BARTRAM'S INFLUENCE ON LITERATURE 143 



o'er the rocks at night I rov'd " (II, 1051) ; Bartram observes 

 an echpse of the moon, of which, " at length " only " a silver 

 thread alone " remains visible and " the late starry skies " are 

 " now overcast by thick clouds " (p. 51) ; there are shadows in 

 the river (p. 49) ; later Bartram reaches the mouth of the river 

 and describes the waves of the sea on the beach (pp. 59-60). 

 There can, of course, be no question that Coleridge's " gentle 

 river" (I, 255) is Bartram's " Alatamaha! gentle by nature" 

 (p. 51). An early draft of the poem gives its title as " The 

 Wild Indian's Love-Chaunt " (Poems, II, 1050) , and Cole- 

 ridge's interest in Bartram's Indians is shown by his Note Book 

 entry: 



The Life of the Siminole playful from infancy to Death compared to 

 the Snow, which in a calm day falling scarce seems to fall and plays and 

 dances in and out, to the very moment that it reaches the ground — '^ 



The connection between the Altamaha and the Indians is made 

 clear by Bartram, who " ascended this beautiful river, on whose 

 fruitful banks the generous and true sons of liberty securely 

 dwell " (p. 42). Professor Lowes is surely justified in coming 

 to the conclusion that " No one who reads the three or four con- 

 secutive pages in Bartram can well doubt that they inspired the 

 setting of 'Lewti'";^^ setting, however, is, in this case, too 

 modest a claim for Bartram, unless the word be considered to 

 include both the atmospheric and physical coloring of the poem, 

 and even then one would have to add certain definite images 

 and the wandering lover himself. 



In Coleridge's Note Book appears the entry: " Describe the 

 never-bloomless Furze and then transi to the Gordonia Lasi- 

 anthus." The rest is a long transcript of Bartram's description 

 of that "" tall aspiring " tree from pp. I6l-l62.*° The never- 

 bloomless furze later crept into line 6 of " Fears in Solitude " 

 v/hile the Gordonia apparently was not utilized (except by 

 Wordsworth) . Yet Coleridge when he wrote of 



" Fol. 36a; Archiv, pp. 360-61. Travels, pp. 212-13. See also Xanadu, p. 11. 



"Xanadu, p. 514. 



^"Archiv, pp. 359-60; Xanadu, p. 9. 



