A Coleridge Miscellany

CARL WOODRING

IN the Collected Letters of Sanuiel Taylor Coleridge, edited
bv Earl Leslie Griggs, the Columbia holdings are represented
by two autographs. One of these is a lengthy letter to Charles
Aders, a patron of the arts who helped shape F.nglish taste in paint¬
ing and music. The other, to an unidentified collector of auto¬
graphs, found the poet so severely low in February, 1832, twenty-
nine months before his death, that he declared "it is almost equally
probable that this Autograph may be the last Letter as that this
Letter may be the last of the Autographs of S. T. Coleridge." As
piercing and characteristic as this late note is, two other examples
of Coleridge's hand at Columbia are of still greater interest than
the two in the Collected Letters.

The Friends of the Columbia Libraries donated in 1965 a copy
of Sibylline Leaves, 1817, with extensive corrections mostly in the
poet's hand. The volume is inscribed on the title page to his gener¬
ous friend ^A'illiam Hood of Bristol "from the obliged Author."
Hood was involved in the financial and other difficulties of publi¬
cation; Coleridge's corrections and additions in this copy were
probably made no later than the month of publication. Some of the
corrections are present in substantially the same form on a printed
errata leaf at the end of the volume; others were printed in the
1828 or later editions of Coleridge's poems. The Columbia copy
should help establish an early date for several of these corrections,
such as the phrase "at the close of the Eclogue" inserted in the
"Apologetic Preface" on page 96 and an improvement in line 81
of "The Nightingale."

Famous fines added to "The Eolian Flarp," beginning "O the
one Life within us, and abroad," are written here with that sur¬
prising comma after "us," present also in proofsheets at Harvard

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