST VOLUME. long after it was written; inasmuch as it must be impossible to recall the precise train of thought in which any passage was conceived, and the considerations upon which not the single verse alone but the whole sentence, or At the age of sixty-three I have undertaken paragraph, had been constructed: but with to collect and edite my Poetical Works, with regard to more important changes, there could | the last corrections that I can expect to bestow be no danger of introducing any discrepance in upon them. They have obtained a reputation style. With juvenile pieces the case is diffeequal to my wishes; and I have this ground rent. From these the faults of diction have for hoping it may not be deemed hereafter been weeded wherever it could be done withmore than commensurate with their deserts, out more trouble than the composition origithat it has been gained without ever accommoda-nally cost, and than the piece itself was worth. ting myself to the taste or fashion of the times. But inherent faults of conception and structure Thus to collect and revise them is a duty which are incurable; and it would have been mere I owe to that part of the Public by whom they waste of time to recompose what it was imposhave been auspiciously received, and to those sible otherwise to amend. who will take a lively concern in my good name - when I shall have departed. The arrangement was the first thing to be considered. In this the order wherein the respective poems were written has been observed, so far as was compatible with a convenient classification. Such order is useful to those who read critically, and desire to trace the an author's mind in his writings; and by affixing dates to the minor pieces, der whatever head they are disposed, the object is sufficiently attained. progress of If these poems had been now for the first time to be made public, there are some among them which, instead of being committed to the press, would have been consigned to the flames; not for any disgrace which could be reflected upon me by the crude compositions of my youth, nor for any harm which they could possibly do the reader, but merely that they might not cumber the collection. But "nescit vox missa reverti." Pirated editions would hold out as a recommendation, that they con tained what I had chosen to suppress, and thus Next came the question of correction. There it becomes prudent, and therefore proper, that was no difficulty with those poems which were such pieces should be retained. composed after the author had acquired his art (so far as he has acquired it), and after his imitated a passage, or borrowed an expression, to bear in mind the risk there must ever be of the present occasion it behoves me to state options were matured. It was only necessary to acknowledge the specific obligation. Upon injuring a poem by verbal alterations made the more general and therefore more important It has ever been a rule with me when I have A 2 My obligation to Dr. Sayers is of a different kind. Every one who has an ear for metre and a heart for poetry, must have felt how perfectly the metre of Collins's "Ode to Evening" is in accordance with the imagery and the feeling. None of the experiments which were made of other unrhymed stanzas proved successful. They were either in strongly marked and well-known measures which unavoidably led the reader to expect obligations which I am conscious of owing either to my predecessors, or my contemporaries. My first attempts in verse were much too early to be imitative, but I was fortunate enough to find my way, when very young, into the right path. I read the "Jerusalem Delivered" and the "Orlando Furioso" again and again, in Hoole's translations: it was for the sake of their stories that I perused and re-perused these poems with ever new delight; and by bringing them thus within my reach in boy-rhyme, and consequently baulked him when he hood, the translator rendered me a service which, when I look back upon my intellectual life, I cannot estimate too highly. I owe him much also for his notes, not only for the information concerning other Italian romances which they imparted, but also for introducing me to Spenser ;-how early, an incident which I well remember may show. Going with a relation into Bull's circulating library at Bath (an excellent one for those days), and asking whether they had the "Faery Queen," the person who managed the shop said "yes, they had it, but it was in obsolete language, and the young gentleman would not understand it." But I, who had learned all I then knew of the history of England from Shakespear, and who had moreover read Beaumont and Fletcher, found no difficulty in Spenser's English, and felt in the beauty of his versification a charm in poetry of which I had never been fully sensible before. From that time I took Spenser for my master. I drank also betimes of Chaucer's well. The taste which had been acquired in that school was confirmed by Percy's "Reliques" and Warton's "History of English Poetry;" and a little later by Homer and the Bible It was not likely to be corrupted afterwards. My school-boy verses savoured of Gray, Mason, and my predecessor Warton; and in the best of my juvenile pieces it may be seen how much the writer's mind had been imbued by Akenside. I am conscious also of having derived much benefit at one time from Cowper, and more from Bowles; for which, and for the delight which his poems gave me at an age when we are most susceptible of such delight, my good friend at Bremhill, to whom I was then and long afterwards personally unknown, will allow me to make this grateful and cordial acknowledgment. looked for it; or they were in stanzas as cumbrous as they were ill constructed. Dr. Sayers went upon a different principle, and succeeded admirably. I read his "Dramatic Sketches of Northern Mythology" when they were first published, and convinced myself when I had acquired some skill in versification, that the kind of verse in which his choruses were composed was not less applicable to narration than to lyrical poetry. Soon after I had begun the Arabian romance, for which this measure seemed the most appropriate vehicle, “Gebir" fell into my hands, and my verse was greatly improved by it, both in vividness and strength. Several years elapsed before I knew that Walter Landor was the author, and more before I had the good fortune to meet the person to whom I felt myself thus beholden. The days which I have passed with him in the Vale of Ewias, at Como, and lastly in the neighbourhood of Bristol, are some of those which have left with me "a joy for memory." I have thus acknowledged all the specific obligations to my elders or contemporaries in the art, of which I am distinctly conscious. The advantages arising from intimate intercourse with those who were engaged in similar pursuits cannot be in like manner specified, because in their nature they are imperceptible; but of such advantages no man has ever possessed more or greater, than at different times it has been my lot to enjoy. Personal attachment first, and family circumstances afterwards, connected me long and closely with Mr. Coleridge; and three-and-thirty years have ratified a friendship with Mr. Wordsworth, which we believe will not terminate with this life, and which it is a pleasure for us to know will be continued and cherished as an heir-loom by those who are dearest to us both. When I add what has been the greatest of all advantages, that I have passed more than half my life in retirement, conversing with books rather than men, constantly and unweariably engaged in literary pursuits, communing with my own heart, and taking that course which upon mature consideration seemed best to myself, I have said every thing necessary to account for the characteristics of my poetry, whatever they may be. It was in a mood resembling in no slight degree that wherewith a person in sound health, both of body and mind, makes his will and sets his worldly affairs in order, that I entered upon the serious task of arranging and revising the whole of my poetical works. What, indeed, was it but to bring in review before me the dreams and aspirations of my youth, and the feelings whereto I had given that free utterance which by the usages of this world is permitted to us in poetry, and in poetry alone? Of the smaller pieces in this collection there is scarcely one concerning which I cannot vividly call to mind when and where it was composed. I have perfect recollection of the spots where many, not of the scenes only, but of the images which I have described from nature, were observed and noted. And how would it be possible for me to forget the interest taken in these poems, especially the longer and more ambitious works, by those persons nearest and dearest to me then, who witnessed their growth and completion? Well may it be called a serious task thus to resuscitate the past! But serious though it be, it is not painful to one who knows that the end of his journey cannot be far distant, and, by the blessing of God, locks on to its termination with sure and certain hope. "The better, please; the worse, displease: I ask no more." In the third edition of Joan of Arc, the Vision was printed separately, at the end; and its place was supplied in the second edition of the Poems by miscellaneous pieces. A separate volume, entitled "Metrical Tales and other Poems," was published in 1805, with this advertisement:-"These Poems were published some years ago in the Annual Anthology. (Bristol, 1799, 1800.) They have now been revised and printed in this collected form, because they have pleased those readers whom the Author was most desirous of pleasing. Let them be considered as the desultory productions of a man sedulously employed upon better things." These various pieces were re-arranged in three volumes, under the title of Minor Poems, in 1815, with this motto, or early manhood. One of these written in my twentieth year, not having been published at the time, would never have been made public by my own act and deed; but as Wat Tyler obtained considerable notoriety upon its surreptitious publication, it seemed proper that a production which will be specially noticed whenever the author shall be delivered over to the biographers, should be included here. They who may desire to know more than is stated in the advertisement now prefixed to it, are referred to a Letter addressed to William Smith, Esq. M. P., 1817, reprinted in the second volume of my Essays Moral and Political, 1832. The second volume of this part of the Collection contains one juvenile piece, and many which were written in early manhood. The remainder were composed in middle or later life, and comprise (with one exception, that will more conveniently be arranged elsewhere,) all the odes which as Poet Laureat I have written upon national occasions. Of these the Carmen Triumphale, and the Carmina Aulica, were separately published in quarto in 1814, and reprinted together in a little volume in 1821. The Juvenile and Minor Poems in this Collection bear an inconsiderable proportion to those of substantive length: for a small part only of my youthful effusions were spared from those autos-da-fé in which from time to time piles upon piles have been consumed. In middle life works of greater extent, or of a different kind, left me little leisure for occasional poetry; the impulse ceased, and latterly the inclination was so seldom felt, that it required an effort to call it forth. Sir William Davenant, in the Preface to Gondibert, "took occasion to accuse and condemn all those hasty digestions of thought which were published in his youth; a sentence, said he, not pronounced out of melancholy rigour, but from a cheerful obedience to the just authority of experience. For that grave mistress of the world, experience, (in whose profitable school those before the Flood stayed long, but we, like wanton children, come thither late, yet too soon are called out of it, and fetched home by death,) hath taught me that the engenderings of unripe age become abortive and deformed; and that 'tis a high presumption to entertain a nation (who are a poet's standing guest, and require monarchical respect,) with hasty provisions; as if a poet might imitate the familiar despatch of faulconers, mount his Pegasus, unhood his Muse, and, with a few flights, boast he hath provided a feast for a prince. Such posting upon Pegasus I have long since foreborne." Yet this eminently thoughtful poet was so far from seeking to suppress the crude compositions which he thus condemned, that he often expressed a great desire to see all his pieces collected in one volume; and, conformably to his wish, they were so collected, after his decease, by his widow and his friend Herringman the bookseller. Agreeing with Davenant in condemning the greater part of my juvenile pieces, it is only as crudities that I condemn them; for in all that I have written, whether in prose or verse, there has never been a line which for any compunctious reason, living or dying, I could wish to blot. Davenant had not changed his opinion of his own youthful productions so as to overlook in his age the defects which he had once clearly perceived; but he knew that pieces which it would indeed have been presumptuous to reproduce on the score of their merit, might yet be deemed worthy of preservation on other grounds; that to his family and friends, and to those who might take any interest in English poetry hereafter, they would possess peculiar value, as characteristic memorials of one who had held no inconsiderable place in the literature of his own times; feeling, too, that he was not likely to be forgotten by posterity, he thought that after the specimen which he had produced in his Gondibert of a great and elaborate poem, his early attempts would be regarded with curiosity by such of his successors as should, like him, study poetry as an art,- for as an art it must be studied by those who would excel in it, though excellence in it is not attainable by art alone. The cases are very few in which any thing more can be inferred from juvenile poetry, than that the aspirant possesses imitative talent, and the power of versifying, for which, as for music, there must be a certain natural aptitude. It is not merely because "they have lacked culture and the inspiring aid of books*," that so many poets who have been "sown by Nature," Wordsworth. have "wanted the accomplishment of verse," and brought forth no fruit after their kind. Men of the highest culture, of whose poetical temperament no doubt can be entertained, and who had "taken to the height the measure of themselves," have yet failed in their endeavour to become poets, for want of that accomplishment. It is frequently possessed without any other qualification, or any capacity for improvement; but then the innate and incurable defect that renders it abortive, is at once apparent. The state of literature in this kingdom during the last fifty years has produced the same effect upon poetry that academies produce upon painting; in both arts every possible assistance is afforded to imitative talents, and in both they are carried as far as the talent of imitation can reach. But there is one respect in which poetry differs widely from the sister arts. Its fairest promise frequently proves deceitful, whereas both in painting and music the early indications of genius are unequivocal. The children who were called musical prodigies, have become great musicians; and great painters, as far as their history is known, have displayed in childhood that accuracy of eye, and dexterity of hand, and shaping faculty, which are the prime requisites for their calling. But it is often found that young poets of whom great expectations were formed, have made no progress, and have even fallen short of their first performances. It may be said that this is because men apply themselves to music and to painting as their professions, but that no one makes poetry the business of his life. This, however, is not the only reason: the indications, as has already been observed, are far less certain; and the circumstances of society are far less favourable for the moral and intellectual culture which is required for all the higher branches of poetry,.. all indeed that deserves the name. My advice as to publishing, has often been asked by young poets, who suppose that experience has qualified me to give it, and who have not yet learnt how seldom advice is taken, and how little therefore it is worth. As a general rale, it may be said that one who is not deceived in the estimate which he has formed of his own powers, can neither write too much in his youth, nor publish too little. It cannot, however, be needful to caution the present race of poetical alventures against hurrying with their pro ductions to the press, for there are obstacles enough in the way of publication. Looking back upon my own career, and acknowledging my imprudence in this respect, I have nevertheless no cause to wish that I had pursued a different course. In this, as in other circumstances of my life, I have reason to be thankful to that merciful Providence which shaped the ends that I had roughly hewn for myself. Keswick, Sept. 30. 1837. PREFACE ΤΟ THE THIRD VOLUME, BEING THE SECOND OF 66 JUVENILE AND MINOR POEMS." In a former Preface my obligations to Akenside were acknowledged, with especial reference to the Hymn to the Penates; the earliest of my Inscriptions also originated in the pleasure with which I perused those of this favourite author. Others of a later date bear a nearer resemblance to the general character of Chiabrera's epitaphs. Those which relate to the Peninsular War are part of a series which I once hoped to have completed. The epitaph for Bishop Butler was originally composed in the lapidary style, to suit the monument in Bristol Cathedral: it has been remodelled here, that I might express myself more at length, and in a style more accordant with my own judgement. One thing remains to be explained, and I shall then have said all that it becomes me to say concerning these Minor Poems. It was stated in some of the newspapers that Walter Scott and myself became competitors for the Poet-Laureateship upon the death of Mr. Pye; that we met accidentally at the Prince Regent's levee, each in pursuit of his pretensions, and that some words which were not over-courtecus on either side passed between us on the occasion;—to such impudent fabrications will those persons resort who make it their business to pander for public curiosity. The circumstances relating to that appointment have been made known in Mr. Lockhart's Life of Sir Walter. His conduct was, as it always was, |