Bristol title-page, and the Museum may possibly acquire a copy with Mr. Arch's when opportunity occurs. In the only copy of the First Edition which they have at present, the words are," Bristol, printed by Biggs and Cottle, for T. N. Longman, Paternoster Row, London." Thus the First Edition of five hundred was divided—say two hundred for Mr. Cottle, say three hundred for Mr. Arch, when the Bristolian found the sale was "slow" and "heavy." Where have they all gone to? It was only eighty-four years ago. But where have all the copies of the big edition of the "Christmas Carol" gone to? That was hardly forty years ago. How indeed do these things vanish? And where are the snows of yester-year?

To recall a little the origin of the book-the circumstances under which Wordsworth and Coleridge planned and produced it. It was in the Nether Stowey and Alfoxden time, when the men were neighbours, three miles of green Somerset country dividing the home of Coleridge from the home of Wordsworth. I saw the place —that is, the neighbourhood and Coleridge's home-a very few years since, much in that summer weather which tempted their own more prolonged wanderings, which followed them in that excursion to "Linton and the Valley of Stones," which was the first cause, Wordsworth says, of the issue of "Lyrical Ballads." Plain living and high thinking they practised then, and from necessity as much as from choice. A yeoman of Somerset would hardly have lived at that time and certainly he would not live to-day-in that cottage. which was Coleridge's. Straight from the country road you step to its door in an instant you are in the small square parlour, with large kitchen-like fireplace, with one or, I think, two small windows, and a window-seat from which, on days of evil weather, the stay-athome commanded the prospect of the passing rustic as he walked abroad—perhaps of the occasional traveller on his way to the village inn. But generally, fair weather or foul, the spectacle was scanty--time was marked by shifting light and changes in the colour of the sky, or by the movements of beasts at milking-time, or at hours of rest and of labour. Never, I should say, was one hour merely frittered away by either the poet who lived or the poet who visited in that humble cottage. Never a call of ceremony: an interview that bears no fruit-a social necessity, the continual plague of cities. Never an hour that did not tell in some way, by active work, or by "wise passiveness," upon the mind that was to be cultivated and the character that was to be developed. Such a life, led not in actual isolation, but in narrowed and selected companionship, was perhaps about the best preparation men could make for work of the con

centrated and the self-possessed power of the "Ancient Mariner," and of the serene profundity of the lines connected with Tintern Abbey. This was the place, and these were the conditions, for the quietude of life and thought felt as the greatest necessity of existence by Wordsworth, "a worshipper of Nature," "unwearied in that service."

In 1797 came the first thought of the book. Wordsworth's account of it may already be familiar. Prefixed in later editions to the poem of "We are Seven," which was printed for the first time in "Lyrical Ballads," is a note which says: "In reference to this poem I will here mention one of the most noticeable facts in my own poetic history, and that of Mr. Coleridge." And then he tells the story: "In the autumn of 1797, he, my sister, and myself, started from Alfoxden pretty late in the afternoon, with a view to visit Linton and the Valley of Stones near to it; and, as our united funds were very small, we agreed to defray the expense of the tour by writing a poem, to be sent to the New Monthly Magazine, set up by Phillips, the bookseller, and edited by Dr. Aiken. Accordingly, we set off, and proceeded along the Quantock Hills, towards Watchet; and in the course of this walk was planned the poem of the Ancient Mariner,' founded on a dream, as Coleridge said, of his friend Mr. Cruikshank." And then Wordsworth adds some details which are extraordinarily characteristic. "Much the greatest part of the story was Mr. Coleridge's invention," he says, "but certain parts I suggested." Now, what were those parts? They were parts, we shall see, which yield to no other in importance, and which do very much to throw over the work the glamour of noble imagination, the sudden magical charm which was Wordsworth's own, and with which he was accustomed to illumine the commoner themes of his habitual choice. It was Wordsworth's suggestion that the Ancient Mariner should be represented as having killed the Albatross, and that "the tutelary spirits of these regions"-the regions of the South Sea-"should take upon them to avenge the crime." "I also suggested the navigation of the ship by the dead men, but do not recollect that I had anything more to do with the scheme of the poem." A detail, however, he had to do with. "I furnished two or three lines at the beginning of the poem, in particular

And listened like a three years' child:

The Mariner had his will.

These trifling contributions, all but one, which Mr. C. has with unnecessary scrupulosity recorded, slipped out of his mind, as they

well might." If the contributions themselves were characteristic, so certainly is the manner of speaking of them. But these men, and the men who were more or less their associates, believed much in each other. In no different spirit from Wordsworth's did Coleridge himself write, in his introduction to "Poems on Various Subjects," these words about Charles Lamb: "The effusions signed C. L. were written by Mr. Charles Lamb, of the India House-independently of the signature, their superior merit would have sufficiently distinguished them." And in no different spirit did Coleridge write of Wordsworth, years afterwards, in the "Biographia Literaria," when their ways had parted. He could explain generously then "what Mr. Wordsworth really intended" by the theories put forward in that famous preface which was too much for Coleridge.

But to return to the book, or rather, for the moment, to Wordsworth's account of it. As they endeavoured to proceed conjointly in the construction of the "Ancient Mariner "-it was still that same evening in which the poem was conceived-their respective manners proved so widely different that it would have been, to Wordsworth's mind, "quite presumptuous in me to do anything but separate from an undertaking upon which I could only have been a clog." "The Ancient Mariner' grew and grew," he adds, “till it became too important for our first object, which was limited to our expectation of five pounds; and we began to think of a volume, which was to consist, as Mr. Coleridge has told the world, of poems chiefly on supernatural subjects taken from common life, but looked at, as much as might be, through an imaginative medium." That "imaginative medium" was to distinguish these poems, we have been told elsewhere, from the rhymed stories of Crabbe. Poetic realism and prosaic realism, and what a world between them!

In April 1798 Wordsworth wrote to his friend, the Bristol bookseller, "You will be pleased to hear that I have gone on adding very rapidly to my stock of poetry. Do come and let me read it to you under the old trees in the park." Definite proposals, too, were to be made, and it was written to Cottle-this time I think by Coleridge-"We deem that the volumes offered to you are, to a certain degree, one work in kind.' That same spring, but later on, Cottle did visit Nether Stowey, and he writes of it in his own book of interesting if sometimes illegitimate gossip: "At this interview it was determined that the volume should be published under the title of Lyrical Ballads,' on the terms stipulated." Thirty guineas seems to have been Wordsworth's share. And, furthermore, it was settled that it should not contain the poem of "Salisbury Plain," but only

an extract from it-Cottle himself, nevertheless, thought that poem the finest Wordsworth had written-that it should not contain the poem of "Peter Bell," but consist rather of shorter poems, and for the most part of pieces more recently written. "I had recommended two volumes," Cottle tells us, "but one was fixed on, and that to be published anonymously." All which speedily came about. Cottle further says, "The volume of the 'Lyrical Ballads' was published about midsummer, 1798." But it was not really till some while after midsummer, for not only were the Tintern Abbey lines, which close the little volume with so august a calm, not written till the 13th of July, but it is said expressly in Wordsworth's "Life" that as late as September the 13th the book was "printed, not published." Some weeks before, Wordsworth and his sister took up temporary abode in Bristol that they might be near the printer. Then, at length, in the early part of autumn, the "Lyrical Ballads" appeared, and Wordsworth and his sister, and Coleridge, left England for Germany.

To the first edition of "Lyrical Ballads " is prefixed four pages of "Advertisement," or preface. About it two or three points are noticeable. First, it gives no hint that two poets have been engaged upon the volume: "the author," who speaks of himself in the third person, is responsible alike for the "Ancient Mariner " and for "Goody Blake and Harry Gill." Secondly, it is written in that familiar languagejust our daily speech a little chastened and braced-which Wordsworth employed at the beginning, and employed to the end. Again, it utters, thus early in Wordsworth's life, that note of warning as to mistaken notions of what Poetry demands, which the writer repeated afterwards with infinite elaboration. "It is the honourable characteristic of Poetry that its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind "--that is, by implication, his first apology for the choice of humble theme. "Readers of superior judgment may disapprove of the style in which many of these pieces are executed it must be expected that many lines and phrases will not exactly suit their taste." Expressions may seem too familiar-may seem lacking in dignity. But, "it is apprehended that the more conversant the reader is with our elder writers, and with those in modern times who have been most successful in painting manners and passions, the fewer complaints of this kind will he have to make." Here is the apology for the fashion of presentation -the germ of that which was afterwards so fully developed in famous writings which borrowed here and there a neat and significant phrase from this first "Advertisement."

The title of the "Ancient Mariner" begins the table of contents,

and the poem runs on to the fifty-first page of the volume-nearly a quarter of all that the volume holds. But Coleridge's remaining contributions were small and few, consisting of "The Nightingale," and of but one other. That he made even these contributions has sometimes escaped people's notice. He had intended to do more, for he tells us in the "Biographia Literaria," that, having written the "Ancient Mariner," he was preparing, among other poems, "The Dark Ladie," and the "Christabel." "But Mr. Wordsworth's industry has proved much more successful, and the number of his poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous matter." When the "Ancient Mariner" came to be reprinted -under Coleridge's banner alone-some minor changes were made. Some of them were gains, but some were losses. And there was added then what the "Lyrical Ballads" does not contain, the "Gloss"-that wonderful telling of the story and yet departing from it-which is set forth in grave and inspired prose. "It was an after-thought," Wordsworth tells us, in speaking of his friend's poem.

Of Wordsworth's own share-that far greater share of his—in the poems, it is interesting to notice how the general title, "Lyrical Ballads with a few other Poems," is required to cover the whole of it. For they are of two kinds-Wordsworth's poems in the volume-the simple stories of humble life, which may or may not be dramatic, in which the "I" of the poet is not necessarily himself, and the poems which record unmistakably his personal feeling and experience, such as "The Tables Turned, an Evening Scene," the noble lines written near Tintern Abbey, and the small poem which rejoices in perhaps the longest title ever bestowed upon verse, "Lines written at a small distance from my house, and sent by my little boy to the person to whom they are addressed." These, and one or two others, are the contributions to which Coleridge refers when he says that "Mr. Wordsworth added two or three poems written in his own character, in the impassioned, lofty, and sustained diction which is characteristic of his genius."

Many of Wordsworth's verses, whether of the one class or the other, in the "Lyrical Ballads," bear reference to the circumstances of the moment and the place-are stamped with the mark of his Alfoxden sojourn. "The Thorn" arose out of his observing on the ridge of Quantock Hill a thorn on a stormy day. He had often passed it unnoticed in calm. "I said to myself, Cannot I by some invention do as much to make this Thorn prominently an impressive object as the storm has made it to my eyes at this moment? I began the poem accordingly, and composed it with great rapidity."