My plea is that it is difficult if not impossible to draw a line above which a variant is important and below which it is negligible; that, to use a word of the poet's own coining, his emendations are rarely if ever 'lightheartednesses'; and that if a collation of the printed text with MSS. is worth studying at all the one must be as decipherable as the other. Facsimiles are rare and costly productions, and an exhaustive table of variants is the nearest approach to a substitute. Many, I know, are the shortcomings, too many, I fear, are the errors in the footnotes to this volume, but now, for the first time, the MSS. of Coleridge's poems which are known to be extant are in a manner reproduced and made available for study and research.
Six poems of some length are now printed and included in the text of the poems for the first time.
The first, 'Easter Holidays' (p. 1), is unquestionably a 'School-boy Poem', and was written some months before the author had completed his fifteenth year. It tends to throw doubt on the alleged date of 'Time, Real and Imaginary'.
The second,'An Inscription for a Seat,' &c. (p. 349), was first published in the _Morning Post_, on October 21, 1800, Coleridge's twenty-eighth birthday. It remains an open question whether it was written by Coleridge or by Wordsworth. Both were contributors to the _Morning Post_. Both wrote 'Inscriptions'. Both had a hand in making the 'seat'. Neither claimed or republished the poem. It favours or, rather, parodies the style and sentiments now of one and now of the other.
The third, 'The Rash Conjurer' (p. 399), must have been read by H. N. Coleridge, who included the last seven lines, the 'Epilogue', in the first volume of _Literary Remains_, published in 1836. I presume that, even as a fantasia, the subject was regarded as too extravagant, and, it may be, too coarsely worded for publication. It was no doubt in the first instance a 'metrical experiment', but it is to be interpreted allegorically. The 'Rash Conjurer', the _âme damnée_, is the adept in the black magic of metaphysics. But for that he might have been like his brothers, a 'Devonshire Christian'.
The fourth, 'The Madman and the Lethargist' (p. 414), is an expansion of an epigram in the Greek Anthology. It is possible that it was written in Germany in 1799, and is contemporary with the epigrams published in the _Morning Post_ in 1802, for the Greek original is quoted by Lessing in a critical excursus on the nature of an epigram.