Chapter XXIX: Alaric Watts

[While at Highgate, Coleridge contributed some short pieces of poetry, which may be regarded as his Autumn Leaves, to the Annals got up by Alaric Alexander Watts and F. M. Reynolds, to which Sir Walter Scott and the other leading literary men of the time were induced to send their less ambitious pieces. Fine steel engravings accompanied the poems and novelettes; and one of these by Stoddart, entitled the _Garden of Boccaccio_, was the subject of a poem by Coleridge in the _Keepsake_ of 1829. For this poem and some trifling epigrams Coleridge received the sum of £50 (_Life of Alaric Watts_, i, 292). The name of Coleridge must have stood high to command so large a fee for the things given to the _Keepsake_. The _Lines on Berengarius_ appeared in the _Literary Souvenir_ of 1827, and _Youth and Age_ and _Work without Hope_ in the _Bijou_ of 1828.

Some conception of the importance of these annuals may be gathered from stating that the _Literary Souvenir_ of 1827, got up by Alaric Watts, sold to the number of 7,712 copies in England, between November and April, and 700 in America of the ordinary edition, and 528 of a large-paper edition. There were other annuals besides these already mentioned, called the _Forget-me-Not_, _Friendship's Offering_, _The Amulet_, _The Winter's Wreath_, _The Anniversary_, _The Gem_, and other kindred publications (_Life of Alaric Watts_, i, 305).

The most finished production of Coleridge's latest period is _Alice Du Clos_, a ballad of the Romantic Movement. Much speculation as to the date of its origin has been put forth, some thinking it belongs to the time when the _Ancient Mariner_, _Christabel_, and the _Three Graves_ were written, others placing it between the publication of the last two Editions of the Collected Poems, 1829-1834. But in Letter 205 of date 8th October 1822, the quotation of the two lines

That names but seldom meet with Love,
And Love wants courage without a name!

seems to imply that the ballad was then extant. Coleridge, as we know (see _Letters_, ii, 717), was engaged between 1822 and 1825 writing his _Aids to Reflection_, and the following curious passage occurs in Aphorism XXXI (Moral and Religious Aphorisms). Speaking of slander, he says: "It is not expressible how deep a wound a tongue sharpened to this work will give, with no noise and a very little word. This is the true white gunpowder, which the dreaming projectors of silent mischief and insensible poisons sought for in the laboratories of art and nature, in a world of good; but which was to be found in its most destructive form, in _the world of evil_, the Tongue" (Bohn Library edition, p. 70). _Alice Du Clos, or the Forked Tongue_, is the full title of the ballad; and it looks as if it had been written to illustrate the passage, though it has an affinity with Lewis's _Ellen of Eglantine_ and _The Troubadour, or Lady Alice's Bower_ (_Tales of Terror and Wonder_).[142]

In a letter to William Blackwood of 20th October 1829 Coleridge says he has among other poems for the Magazine, "a Lyrical Tale, 250 lines," which he could give if desired (_William Blackwood and his Sons_, by Mrs. Oliphant, i, 415). The date of the poem may therefore be put down as 1822-1829.

_Alice Du Clos_ ranks with the _Ancient Mariner_, _Christabel_, _Kubla Khan_, _Love_ and the _Ballad of the Dark Ladye_, among Coleridge's poems in which he rises out of his own subjectivity into the clear realm of objective art. The remark of Thomas Ashe (Preface to the Aldine Edition of the _Poems_, cxxxvi), that "the great fault of Coleridge is that he puts too much of himself, _unidealized_, into his verses," is perfectly true. Coleridge was himself aware of this defect, and in