100--*Bare crag*, etc. The scenery here is that of the Lake country where Coleridge and Wordsworth were then living--the former at Keswick in Cumberland, the latter at Grasmere, Westmoreland.
59, 120--*Otway*. Coleridge wrote originally, "As thou thyself [i.e. Wordsworth--see next note] had'st fram'd the tender lay." This he changed to "Edmund's self" when he first printed the poem in 1802; and finally to "Otway's self." Thomas Otway was a dramatist of the time of Charles II (born 1651, died 1685). He wrote, among other plays, two tragedies of wonderful pathetic power, "The Orphan" and "Venice Preserved." The theme and style of the former of these, especially, no doubt suggested his name to Coleridge here. Otway's own career was pathetic; he died young, neglected, and according to one story, starved. To this story Coleridge alludes in one of his early poems, the "Monody on the Death of Chatterton:"
"While, 'mid the pelting of that merciless storm, Sunk to the cold earth Otway's famished form!"
121--*'T is of a little child*, etc. Alluding to Wordsworth's "Lucy Gray," which had been published in the second edition of "Lyrical Ballads," 1800.
60, 12--*trim skiffs*, etc. Fulton had invented the steamboat in 1807. The first regular steamboat in British waters was built in 1812.
61, 34--*altered size*. Coleridge became very stout in his later years.
62, 5--*the sole unbusy thing*. Cf. George Herbert's "Employment:"
"All things are busie; onely I Neither bring hony with the bees, Nor flowers to make that, nor the husbandrie To water these."
"I find more substantial comfort now," wrote Coleridge to his friend Collins in 1818, "in pious George Herbert's 'Temple,' which I used to read to amuse myself with his quaintness, in short, only to laugh at, than in all the poetry since Milton."
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge