"Zahuris, Red of Eye ..."

This curious folk evidently appealed to Coleridge’s imagination:

The Zahuris red of eye & dwarf in stature, have the power of seeing in the earth as if it were water, & all treasures, bodies, mines springs, &c, appearing therein as substances in the bottom or middle of a transparent Fluid—see only on Tuesdays & Fridays, & are always born on Good Friday.— [Notebooks 2 (1804-1808), 3148]

Kathleen Coburn strikes a rare bum-note with her glossing of this entry: ‘The Zahuris have not been tracked down to their native country; possibly they spring full-blown out of the head of STC.’ They don’t, though. Their native country is Spain, and they spring from Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire Historique et Critique; published in 1697-1709. (The first English translation of this encyclopedia appeared in 1709, with a revised translation appearing in 1734-41; this latter is the edition Coleridge owned). And here is the entry that Coleridge read:

ZAHURIS, a name given to certain men in Spain whose eye-sight is so very piercing, as is pretended that they perceive, under ground, streams of water, veins of metals, as also treasures and carcasses. They have very red eyes. Martin del Rio relates, that when he was at Madrid in 1575, a little boy of this sort was seen there. It is remarkable, that, though this author is very ready to ascribe extraordinary effects to devils, he yet does not believe that the Zahuris discover water and metals under ground, by any magical compact; he imagining that they discover water by vapours, and mines by the herbs which grow in those places; with regard to treasures and dead carcasses, he pretends the devil directs these people to them, since they can declare what treasures and dead bodies they see, and are indued with this power only on Tuesdays and Fridays.
[A General Dictionary, Historical and Critical: a New and Accurate Translation of that of the Celebrated Mr Bayle, by the Reverend Mr John Peter Bernard, the Reverend Mr Thomas Birch and Mr John Lockman, vol 10 (1741), 249-50]

In a footnote, Bayle adds a little more information by quoting one ‘Gutierrius, a Spanish Physician’ to the effect that ‘the credulity of the common people’ supposes ‘that they are born on Good Friday, and that they owe this wonderful privilege to their birth day’, something Gutierrius himself scorns: vide quam futile ac irreligiosum commentum, see what vain and irreligious things some people believe!

There’s nothing here about dwarfs, which Coleridge seems to have imported into his note from his own head.

Many years later STC mentions the Zahuris again. July 1822 he was reading Johann Carl Passavant’s Untersuchungen uber den Lebensmagnetismus und das Hellsehen (Frankfurt am Main 1821), writing in his notebook ‘Dr Passavant has enlivened and renewed my interest in the Magia Thelematica, Thelematomagy, or Zoo-magnetism; but in other respects has left me as he found me’ [Notebooks 4 (1819-1826), 4908]. ‘Passavant's approach,’ says Coburn, ‘appealed to Coleridge because it was that of a medical man interviewing patients and citing cases, interested in the historical background of his subject and seeing in it a pious argument for the power of the spiritual. There were in his work links with magnetists familiar by name to Coleridge’. This quasi-mesmerist thesis, Coleridge thought, had certain explanatory advantages:

The supposition of the truth of Zoo-magnetism enables us rationally to account for a series of Phaenomena hitherto unexplained, or most unsatisfactorily explained away with Lies, Tricks, or the Devil, the Oracles of the ancients, Charms, Amulets, witchcraft, Prophecies, Divination, and extra ordinary Individuals, as the Female who misled Montanus & thro' him Tertullian, Behmen, Swedenborg, & (according to their own declarations, Philo Judaeus, and Porphyry) and of a lower kind, Bleton, Aymar, Pedegache, Campetti, the Zahuris of Spain, & (still living) the Swiss Female, Catharina Beutler.— [Notebooks 4:4908]

The specifics of Notebook entry 3134 can only have come from Bayle, but Coleridge later re-encountered the Zahuri through another text: Jean Paul Richter, whom Coleridge loved. Henry Crabb Robinson lent STC a number of Jean Paul books on 10th August 1812, including his sprawling 1800 novel Titan (notebook entries 4276-79 are all excerpts from this novel that STC has copied-out or summarised).

Early in this novel a strange hooded figure approaches the protagonist, Albano de Zesara:

While Zesara was thus traversing waves, mountains, and stars with a stiller and stiller soul, and when at last garden and sky and lake ran together into one dark Colossus, and he sadly thought of his pale mother, and of his sister, and of the announced wonders of his future life, a figure dressed all in black, with the image of a death's-head on its breast, came slowly and painfully, and with trembling breath, up the terraces behind him. “Remember death!” it said. “Thou art Albano de Zesara?” “Yes,” said Zesara, “who art thou?” “I am,” it said, “a father of death. It is not from fear, but from habit, I tremble so.”

The limbs of the man continued to quake all over, in a frightful and almost audible manner. Zesara had often wished an adventure for his idle bravery; now he had it before him. … He asked, with indignation: “Who art thou? What knowest thou? What wilt thou?” and grasped at the folded hands of the monk, and held both imprisoned in one of his. “Thou dost not know me, my son,” said the father of death, calmly. “I am a Zahouri,* and come from Spain from thy sister; I see the dead down in the earth, and know beforehand when they will appear and discourse. But their apparition above ground I do not see, and their discourse I cannot hear.” [Jean Paul, Titan 1:45-46]

Jean Paul adds, as you can see, a footnote: ‘The Zahouris in Spain are, as is well known, gifted with the power of discerning corpses, veins of metal, &c. far under the earth.’ His message to Zesara is that his sister in Spain is about to die, and that before going to heaven her spirit will zip over to Northern Italy (where they are) with a message. How this fits with the ‘Zahouri’ ability to see through the earth isn’t made clear. But everything the trembling old man says comes true: the evening star sinks behind the mountains and his sister’s spirit appears to Zesara telling him: ‘Love the beautiful one whom I will show thee,—I will help thee.’ Straight away a woman as beautiful as Aphrodite ‘with long, chestnut-brown hair, and dark eyes, and a shining, swan-like neck, and with the complexion and vigor of the richest climate’ rises from the lake, revealing herself ‘down to her bosom’ before sinking again below the surface. Then the sister-spirit repeats ‘Love the beautiful one whom I showed thee’ and vanishes.

The monk coldly and silently prayed during the scene, of which he heard and saw nothing. At length he said: “On the next Ascension-day, at the hour of thy birth, thou wilt stand beside a heart which is not within a breast, and thy sister will announce to thee from Heaven the name of thy bride.”

Fruity stuff!

It’s not clear to me how seriously STC took any of this (fairly seriously, is the implication of Notebook entry 4908). It's also not clear whether he was aware what the word ‘Zahuri’ or ‘Zahouri’ meant. I can’t find any evidence that he ever laid eyes on Stephen Weston’s Remains of Arabic in the Spanish and Portuguese Languages (London 1810)—too late for the first Notebook entry, of course—which implies that the whole thing was a sort of hoax played on foreigners.

So how does the dwarf creep into Coleridge's original notebook entry? We can make a pretty good guess: Coleridge's mind has moved from people on the surface seeing into the innards of the earth to beings living inside those innards, which is to say: Kobolds. Coleridge learnt about these creatures when he lived in Germany and the notebooks often make reference to them. They can ‘materialize in the form of an animal, fire, a human being, and a candle. The most common depictions of kobolds show them as humanlike figures the size of small children. Kobolds who live in human homes wear the clothing of peasants; those who live in mines are hunched and ugly.’

Although Jean Paul's ‘Zahouri’ sppears as a trembling old man the original ‘Zahuri’ reported by Martin del Rio was a child. Coleridge has conflated this underground-y childishness with Kobold-ness. In doing so he creates a very different kind of creature, related to but different from kobolds (who were thought to live in the rock, as fish live in water and we in air). His Zahuris live in air but see through rock like water (and can perhaps swim in it, as we swim in water). It would make a fine addition to any Fantasy novel, or perhaps, though here I am growing fanciful, to the final howevermany sections of STC's unfinished Christabel. Maybe not altogether fanciful though: in his German translation of the Bible, Martin Luther renders the Hebrew lilith in Isaiah 34:14 as kobold.

An Oracular Pun

We know Coleridge was fond of puns. Here, for instance, is Notebooks 2 (1804-1808), entry 3073: εσται καὶ Σάμος Αμμος, ἐσεῖται Δῆλος αδηλος και Ρώμη ῥύμη means ‘Samos will become a desert, Delos will become unknown and Rome a single street’. The Latin, erit Samos arena, erit Delos obscurus, et Roma vicus means the same, but without the plays-on-words that makes the Greek notable: linking ‘Samos’ to ἄμμος (ammos, ‘sand’ or ‘sandy ground’), Delos to ᾰ̓́δηλος (adēlos, ‘invisible’) and Rome to ῥύμη (rhumē, a street or alley).

Where did Coleridge jot this from? We know he owned a copy of Bochart’s Geographia Sacra (3 vols 1681), although his actual copy has gotten itself lost. It'd be nice if it turned up in some auction, somewhere; I'm sure it has some cool STC marginalia. At any rate, it’s Bochart who records this curiosity [book 3 ch. 1 p.168], attributing it to the ‘Pseudosybillina’. Apologies for the grubbiness of the scan. If you click to embiggen it becomes slightly less grubby-looking. You can see that Coleridge has slightly altered Bochart's Latin: the original has erit et Samos arena, erit Delos ignota, et Roma vicus. Means the same thing, though.

Coleridge and Sanderson

Notebook entry 3032 there has never been traced to its source. Until now, that is: it's Coleridge summarising the following passage from a Robert Sanderson sermon:

It then remaineth to understand this text and chapter of that other and later kind of spiritual gifts; those graces of edification, (or gratiæ gratis date) whereby men are enabled in their several callings, according to the quality and measure of the graces they have received, to be profitable members of the public body, either in church or commonwealth. Under which appellation, (the very first natural powers and faculties of the soul only excepted, which flowing à principiis speciei, are in all men the same and like, I comprehend all other secondary endowments and abilities whatsoever of the reasonable soul, which are capable of the degrees of more and less, and of better and worse, together with all subsidiary helps any way conducing to the exercise of any of them; whether they be, First, supernatural graces, given by immediate and extraordinary infusion from God, such as were the gifts of tongues, and of miracles, and of healings, and of prophecy properly so called, and many other like, which were frequent in the infancy of the church, and when this epistle was written, according as the necessity of those primitive times considered, God saw it expedient for his church; or whether they be, Secondly, such as philosophers call natural dispositions, such as are promptness of wit, quickness of conceit, fastness of memory, clearness of understanding, soundness of judgment, readiness of speech, and other like, which flow immediately à principiis individui, from the individual condition, constitution, and temperature of particular persons. Thirdly, such as philosophers call intellectual habits; which is when those natural dispositions are so improved and perfected by education, art, industry, observation, or experience, that men become thereby skilful linguists, subtle disputers, copious orators, profound divines, powerful preachers, expert lawyers, physicians, historians, statesmen, commanders, artizans, or excellent in any science, profession, or faculty, whatsoever.) [Sanderson, ‘The Third Sermon: Ad Clerum’; delivered in Lincoln, 13th March 1620]

The text for this sermon was 1 Corinthians 12:7: ‘But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal.’ This is interesting, because the relationship of the ‘species’ and the ‘individuum’ is important to the Biographia Literaria, and it suggests that Sanderson fed-into Coleridge's thinking for that book. (He does say, in ch. 10 of that book, that he has ‘followed Hooker, Sanderson, Milton and others, in designating the immediateness of any act or object of knowledge by the word intuition’, but that's the only time the theologian's name is mentioned). It interests me that STC jots down the first two of Sanderson's distinctions but not the third. There is something of a problematic, as the phrase goes, in Biographia with respect to Coleridean dyads and triads. So for instance, his ‘primary imagination’, ‘secondary imagination’ and ‘fancy’ distinction in ch 12 becomes, Sara Coleridge tells us, a dyad at some later point in his thought: he apparently annotated his copy to cross out the first and amalgamate the two kinds of imagination together.

Later in this same sermon, Sanderson says ‘prayer without study is presumption, and study without prayer atheism: the one bootless the other fruitless’, which seems to me a very Coleridgean sentiment. It might be worth excavating exactly what STC took from Sanderson, actually.

Does It Rain In Xanadu?

Insofar as Coleridge is, in ‘Kubla Khan’, describing a territory somewhere in the vicinity of China, or (at the poem's end) Abyssinia/Ethopia, then we can assume the answer to my question is: ‘yes’, because of course rainfall happens periodically in those places. But insofar as Coleridge is talking about a kind of terrestrial paradise then the answer is not so clear.

Let me come at this another way. It's an old chestnut of ‘Kubla Khan’ studies that, in addition to reading Purchas His Pilgrimage (‘in Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Pallace, encompassing sixteen miles of plaine ground with a wall’) as we know Coleridge was doing immediately prior to writing his poem, Coleridge had also been reading his Milton. This is always a safe bet, since Coleridge was always reading his Milton. Coleridge's ‘Mount Abora’, which is not an actual mountain found in any atlas, has long been assumed to owe something to the Ethiopian prominence called Amara, a mountain also mentioned in Paradise Lost. This is the relevant bit from Purchas:

The hill Amara hath alreadie been often mentioned, and nothing indeed in all Ethiopia more deserueth mention. .... This hill is situate as the nauil of that Ethiopian body, and center of their Empire, vnder the Equinoctiall line, where the Sun may take his best view thereof, as not encountering in all his long iourny with the like Theatre, wherein the Graces & Muses are actors, no place more graced with Natures store, ... the Sunne himself so in loue with the sight, that the first & last thing he vieweth in all those parts is this hill ... Once, Heauen and Earth, Nature and Industrie, have all been corriuals to it, all presenting their best presents, to make it of this so louely presence, some taking this for the place of our Fore-fathers Paradise. [Purchas (1617), p. 843]

And here's the relevant bit of Milton's epic, describing Eden (and, we're on safe ground presuming, influencing Coleridge's Edenic Xanadu too):

                             Thus was this place,
A happy rural seat of various view;
Groves whose rich Trees wept odorous Gumms and Balme,
Others whose fruit burnisht with Golden Rinde
Hung amiable, Hesperian Fables true,
If true, here only, and of delicious taste:
Betwixt them Lawns, or level Downs, and Flocks
Grasing the tender herb, were interpos'd,
Or palmie hilloc, or the flourie lap
Of som irriguous Valley spred her store,
Flours of all hue, and without Thorn the Rose:
Another side, umbrageous Grots and Caves
Of coole recess, o're which the mantling vine
Layes forth her purple Grape, and gently creeps
Luxuriant; mean while murmuring waters fall
Down the slope hills, disperst, or in a Lake,
That to the fringed Bank with Myrtle crownd,
Her chrystal mirror holds, unite thir streams.
The Birds thir quire apply; aires, vernal aires,
Breathing the smell of field and grove, attune
The trembling leaves, while Universal Pan
Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance
Led on th' Eternal Spring. Not that faire field
Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flours
Her self a fairer Floure by gloomie Dis
Was gatherd, which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world; nor that sweet Grove
Of Daphne by Orontes, and th' inspir'd
Castalian Spring, might with this Paradise
Of Eden strive; ...
Nor where Abassin Kings thir issue Guard,
Mount Amara, though this by som suppos'd
True Paradise under the Ethiop Line
By Nilus head, enclosd with shining Rock, [Paradise Lost 4:246-283]

Those last few lines in particular make it look as though Milton has read his Purchas (as he might very well have done; although my edition of PL cites instead a similar passage from Heylyn's 1652 Cosmographie). From ‘Amara’ to ‘Abora’ might be explicable in terms of Coleridge's subconscious playing language games—Ted Hughes had a theory that Abora was A + B plus ora, the Latin for ‘prayer’, specifically the 2nd person imperative (‘mountain of alphabet pray for us!’ is what Hughes comes up with having run the name through his enigma machine). Or it might be that Coleridge is remembering, or half remembering, a different travelogue: we know he read James Bruce's Travels to Discover the Sources of the Nile in the early 1790s, and in that book Bruce mentions the Abyssinian river ‘Atbara’, as well as a peninsula of the same name, and says that there is a ‘division of the country’ called Amhara, which is pretty close to Amara. There's a lot of this kind of, more or less barren, source-hunting in Coleridgean scholarship, I'm afraid.

I'm interested in a slightly different angle, here. The river Milton is describing is the Biblical river that ran through paradise: ‘and a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads’ [Genesis 2:10]. But a few verses earlier, the Bible tells us ‘there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground’ [Genesis 2:6]. That's something of a crux. Here's Carey and Fowler's footnote on the Milton passage.

The fertility of Paradise is explained in Genesis as not due to rain, ‘there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.’ The passage is a famous crux. St Jerome's Vulgate version e.g. had a fountain instead of a mist: sed fons ascendebat e terra, irrigans universam superficiem terræ. Dante had used the detail in his earthly paradise (Purg. xxviii 121ff) where it is emphasised that the moisture, being independent of rainfall, does not fluctuate in abundance ‘but comes from a stable and certain source.’ ... The principle model for M.'s description is Philo Quaest. in Gen i 12, where the difficulty in finding any location for Paradise that meets the requirements of Gen ii 10-14 is overcome by the speculation that ‘perhaps Paradise is in some distant place far from our inhabited world, and has a river flowing under the earth, which waters many great veins so that these rising send water to other recipient veins, and so become diffused. And as these are forced by the rush of water, the force of which is in them makes its way out to the surface, both in the Armenian mountains and elswhere.’ [Carey and Fowler (eds) The Poems of John Milton (Longman 1968), 623-24]

Coleridge was familiar with Philo, certainly at second-hand (via Brucker), and although I'm not sure how much Philo he read first-hand it's certainly possible he knew this passage from the Quaestiones et solutiones in Genesis. At any rate, we're on safe ground, I think, in assuming Coleridge's interest in and familiarity with these questions as to whether Eden was watered by rains, mists from above or a subterranean river feeding veins from below—or indeed watered by the bursting-out of a great fountain.

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

‘Alph’, then the prime river, runs underground, and so, we assume, waters Xanadu. Through Philo's veins, or rather through such veins and also via this Saint-Jeromian fons:

A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.

Perhaps, then, Xanadu has no need of rain.

This tempts me into abstruser musings, as per my blog biog. Take naming. One thing that happens in this poem is that Coleridge's poetic subconscious shifts what in Purchas is ‘Xamdu’ (unless he was reading a 1st or 2nd edition of the Pilgrimage, where the place-name is ‘Xaindu’)—plus what is in Paradise Lost [11:388] ‘Cambalu, seat of Cathaian Can’—into Xanadu. Coleridge at this point in his life lacked Hebrew (which he didn't acquire until the 18teens); but if he had recently been reading one or other of the many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works of theological interpretation of the Bible which we know he read, he might have learned that the original Hebrew for Genesis 2:8 is ‘And YHWH planted a gan in ‘ēden, at the east’: gan meaning garden. An Edenic refiguration of Cublai Khan's earthly park could see gan-ēden, with Khan bleeding into the sound (gkhan-ēden) reshaping the word into ‘Xanedu’. The -u is a given in all three earlier versions of the name, otherwise Coleridge might have gone the whole hog and set his poem in ‘Xanaden’. Maybe.

Hmm: maybe not.

One objection, of course, is that there's no ‘woman wailing for her demon-lover!’ in Eden, at least not in Genesis (setting extra-Biblical speculation about Lilith and the like aside). We could say that this woman is not actually in Coleridge's garden: it's an as-if comparison, not a description (the place is ‘as holy and enchanted/As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted/By woman wailing for her demon-lover!’) But we could take a different line, and note the many scholars who draw comparisons between this portion of Genesis and the Song of Solomon:

The relationship of the Song with Genesis 2 has been remarked upon at length by Karl Barth, in his immensely comprehensive Church Dogmatics, from a theological perspective; for him they sanctify sexual love, in contrast with the repressive attitude towards eroticism in the rest of the OT. Daniel Lys, too, points to the parallel with the garden of Eden in discussing the function of the Song in the Bible. He writes “Le Cantique n'est rien d'autre qu'un commentaire de Gen.2.” [Francis Landy, ‘The Song of Songs and the Garden of Eden’, Journal of Biblical Literature 98:4 (1979), 513]

I think this makes more sense. It is, after all, hard to deny the erotic charge Coleridge's poem communicates: the pleasure dome, the wailing lover-women and the toothsome-sounding Abyssinian maid at the end. The point is that the Biblical Canticle takes these Edenic images of garden, underground river and bursting fountain and turns them into metaphors of sexual yearning and sexual consummation:

A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.

Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikenard,

Spikenard and saffron; calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices:

A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon.

Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits. [Song of Solomon, 4:12-16]

The question does it rain in Xanadu? takes on, in this light, something anticipatory, something erotic. That doesn't strike me as a million miles off the mark, I must say.

———
The illustration at the head of this post is of Coleridge's poem, and is by Dugald Walker.

Alph, the Sacred River

Walter Bradick's 1765 Choheleth: or, The Royal Preacher: a Poem most Humbly Inscribed to The King opens with a preface attributing the original version of the poem to somebody else (J. Dennis Furley, according to some sources) and claiming it first appeared in 1691. The DNB, though, seems to imply Bradick was himself the author (it also laments that ‘it may be doubted whether the work is now extant’. Cheer up, DNB! Here it is, on Google Books!)

‘Koheleth’ is the Hebrew name for the Preacher, Ecclesiastes; and the poem is a versification of that Biblical book. Did Coleridge know it? I can't prove so, but I'd like to think he did.

The poem starts on a suitably gloomy, Ecclesiastes-y note:

O vain, deluding world! whose largest gifts
Thine emptiness betray, like painted clouds,
Or watry bubbles: as the vapour flies,
Dispers'd by lightest blast, so fleet thy joys,
And leave no trace behind. This serious truth
The Royal Preacher loud proclaims, convinc'd
By sad experience; with a sigh, repeats
The mournful theme, that nothing here below
Can solid comfort yield: 'Tis all a scene
Of vanity, beyond the pow'r of words
T'express, or thought conceive. [1-11]

If it's really ‘beyond the pow'r of words/T'express, or thought conceive’ you have to wonder what the point is in writing a poem about it. Still. Nature, the poem (takings its prompt from scripture) insists, is a Heraclitan flow:

See, how the winds
From ev'ry point are whirl'd, and still renew
Their circuit. Rapid torrents rivers fill,
And these their tribute to the Ocean pay,
Whose vast abyss ne'er overswells its bounds;
For strait, in vapours, by the Sun exhal'd
Or through Earth's secret caverns, it restores
All back again.

This is the earliest reference I've come across the idea (was it common in the 17th/18th centuries?) that the ocean supplies waters back to the sources of rivers via ‘secret caverns’. I'd like to know more about this idea, actually: is it, for instance, behind Coleridge's dream-vision caverns measureless to man through which Alph flows? Is (that is to say) Alph the sacred river running back from the sea to the springs of creation? The original Biblical verses don't include the secret caverns: ‘The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits. All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.’ [Ecc. 1:6-7]

The poem adds another very Romantic-sounding passage to the original Bible verse, viz.:

More anxious none t' explore the hidden springs
Of Nature's wondrous works; nor less intent,
Though more abstruse the study, to trace out
The mazy lab'rinths of the human heart,
Its dark recesses, various and perplex'd
Its motions, diff'rent passions and pursuits.
Immense the labour, thorny was the road:

This sounds very like Wordsworth. But then we go on, and the anticipatory shadow of Kubla Khan falls again across the reader's mind:

       In the royal Seats I rais'd,
United shone magnificence and taste;
With ev'ry precious thing within adorn'd,
That wealth immense could furnish; planted round
With choicest vines, in beauteous order rank'd,
Whose racy juice supply'd the sumptuous board,
And cheer'd the heaviest heart. When tir'd with pomp
Of Court, and Solitude to rural scenes
Invited, entertainment sweet I found
In gardens, which with Eden might compare
Here flow'rs profuse exhal'd their odours, more
Reviving than Arabia's spicy gales;
Nor could Aurora paint on clouds, nor bow
Of Heav'n, by solar beams reflected, shew
Colours so various, or of lovelier hue.
There lofty trees th' extended vista form'd,
Or shady grove. The most delicious fruits
Of ev'ry kind, so plenteous, that, beneath
Their weight, the branches funk. Nor chrystal streams
Were wanting, which in pleasing torrents roll'd
From high cascades, or, in meanders flow,
Through artificial channels taught to glide,
Or rise in figur'd shapes from marble font.
Each tender plant the kindly moisture shar'd,
Nor felt the scorching rays. In this retreat
I pass'd my vacant hours, the cares of life
In sweet oblivion lost.

The parallels with Coleridge's Xanadu aren't, perhaps, very close; although this account is rather more languidly orientalist than the Biblical original (‘I made me great works; I builded me houses; I planted me vineyards: I made me gardens and orchards, and I planted trees in them of all kind of fruits: I made me pools of water, to water therewith the wood that bringeth forth trees: I got me servants and maidens, and had servants born in my house; also I had great possessions of great and small cattle above all that were in Jerusalem before me: I gathered me also silver and gold, and the peculiar treasure of kings and of the provinces: I gat me men singers and women singers, and the delights of the sons of men, as musical instruments, and that of all sorts.’ Ecc. 2:4-8). Still, Ecclesiastes as a source for ‘Kubla Khan’ (or maybe it would be better to say: ‘Kubla Khan’ as a sort of exoticised, far-eastern version of Ecclesiastes) hadn't occurred to me before.

That Hebrew is, in some sense, ‘behind’ Alph the Sacred River makes sense, of course; since ‘Al[e]ph’ is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In 1828, unfortunately for my purposes long after this poem was written, Coleridge wrote to his friend Hyman Hurwitz thanking him for a gift of his recently published pamphlet, An Introductory Lecture Delivered in the University of London on Tuesday 11, 1828, by Hyman Hurwitz, Professor of the Hebrew Language and Literature: a work he read, he says, ‘in gladsomeness of heart’ [CL 6:772]. One thing Hurwitz mentions is the theory of Caspar Neumann (1648-1715) regarding the Hebrew alphabet:

This is so en point for ‘Kubla Khan’ as a poem, one yearns to believe that Coleridge had encountered Neumann's ideas prior to the writing. I can't find evidence that he did, though. Which is a shame. After all, manifestly that's what Alph is in this poem: primary motion, origination, activity. Indeed, I wonder if one of the reasons STC's imagination slides from the ‘Cublai Khan’ of his source-text to that klakky doubled-k, i-less ‘Kubla Khan’ is that it comes closer to a rebus compounded of kaf, beth and alph, a mystic connection of originating poetic motion, space and concavity.

New Coleridgeiana

In 1918, the auction house Henry Sotheran and Co offered for sale a bundle of autograph writings by Coleridge, including both published and unpublished pieces of poetry and prose. Some, although by no means all, of this latter material was later published, which means this catalogue remains our only clue for a number of intriguing,  hitherto unknown pieces of Coleridgean prose and poetry. Below is what Sotheran were hoping to sell, all-in, for £175. I mark what I believe to be previously unnoticed material with ‘[*]’:

1. ‘10 pp octavo, mostly dated from The Grove, Highgate [Mr. James Gillman's], June 1st, 1822, to February 11th, 1832, to MR. or MRS. CHARLES ADERS, the latter the beautiful and accomplished daughter of Raphael Smith, the engraver, Euston Square, and Laurence Pountney Lane, City, long, closely-written letters of very intimate character, full of discussions on ETHICS, METAPHYSICS, LITERATURE, RELIGION, etc., mentioning CHARLES LAMB, ROBERT SOUTHEY, EDWARD IRVING, DORA WORDSWORTH, etc., but most remarkable for their constant allusions to a young lady by whom the poet seems to have been attracted at that time; her name, which happens very often in connexion with affectionate messages, has been carefully deleted quite a long time ago, possibly soon after the letters were received, but by careful scrutiny and comparison of the deletions can be seen to have been ELLEN KELLY; in one letter COLERIDGE writes her face is like a Corelli Concerto (the VIIIth) a silent music, he also several times expresses a wish that the ADERS should come to live with the GILLMANS, and bring the lady with them.’ The catalogue includes the following excerpts from this bundle:

[i] ‘It is a maxim with me, to make Life as continuous as possible, by linking on the Present to the Past. ... The Present is a phantom known only by its pining, if it do not breathe the vital air of the Future : and what is the Future, but the Image of the Past projected on the mist of the Unknown, and seen with a glory round its head. But where shall we find the Eternal, which gives the Three in One, and makes all exist in each? It is Love-Love that like Flame can pass successively, from this to this, ever the same essentially, and yet taking up into its character the nature of the object on which it finds its sustenance. I of course am a stranger to your dear now spiritual Mother ; but as by the beauty of a Daughter we may form an idea of the beauty and there is an almost divine Beauty) of Age that formed the shrine of holy love in the Present, so by Mrs. Aders' Countenance, Tones, and Movements can I interpret what your Mother must have been—for no man can truly love diversely or diverse objects.’ [CL 5:266]

[ii] [*]‘Mr. Green like myself is half German—and in the best sense, all German.’

[iii] ‘If Mr. R. [Reece] could give me time, unused as for so many many years I have been to versifying of any kind, and dried up I fear, my poetic spring will be found by the severities of austere Metaphysics, I will attempt it [some translation] for him.’ [CL 5:271]

[iv] ‘To be with one for any continuance and in any bond of sympathy, and not to feel attached to Germans, and to prize the intellectual growth of Protestant Germany, is scarcely possible.’ [CL 5:287]

[v] ‘I am resolved to tell Miss [Kelly], as soon as ever the Rose makes its appearance on her cheeks, that she deserves to have a gray haired Poet's kiss inflicted on her for the gloom, her sad naughty sore throat has thrown over our anticipations ... Be assured dear Madam! that if there be any medical efficacy in fervent and affectionate Wishing, your dear [child? this word deleted] will not long remain on a sick bed.’ [CL 5:366-67]

[vi] ‘Mr. Green ... is among the very best men I know. But probably you may have heard Mr. Robinson (that Pineapple of a Crab, as Charles Lamb says) speak of him.’ [CL 5:367]

[vii] [*] ‘Give my love to Miss [Kelly, this word deleted] and tell her that spite of absence and dreary weather she buds and blossoms on the Green-house of my fairest Recollections.’

[viii] [*] ‘Tell [dear Ellen, these words deleted], that I do not forget her—because I never forget her or can, she being one of the letters in the name written on the inward tablet.’

[ix] ‘My dear Friend, and (by the privilege of silvery locks and heart pure as burnished silver, in defiance of Beauty and Genius I dare add, beloved Sister!'[)] (Then follows a very long letter, to Mrs. Aders, 4 pp. 4to. relating to three copies of a portrait of himself by Madame von Predl.] [CL 6:651f]

[x] [*] ‘Another long letter is written in the form of an ‘EXTRACT FROM THE DOMESTIC AND LITERARY INTELLIGENCER, No, I, OCTOBER 12TH, 1825’: the supposed extract being a pretended press puff of “THE INVITATION, an epic Drama, in the style of Homer and Shakespeare. Finer models the Authors could not have selected”; this is followed by a Synopsis of a “Scena on the East Cliff of Ramsgate,” in which the writer and his friends figure as Esteecy [his pet pun on his own initials], Philophilé, Venus and Hygeia, the latter “enters a flying Machine and mounts aloft.” The whole forms a very remarkable Fantasia. At the end is a Letter by MR. GILLMAN stating that writing and talking what he calls nonsense, is an infallible symptom, that our dear Friend is in good spirits and in his bettermost health.’

[xi] ‘In this bleak World of mutabilities where what is not changed, is chilled, and in this winter-time of my own Being, I resemble a Bottle of Brandy in Spitzbergen—a Dram of Alcoholic Fire in the centre of a cake of Ice.’ [CL 6, 532]

[xii] ‘I have long had it in my wish and imagination to attempt the founding of a Teutonic Club, that should be connected with the gradual purchase of a permanent German Library in London.’ [CL 6:544]

[xiii] ‘He [Mr. Watson] loves Germany & Germans—dislikes the Italians, and ABHORS the French—all as a good man ought to do—just as I would have had it.’ [CL 6:553]

[xiv] ‘From Mr. Reynolds I have heard—that my two Poems, the first for an engraving, and entitled “Boccaccio's Garden”, and the other, a wild and somewhat long Ballad, are all they can print this year, owing to the disproportionate length of Sir W. Scott's Prose (that was to have been a Canongate Tale, had not Mr. Heath outbid).’ [CL 6:757]

[xv] ‘I should like to suggest to some of his [Ackermann's] able artists what seems to me no bad subject for a Caricature viz. The REFORM BILL, allegorized as a Loco-motive Steam-Engine, with all its smoke and fury, and by a long train of waggons, carts, etc., dragged on by it, one or two large caravans containing the ministerial Majorities, etc, ... each of the waggons should represent some one of our dead weights, and dead blunders of the present Ministry-Belgium, Holland, Portugal, Irish Tythes ... with the Steam Engine run mad, over hedge & ditch.’ [CL 6:883]

Some of these letters later appeared in the Collected Letters (the first, third, fourth, sixth and last are all known to scholars, as is the ‘Bottle of Brandy in Spitzbergen’ letter and the ‘founding of a Teutonic Club’ letter, plus the letter that references Mr Watson loving Germans but hating Italians); but so far as I'm aware the second passage here, most of the letters that refer to STC's old-man passion for Ellen Kelley, and the letter that references ‘THE INVITATION’ have none of them been published. Were the Ellen Kelley letters, in effect, suppressed, because they were in some sense indiscreet? Tantalising!

Aders was a German merchant resident in London, who in July 1820 married an Englishwoman, Eliza Smith (daughter, as the catalogue notes, of the painter John Raphael Smith). Earl Leslie Griggs includes a number of letters from STC to either Mr or Mrs Aders, the earliest dating from December 1820. He has no letter dated June 1st, 1822, although he does include a letter to Charles Aders dated February 11th, 1832. The reference to ‘Miss [Kelley, heavily inked out] whose face is a Corelli Concerto (the VIIIth) a silent Music’ is from a letter to Eliza Aders dated 26th December 1822 [Griggs 5:262], Arcangelo Corelli being the famous 17th-century Italian violinist and composer. STC had attended a dinner party at the Aders on the 22nd Dec, with many other people (Henry Crabb Robinson has a detailed account of this, ‘Coleridge was the star of the evening’, and musicians had been hired to perform, presumably Corelli being among the pieces played—the 8th concerto is called ‘The Christmas’ (you can listen to it here), so it would have been appropriate.

What else? Well, the poem STC here calls ‘Boccaccio's Garden’ was actually published as ‘The Garden of Boccaccio’ in The Keepsake for 1829 (edited by Reynolds), and reprinted soon after in Coleridge's 1829 Poetical Works [CC 16:652]. The ‘wild and somewhat long Ballad’ must be ‘Alice du Clos; or, The Forked Tongue. A Ballad’ which also appeared in the 1829 Keepsake. The cod-heroic ‘THE INVITATION, an epic Drama, in the style of Homer and Shakespeare’, however much of it there originally was, has been altogether lost.


[*] 2. ‘HOLOGRAPH MS., of an UNPUBLISHED POEM. “ON QUITTING OXFORD STREET, BRISTOL, FOR NETHER STOWEY, NEW YEAR'S DAY, 1795, WITH MRS. C. AND HARTLEY, THEN AN INFANT, ADDRESSED TO MR. MAURICE OUR MEDICAL FRIEND, AT WHOSE HOUSE WE HAD PASSED THE PRECEEDING EVENING, AND SENT OFF FROM CROSS, ABOUT 19 MILES FROM BRISTOL”; a Poem of 7 Verses, and Verses 1-3 of “PART THE SECOND: SENT BY THE POST THE SAME EVENING FROM BRIDGWATER”—at the foot of which Coleridge has written, “I have laboured in vain to recollect the remaining 7 or 8 Stanzas”; 4 pp. quarto., watermarked 1828.’ The catalogue gives us four lines of this poem:

My first-born! my bright-eyed, with three-cornered mouth,
Thee the winds for a while their own murmours may teach
Till the Cuckoo and Nightingale come from the South
They shall set thee, my Babe, thy first Lesson in Speech!

The catalogue adds: ‘the verses previous to this very pleasing one are of a humorous and somewhat coarse description.’ These four lines have never, so far as I can see, been published.


3. ‘SOMNOLENT EXTEMPORE, EYES HALF CLOSED AND HEAD NODDING TIME TO AN AMERICAN LADY’:

You came from o'er the Waters,
From Famed Columbia's land;
And you have Sons and Daughters
And Money to command.

But we are all the Children
Of one great Lord of Love;
Whose Mercy, like a Mill-drain
Runs over from above.

This poem was published under the title ‘To Baby Bates’. J C C Mays [CC 16:653] notes ‘the verses are known only from a transcript in a contemporary album and a transcript of a transcript reported in 1888.’ The version he prints in the Princeton Poetical Works is four stanzas, with minor variants of stanzas 1 and 2 (‘And Money to command’ is, in Mays, ‘And Money at command’, and there are differences in capitalisation and punctuation).


4. ‘THE TENDER CORN’:

The Rose that blushes like the morn
Bedecks the valleys low,
And so dost thou, o tender Corn,
My Angelina's Toe.

This is published by Mays as ‘To a Young Lady Complaining of a Corn’ [CC 16:539], although he speculatively dates this to ‘Jun-Jul 1817’ which is too early; its appearance in this batch of papers must mean it comes from the later 1820s. Mays has ‘And so dost thou, sweet infant Corn’ for ‘And so dost thou, o tender Corn’.


[*] 5. ‘THREE OTHER SHORT UNPUBLISHED POEMS: LOVER'S REVERIE; and THE YOUNG TANNER’; and some Prose Remarks respecting the same, ending, O that the Songs and Songlets here collected were but set to Charming Music by some modern Haydn—I might then exclaim!

Blest be the man that set these Lays!
He claims our thanks as well as praise!
Since had it not been for the Music
The Words had made both me and you sick.—S. T. COLERIDGE.

We can only guess at the nature and specifics of the three short poems, although STC's facetious quatrain has never been reprinted.


6. ‘ORIGINAL HOLOGRAPH MS. of the following UNPUBLISHED EPITAPH, 1 p. quarto, watermarked 1828’:

Here lies our Black Cat!
Caught many a Rat:
Till—sad Exchange!
He caught the Mange:
And, no Cure found,
In a Water-Tub
We drown'd, drown'd, drown'd,
Drown'd, drown'd, drown'd,
Drown'd, drown'd—drown'd
DON BELZEBUB!!

This poem is printed, it seems from this very autograph, by Mays [CC 1:654]


7. ‘ORIGINAL HOLOGRAPH MS. on GOETHE, 1 p. octavo: “What more aggrieves me in the greater part of Goethe's Compositions is the Irrememberable. The sorrows of Werther, the Mignon of old Harper of his Wilhelm-Meister, his Gorz von Berlichingen, and his Faustus, with many others, all are such glaring exceptions, that they might seem to justify the direct contrary”—etc.’ Earl Leslie Griggs prints this in his Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1932).


8. ‘ORIGINAL HOLOGRAPH NOTE on SCHLEIERMACHER'S SERMONS, 2 pp. octavo., signed, and dated Jan. 23rd, 1826, with a P.S. mentioning CHARLES LAMB: “You will think it worth my noticing that in a little blank verse Poem addressed by me to Charles Lamb on his Sister's Illness in my 23rd year I had expressed the same sentiments as Schleiermacher in the conclusion of his 2nd Sermon, and in my 24th year had already publicly recanted and renounced them in a Note to the Poem in the first edition of my Juvenile Poems!”-etc.’ This one is in the Collected Letters.


9. ‘To ELIZA, IN PAIN’; ORIGINAL HOLOGRAPH MS. of an unpublished Poem, of 12 Verses, 3 pp. quarto., signed, and dated June 3rd, 1826, addressed to MRS. ADERS, the subject of the poem, and enclosed in one of the above-mentioned letters of the same date’:

Twas my last waking thought—how can it be.
That thou, sweet Friend! such anguish should'st endure?
And hence the apish Dwarf, I dreamt to see,
Who told the cause and mock'd me with the cure—

This is in May's Poetical Works [16:618], although with a couple of quite significant variants:

Twas my last waking thought, how it could be.
That thou, sweet friend, such anguish should'st endure?
When straight from Dreamland came a Dwarf, and he,
Could tell the cause, forsooth, and knew the cure.

A New Specimen of Coleridge's Table Talk (1826)

Surprising this has passed by unnoticed: Caroline-Frances Cornwallis (1786–1858) was an important 19th-century feminist writer, hardly obscure or unknown. Her Selected Letters (1864) contains one to ‘Mrs Mossop’ from Jan 1826:

To Mrs. Mossop. Nizells, Jan. 1826

. . . . My Séjour at Hampstead was delightful. One of the people I met there was a Mr. Bandinell, of the Foreign Office, who had just been conversing with Major Denham, lately returned from Africa. He reports that amongst the nations of the interior there is much more appearance of civilization than towards the coast; that in one place he found a market attended by 50,000 people, soldiers clad in iron armour, and much that betokened a considerable advance above the savage life. On the coast it would appear that the slave-trade, by encouraging war, that great opposer of peaceful arts, had tended to degrade the people to their present state, as well as the vile policy of Europeans, who generally contrive to disseminate vice and disease amongst the natives wherever they go. Sir George Rose, Coleridge, Terrick Hamilton (the translator of Antar), besides the tribe of Freres, made our dinner-parties delightful; and Mrs. G. F. possesses the rare art of drawing forth the clever people whom she entertains at her table. Coleridge is an odd man, exceedingly fond of talking, and with an eternal flow of language which nothing seems to exhaust. He generally talks well if he does not get too metaphysical, and I had the luck of being placed beside him at dinner, so that I had the most of his talk. One idea of his seemed to me good, and I do not think I have seen it in print, though it has often passed through my mind—that the knowledge of a future state, or rather the consciousness of immortality, partook of the nature of an instinct. “No nation has been found without such a belief,” said he; “children feel the impression almost before you can say that they have been taught, and nature is never deceived in her instincts; birds never err in the building their nests, animals in a wild state always seek their proper food, and man, if he throws away this conviction, is like a domesticated animal that grows wanton and eats dirt by way of change. The only time I ever saw Lord Byron he pointed to a man in a state of brutal intoxication, and asked if I thought that a proof of an immortal nature? ‘Your inquiry, my lord, is,’ I answered; and so it was; it was the natural instinct shrinking with abhorrence from the degradation of the soul.” Such conversation at a dinner party is not common, and I was much pleased with my place. He is an old man—rather heavy in appearance, excepting that his eyes brighten as he speaks, and he is rarely silent; a good deal of action, though his movements have the air of infirmity, his hand is slow and unsteady, and his back is bowed; he is not corpulent, but square built. After dinner, when he came into the drawing-room, he began a regular lecture of about two hours duration, which rather tired his hearers, and as I was out of his circle, I could not hear what it was about. I have learnt a new art—that of modelling in wax, and I have, in this fashion, got a likeness both of Coleridge and his Excellency [Mr. Frere], which are much approved by those who know them, and which I shall hope to show you some day.

This is, in fact, a double-whammy: a new (which is to say, hitherto unnoticed) piece of Coleridgean prose that contains within it a new, if minor, anecdote concerning Lord Byron. One wonders what Coleridge's two-hour lecture concerned, and whatever happened to Cornwallis's wax likeness of the poet ...