written, "How perfect was the happiness which this poem recalls!" for
this is really all that Coleridge's eulogium, with its touching bias
from the hand of memory, amounts to.

It has become time, however, to speak more generally of Coleridge's
early poems. The peaceful winter months of 1795-96 were in all
likelihood spent in arranging and revising the products of those poetic
impulses which had more or less actively stirred within him from his
seventeenth year upwards; and in April 1797 there appeared at Bristol a
volume of some fifty pieces entitled _Poems on Various Subjects, by
S. T. Coleridge, late of Jesus College Cambridge_. It was published
by his friend Cottle, who, in a mixture of the generous with the
speculative instinct, had given him thirty guineas for the copyright.
Its contents are of a miscellaneous kind, consisting partly of rhymed
irregular odes, partly of a collection of _Sonnets on Eminent
Characters_, and partly (and principally) of a blank verse poem of
several hundred lines, then, and indeed for years afterwards, regarded
by many of the poet's admirers as his masterpiece--the _Religious
Musings_. [1]

To the second edition of these poems, which was published in the
following year, Coleridge, at all times a candid critic (to the limited
extent to which it is possible even for the finest judges to be so) of
his own works, prefixed a preface, wherein he remarks that his poems
have been "rightly charged with a profusion of double epithets and a
general turgidness," and adds that he has "pruned the double epithets
with no sparing hand," and used his best efforts to tame the swell and
glitter both of thought and diction. "The latter fault, however, had,"
he continues, "so insinuated itself into my _Religious Musings_
with such intricacy of union that sometimes I have omitted to