134 WILLIAM BARTRAM 



With other ministrations thou, O Nature! 



Healest thy wandering and distemper' d child: 



Thou pourest on him thy soft influences, 



Thy sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing sweets, 



Thy melodies of woods, and winds, and waters, 



Till he relent, and can no more endure 



To be a jarring and a dissonant thing 



Amid this general dance and minstrelsy; 



But bursting into tears wins back his way. 



His angry spirit heal'd and harmoniz'd 



By the benignant touch of love and beauty. (V, 126-136) 



The phraseology is too general to permit the acceptance of 

 parallels as proof of indebtedness, but the sentiment is so 

 characteristic of Bartram's numerous tributes to Nature's hues 

 and fair forms — woods and winds and waters — to its beauty, 

 harmony, and benignity, that, when considered with the other 

 lines in the play which apparently owe their inspiration and 

 phraseology to Bartram, this passage must also be included 

 among Coleridge's retentions from Bartram. Furthermore, it is 

 obviously related to the "' wilderness plot " and " Siminole " 

 entries, both from Bartram, in the Gutch Memorandum Book.^** 



'" The Ancient Mariner " discloses a variety of Bartram influ- 

 ences. Here we find identical phraseology and imagery and 

 what E. H. Coleridge calls " a less verifiable but no less sug- 

 gestive coincidence of moral feeling or sentiment." ^® Professor 

 Lowes' s study of the sources of this poem is exhaustive and 

 needs no summary here, except in so far as Bartram is con- 

 cerned. Coleridge was an omnivorous reader, and the tracing 

 of echoes in only two poems,. of which " The Ancient Mariner " 

 is one, has led Professor Lowes to the writing of a volume of 

 more than six hundred pages. By a diligent study of what Cole- 

 ridge copied from Bartram into his Note Book and of the poem 

 itself Professor Lowes sheds an interesting light on the work- 

 ings of Coleridge's imagination and, incidentally, on his im- 

 mense debt to Bartram. 



Thus Professor Lowes points out that Coleridge's description 

 of an aurora in " The Ancient Mariner " in the stanza 



^^ Alois Brandl, S. T. Coleridge's Notizbuch aus den Jahren 179^-1798; quoted 

 in Xanadu, pp. 5, 8, 11. 



^' Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, pp. 69-92. 



