PREFACE
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
INDEX OF PROPER NAMES
INDEX OF TITLES
INDEX
FROM THE UNPUBLISHED
NOTE-BOOKS OF
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
EDITED BY
ERNEST HARTLEY COLERIDGE
LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
MDCCCXCV
All rights reserved
Entered at Stationers' Hall
Entered at the Library of Congress, Washington
Copyright, 1895
When shall I find time and ease to reduce my pocket-books andmemorandums to an Index or Memoriæ Memorandorum? If—aye! and alas!if I could see the last sheet of my Assertio Fidei Christianæ, eteterni temporizantis, having previously beheld my elements ofDiscourse, Logic, Dialectic, and Noetic, or Canon, Criterion, andOrganon, with the philosophic Glossary—in one printed volume, and theExercises in Reasoning as another—if—what then? Why, then I wouldpublish all that remained unused, Travels and all, under the title ofExcursions Abroad and at Home, what I have seen and what I have thoughtwith a little of what I have felt, in the words in which I told andtalked them to my pocket-books, the confidants who have not betrayedme, the friends whose silence was not detraction, and the inmatesbefore whom I was not ashamed to complain, to yearn, to weep, or even topray! To which are added marginal notes from many old books and one ortwo new ones, sifted through the Mogul Sieve of Duty towards myNeighbour—by 'Εστησε.
21 June, 1823.
Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which thepoet's nephew and son-in-law, Henry Nelson Coleridge, published in 1835,was a popular book from the first, and has won the approval of twogenerations of readers. Unlike the Biographia Literaria, or theoriginal and revised versions of The Friend, which never had their dayat all, or the Aids to Reflection, which passed through many editions,but now seems to have delivered its message, the Table Talk is stillwell known and widely read, and that not only by students of literature.The task which the editor set himself was a difficult one, but it laywithin the powers of an attentive listener, possessed of a good memoryand those rarer gifts of a refined and scholarly taste, a sound andluminous common sense. He does not attempt to reproduce Coleridge'sconversation or monologue or impassioned harangue, but he preserves and[viii]notes down the detached fragments of knowledge and wi