His engagement with its proprietor, Mr. Daniel Stuart, to whom he
had been introduced during a visit to London in 1797, was to contribute
an occasional copy of verses for a stipulated annual sum; and some
dozen or so of his poems (notably among them the ode to _France_
and the two strange pieces _Fire Famine and Slaughter_ and _The
Devil's Thoughts_) had entered the world in this way during the
years 1798 and 1799.
Misled by the error above corrected, the writers of some of the brief
memoirs of Coleridge's life represent him as having sent verse
contributions to the _Morning Post_ from Germany in 1799; but as
the earliest of these only appeared in August of that year there is no
reason to suppose that any of them were written before his return to
England. The longest of the serious pieces is the well-known _Ode to
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire_, which cannot be regarded as one
of the happiest of Coleridge's productions. Its motive is certainly a
little slight, and its sentiment more than a little overstrained. The
noble enthusiasm of the noble lady who, "though nursed in pomp and
pleasure," could yet condescend to "hail the platform wild where once
the Austrian fell beneath the shaft of Tell," hardly strikes a reader
of the present day as remarkable enough to be worth "gushing" over; and
when the poet goes on to suggest as the explanation of Georgiana's
having "learned that heroic measure" that the Whig great lady had
suckled her own children, we certainly seem to have taken the fatal
step beyond the sublime! It is to be presumed that Tory great ladies
invariably employed the services of a wet-nurse, and hence failed to
win the same tribute from the angel of the earth, who, usually, while
he guides
"His chariot-planet round the goal of day,
All trembling gazes on the eye of God,"
but who on this occasion "a moment turned his awful face away" to gaze
approvingly on the high-born mother who had so conscientiously
performed her maternal duties.
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