128 WILLIAM BARTRAM 



large amount of factual proof of literary indebtedness to Bar- 

 tram. To summarize and bring together this mass of material, 

 and to augment it with the result of a certain amount of original 

 research is the aim of this more extended study. 



1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge 



Thirty-seven years ago Professor Aloys Brandl published a 

 note book kept by Coleridge during the years 1795 to 1798.* 

 In it Coleridge had set down, among many ideas of his own, 

 some quotations from the books he happened to be reading at 

 the time. A study of these quotations discloses that Coleridge 

 had read Bartram's Travels with a great deal of attention, for 

 he found many passages, sometimes whole pages, important 

 enough to be copied into his notebook. Professor John Livings- 

 ton Lowes, in his study of Coleridge's imagination, thus sum- 

 marizes the impression that Bartram produced upon Coleridge: 



Probably none of the books which Coleridge was reading during the 

 gestation of " The Ancient Mariner " left more lively images in his 

 memory than Bartram's Travels. The fascinating fifth chapter of Part 

 Two in particular had awakened him to all manner of poetic possi- 

 bilities, and prompted copious transcriptions in the Note book. And 

 these transcripts form, as it happens, a significant cluster. The alligators 

 . . . were set down from pages 127-30 of the Travels; the "little 

 peaceable community" of snake-birds, from 132-33; the antiphonal 

 roarings of the crocodiles and the thunder, from page 140; the wilder- 

 ness plot, green, fountainous, and unviolated, from page 157; and the 

 Gordonia lasianthus, from pages 161-62. Coleridge's memory, it is 

 clear, had been greedily absorbing impressions from these thirty-odd 

 pages. . . .5 



The specific use that Coleridge made of these impressions from 

 the Travels is a subject that leads us to Coleridge's poems. 



Long before the finding of the Note Book Bartram's name 

 was linked with the work of Coleridge by the poet himself. In 

 a footnote to a passage in " This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison " 



* "" S. T. Coleridges Notizbuch aus den Jahren 1795-1798." Herrig's Archiv 

 fiir das Studium der Neuren Sprachen und Litteraturen. XCVII (1896), 333-372. 

 The note book is in the British Museum {Add. MSS. 27901). It had belonged 

 to Coleridge's school fellow, John Mathew Gutch. 



^ The Road to Xanadu, pp. 46-47. 



