Chapter CIX: Letter 167: , speaking of the Hymn before Sunrise, he admits that there

is in the Hymn too much of the _idiosyncratic_ for true poetry, a piece of self-criticism that can be alleged against a great number of his poems, beautiful of their kind yet savouring too often of the Ego. The _Lime Tree Bower_, _Dejection, an Ode_, the _Lines to Wordsworth_, the _Pains of Sleep_, the _Tombless Epitaph_, _Youth and Age_, the _Garden of Boccaccio_, _Work without Hope_, are not exceptions. It is only in the _Ancient Mariner_, _Christabel_, _Kubla Khan_, _The Three Graves_, _Love_, _The Ballad of the Dark Ladye_, and _Alice Du Clos_, that Coleridge succeeds in hiding his own personal identity behind his melodious utterance, and attains to that simplicity which is truly classical. Most of his other poems are autobiographical, and can be thoroughly understood only as part of his epistolary correspondence. His finest ode, _Dejection_, is only a versified letter to Wordsworth, afterwards denuded of its most personal references, and addressed to a "Lady," to give it a more artistic cast.

The relationship between Coleridge and Alaric Watts was not confined to the contributions to the Annuals. An agreeable social intimacy sprang up between the Highgate household and the Watts; and a correspondence between Mr. and Mrs. Watts and Coleridge took place. Five fine letters by Coleridge are contained in the _Life of Alaric Watts_, from which it seems Coleridge and Mr. Watts intended to collaborate in the issue of an edition of Shakespeare, which would have been a congenial task to Coleridge, and one can feel regret that it was not carried out. A feature of the edition was to be "properly critical notes, prefaces, and analyses, comprising the results of five and twenty years' study: the object being to ascertain and distinguish what Shakespeare possessed in common with other great men of his age, or differing only in degree, and what was his, peculiar to himself" (_Life of Alaric Watts_, i, 243). This, of course, as any one acquainted with Coleridge's Lectures on Shakespeare knows, was one of Coleridge's favourite topics, and one which could have been better illustrated in an annotated edition than in popular lectures.

In one of his letters to Alaric Watts Coleridge gives the best account of the lack of voluntary power to open letters sent him; and counsels Watts if he wishes an immediate answer to his letters to send them under cover to Mrs. Gillman, who is his "outward conscience." In another letter, sending contributions for the Annual, he encloses his poem entitled _Limbo_, which he says is a pretended fragment of the poet Lee.]

FOOTNOTES:

[142] [The error "Ellen" in line 91 may have arisen from Coleridge
having called the heroine Ellen, after that of Lewis's _Ellen
of Eglantine_, but afterwards having changed that name for
Alice in the other stanzas forgetting to alter the word in
line 91.]