Hitherto, but little use has been made of this life-long accumulation of literary material. A few specimens, "Curiosities of Literature" they might have been called, were contributed by Coleridge himself to Southey's _Omniana_ of 1812, and a further selection of some fifty fragments, gleaned from note-books 21-1/2 and 22, and from a third unnumbered MS. book now in my possession, were printed by H. N. Coleridge in the first volume of the _Literary Remains_ under the heading _Omniana 1809-1816_. The _Omniana_ of 1812 were, in many instances, re-written by Coleridge before they were included in Southey's volumes, and in the later issue, here and there, the editor has given shape and articulation to an unfinished or half-formed sentence. The earlier and later _Omniana_, together with the fragments which were published by Allsop in his _Letters, Conversations and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge_, in 1836, were included by the late Thomas Ashe in his reprint of the _Table Talk_, Bell & Co., 1884.
Some fourteen or fifteen notes of singular interest and beauty, which belong to the years 1804, 1812, 1826, 1829, etc., were printed by James Gillman in his unfinished "Life of Coleridge," and it is evident that he contemplated a more extended use of the note-books in the construction of his second volume, or, possibly, the publication of a supplementary volume of notes or _Omniana_. Transcripts which were made for this purpose are extant, and have been placed at my disposal by the kindness of Mrs. Henry Watson, who inherited them from her grandmother, Mrs. Gillman.
I may add that a few quotations from diaries of tours in the Lake Country and on the Continent are to be found in the foot-notes appended to the two volumes of _Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge_ which were issued in the spring of the present year.
To publish the note-books _in extenso_ would be impracticable, if even after the lapse of sixty years since the death of the writer it were permissible. They are private memoranda-books, and rightly and properly have been regarded as a sacred trust by their several custodians. But it is none the less certain that in disburthening himself of the ideas and imaginations which pressed upon his consciousness, in committing them to writing and carefully preserving them through all his wanderings, Coleridge had no mind that they should perish utterly. The invisible pageantry of thought and passion which for ever floated into his spiritual ken, the perpetual hope, the half-belief that the veil of the senses would be rent in twain, and that he and not another would be the first to lay bare the mysteries of being, and to solve the problem of the ages--of these was the breath of his soul. It was his fate to wrestle from night to morn with the Angel of the Vision, and of that unequal combat he has left, by way of warning or encouragement, a broken but an inspired and inspiring record. "Hints and first thoughts" he bade us regard the contents of his memorandum-books--"_cogitabilia_ rather than _cogitata_ a me, not fixed opinions," and yet acts of obedience to the apostolic command of "Try all things: hold fast that which is good"--say, rather, acts of obedience to the compulsion of his own genius to "take a pen and write in a book all the words of the vision."