130 WILLIAM BARTRAM 



passage from Bartram which Coleridge quoted in his footnote 

 as proof of the accuracy of his observation, there is another 

 passage in Bartram describing the flight of the Savanna crane: 



Behold the loud, sonorous, watchful savanna Cranes (grus pratensis) 

 with musical clangor, in detached squadrons. They spread their light 

 elastic sail : at first they move from the earth heavy and slow ; they labor 

 and beat the dense air ; they form the line with the wide extended wings, 

 tip to tip; . . .8 



The parallelism between Bartram' s " beat the dense air " and 

 Coleridge's " Beat . . . the dusky air," when considered along 

 with the repetition of the " strange " expression " Flew creek- 

 ing " from the other passage, suggests certain inferences. One 

 is that Coleridge did not intend to imply in his footnote that 

 he had read Bartram for the first time " Some months after " 

 he had written " This Lime-Tree Bower," but that he had been 

 rereading Bartram." Another is that that when he wrote his 

 poem his imagination was stimulated by retensions from the two 

 descriptions of the flight of Savanna cranes he had read in 

 Bartram. 



Further support of the belief that Bartram was in Coleridge's 

 mind in the summer of 1797, when he wrote " This Lime-Tree 

 Bower," is given by Professor Lowes in his contention that 

 " the passage in the fourth act of Osor'io (11. 213-17; Poems, 

 II, 573; cf. I, 184) is as unmistakably suggested by Bartram as 

 is the corresponding picture in [Wordsworth's] ' Ruth ' (11. 

 67-78) . And the fourth act of Osorio was written before Sept. 

 13, 1797 {Poems, II, 518; B. E. I, 140)." " Coleridge's passage 

 reads 



® Travels, p. 144, second London edition, 1794. It was this edition which 

 Coleridge finally purchased in 1818, although he may have read an earlier 

 edition before. (See Xanadu, p. 453). 



* That Coleridge was in the habit of rereading books which interested him 

 is quite clear. Thus he borrowed from the Bristol library Poetic Tracts, Vol. Ill, 

 on March 2-20, 1795, and again on December 30, 1795 to January 28, 1796; 

 Cudworth's Intellectual System on May 15-June 6, 1795, and again November 9- 

 December 13, 1796; Benyowsky's Memoirs December 1-15, 1797, and again 

 May 31-July 13, 1798 (Paul Kaufman, "" The Reading of Southey and Coleridge: 

 The Record of their Borrowings from the Bristol Library, 1793-98." Modern 

 Philology, XXI, 319-20). 



^° Xanadu, p. 513. 



