DEDICATION.* ΤΟ S. T. COLERIDGE, ESQ. MY DEAR COLERIDGE, You will smile to see the slender labours of your friend designated by the title of works; but such was the wish of the gentlemen who have kindly undertaken the trouble of collecting them, and from their judgment could be no appeal. It would be a kind of disloyalty to offer to any one but yourself a volume containing the early pieces, which were first published among your poems, and were fairly derivatives from you and them. My friend Lloyd and myself came into our first battle (authorship is a sort of warfare) under cover of the greater Ajax. How this association, which shall always be a dear and proud recollection to me, came to be broken-who snapped the three-fold cordwhether yourself (but I know that was not the case) grew ashamed of your former companions-or whether (which is by much the more probable) some ungracious bookseller was author of the separation-I cannot tell; but wanting the support of your friendly elm, (I speak for myself,) my vine has, since that time, put forth few or no fruits; the sap (if ever it had any) has become, in a manner, dried up and extinct; and you will find your old associate, in his second volume, dwindled into prose and criticism. Am I right in assuming this as the cause? or is it that, as years come upon us, (except with some more healthy-happy spirits,) life itself loses much of its poetry for us? we transcribe but what we read in the great volume of Nature; and, as the characters grow dim, we turn off, and look another way. You yourself write no Christables or Ancient Mariners now. Some of the sonnets, which shall be carelessly turned over by the general reader, may happily awaken in you remembrances which I should be sorry should be ever totally extinct-the memory "Of summer days and delightful years" even so far back as to those old suppers at our old ********** Inn-when life was fresh and topics exhaustless-and you first kindled in me, if not the power, yet the love of poetry, and beauty, and kindliness. "What words have I heard Spoke at the Mermaid!" The world has given you many a shrewd nip and gird since that time, but either my eyes are grown dimmer, or my old friend is the same who stood before me three-and-twenty years ago-his hair a little confessing the hand of time, but still shrouding the same capacious brain-his heart not altered, scarcely where it "alteration finds." One piece, Coleridge, I have ventured to publish in its original form, though I have heard you complain of a certain over-imitation of the antique in the • Prefixed to the author's works published in 1818. style. If I could see any way of getting rid of the objection without rewriting it entirely, I would make some sacrifices. But when I wrote John · Woodvil, I never proposed to myself any distinct deviation from common English. I had been newly initiated in the writings of our elder dramatists; Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger, were then a first love; and from what I was so freshly conversant in, what wonder if my language imperceptibly took a tinge? The very time which I had chosen for my story, that which immediately followed the restoration, seemed to require, in an English play, that the English should be of rather an older cast than that of the precise year in which it happened to be written. I wish it had not some faults, which I can loss vindicate than the language. 1 remain, My dear Coleridge, Yours, With unabated esteem, C. LAMB. A Ballad, noting the Difference of Rich and Poor, in the ways of a rich Lines on the celebrated Picture by Leonardo da Vinci, called the Vir gin of the Rocks 502 SONNETS. 1. To Miss Kelly 503 II. On the Sight of Swans in Kensington Garden 503 III. 504 IX. To John Lamb, Esq., of the South Sea House 507 X. 507 John Woodvil, a Tragedy 513 The Witch, a Dramatic Sketch of the Seventeenth Century 549 To Dora W -, on being asked by her Father to write in her Album 554 Harmony in Unlikeness In my own Album Angel Help The Christening.. On an Infant dying as soon as born. The Young Catechist She is Going. To a Young Friend on her Twenty-first Birthday. Written at Cambridge.. PAGE 558 559 560 560 562 563 563 564 565 To a celebrated Female Performer in the "Blind Boy" 565 The Gipsy's Malison.. 567 To the Author of Poems published under the Name of Barry Cornwall 568 To J. S. Knowles, Esq., on his Tragedy of Virginius. 568 To the Editor of the " Every-day Book".. 569 To T. Stothard, Esq., on his Illustrations of the Poems of Mr. Rogers 570 To a Friend on his Marriage. 570 The Self-enchanted. 571 To Louisa M- whom I used to call "Monkey" To David Cook, of the Parish of Saint Margaret's, Westminster, POEMS. HESTER. WHEN maidens such as Hester die, Their place ye may not well supply Though ye among a thousand try, With vain endeavour. A month or more hath she been dead, A springy motion in her gait, I know not by what name beside She did inherit. Her parents held the Quaker rule, Which doth the human feeling cool, But she was train'd in Nature's school, Nature had bless'd her. A waking eye, a prying mind, My sprightly neighbour, gone before |