dates the poem of the Three Graves with the others of this period. To these it now seems reasonable to add some other significant details.
Lamb's letter concerning the Bürger translations had been sent to Coleridge in the latter part of July.[1] The chances are, however, that Coleridge could not have seen Taylor's Lenora until some months later. His poem in the Monthly Magazine of September had been sent for the Morning Chronicle, and Lamb was responsible for its insertion in the former periodical. Moreover Coleridge was troubled about many matters in these months,—the birth of his first child in September, the change of residence to Stowey, the second edition of his poems, depression of spirits in general, and the neuralgia which brought the first use of opium. Apart from his drama Osorio, he was not again writing verse of importance until the inspiration attendant upon the friendly intercourse with Wordsworth. Then follows his period of balladry, perhaps partly inspired by Wordsworth, and the marked influence of Taylor's Lenora. This period includes four poems, the Three Graves, the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and the Dark Ladie.
The order in which the poems of the year 1797 were written is not certain, but in the Three Graves and the Ancient Mariner the ballad measure was first used with the seriousness with which it had first been employed by Taylor. The first of these, which Dykes Campbell places first in composition, is a "sexton's tale" of a mother, daughter, and her lover, of a curse and its tragic consequences. Many years later when parts of the poem were printed in the Friend (Sept. 21, 1809), the following sentence shows the time and feeling under which the fragment was written:
I was not led to choose this story from any partiality to tragic, much less to monstrous events (though at the time I composed the verses, somewhat more than twelve years ago, I was less averse to such subjects), but from finding in it a striking proof of the possible effect on the imagination from an idea violently and suddenly impressed upon it.
Remembering that this places the writing of the poem in the year of Kubla Khan, the Ancient Mariner and Christabel, we may probably paraphrase this sentence somewhat as follows: "I was led to choose this story from my partiality to tragic and monstrous events when it was composed some twelve years ago." There can be little
- ↑ See p. 32.
