20. *_The Female Vagrant_.

I find the date of this is placed in 1792 in contradiction, by mistake, to what I have asserted in ‘Guilt and Sorrow.’  The correct date is 1793-4.  The chief incidents of it, more particularly her description of her feelings on the Atlantic, are taken from life.

21. *_Guilt and Sorrow; or Incidents upon Salisbury Plain_. [VIII.]

Unwilling to be unnecessarily particular, I have assigned this poem to the dates 1793 and 1794; but, in fact, much of the Female Vagrant’s story was composed at least two years before.  All that relates to her sufferings as a soldier’s wife in America, and her condition of mind during her voyage home, were faithfully taken from the report made to me of her own case by a friend who had been subjected to the same trials, and affected in the same way.  Mr. Coleridge, when I first became acquainted with him, was so much impressed with this poem, that it would have encouraged me to publish the whole as it then stood; but the Mariner’s fate appeared to me so tragical, as to require a treatment more subdued, and yet more strictly applicable in expression, than I had at first given to it.  This fault was corrected nearly fifty years afterwards, when I determined to publish the whole.  It may be worth while to remark, that though the incidents of this attempt do only in a small degree produce each other, and it deviates accordingly from the general rule by which narrative pieces ought to be governed, it is not therefore wanting in continuous hold upon the mind, or in unity, which is effected by the identity of moral interest that places the two personages upon the same footing in the reader’s sympathies.  My ramble over many parts of Salisbury Plain put me, as mentioned in the preface, upon writing this poem, and left upon my mind imaginative impressions the force of which I have felt to this day.  From that district I proceeded to Bath, Bristol, and so on to the banks of the Wye; when I took again to travelling on foot.  In remembrance of that part of my journey, which was in 1793, I began the verses,

    ‘Five years have passed,’ &c.

22. Charles Farish.

    ‘And hovering, round it often did a raven fly.’

From a short MS. poem read to me when an undergraduate, by my schoolfellow and friend, Charles Farish, long since deceased.  The verses were by a brother of his, a man of promising genius, who died young. [’Guilt and Sorrow,’ st. ix. l. 9.]

23. *_The Forsaken.  Poems founded on the Affections_. [XII.]

This was an overflow from the affliction of Margaret, and excluded as superfluous there; but preserved in the faint hope that it may turn to account, by restoring a shy lover to some forsaken damsel; my poetry having been complained of as deficient in interests of this sort, a charge which the next piece, beginning,

    ‘Lyre! though such power do in thy magic live!’