Beschreibung:

COLERIDGE, Samuel Taylor. Autograph manuscript, fragment of verse, seven lines (beginning “The prayer of Hate, and bellows to the Herd,” from “Religious Musings”, n.d. [1794-96]. 161 x 89 mm, tipped onto stiff paper . Together with an autograph letter signed by James Gillman to an unknown recipient, Highgate, 26 July n.y. [1834], announcing Coleridge’s death: “the dear, valued and beloved friend, is no longer capable of answering your note. Alas he is no more.” One page, 8vo, on mourning paper . Provenance : Prof. Abraham, Copenhagen (inscription on mount, note on accompanying slip); sold Christie’s London, 24 June 1987, lot 104.
COLERIDGE, Samuel Taylor. Autograph manuscript, fragment of verse, seven lines (beginning “The prayer of Hate, and bellows to the Herd,” from “Religious Musings”, n.d. [1794-96]. 161 x 89 mm, tipped onto stiff paper . Together with an autograph letter signed by James Gillman to an unknown recipient, Highgate, 26 July n.y. [1834], announcing Coleridge’s death: “the dear, valued and beloved friend, is no longer capable of answering your note. Alas he is no more.” One page, 8vo, on mourning paper . Provenance : Prof. Abraham, Copenhagen (inscription on mount, note on accompanying slip); sold Christie’s London, 24 June 1987, lot 104. AN EARLY VERSE FRAGMENT FROM ONE OF COLERIDGE’S FIRST SIGNIFICANT POEMS The prayer of Hate, and bellows to the Herd That Deity, accomplice Deity In the fierce jealousy of waken’d Wrath Will go forth with our armies & our fleets To scatter the red Ruin on their foes! O Blasphemy! To mingle fiendish deeds With blessedness! (the end of the eighth stanza) The twenty-two year old poet began writing “Religious Musings” in London around Christmas in 1794, and finished it in 1796. It is a 420-line blank verse poem, containing Coleridge’s early thoughts on religion and politics, and upon its final publication Coleridge would consider it his first major work. He wrote to his friend Thomas Poole in April 1796 "I pin all my poetical credit on the Religious Musings." It was first published in his 1796 edition of his Poems as “Religious Musings: A Desultory Poem, Written on the Christmas Even of 1794”, though he had printed an excerpt in the 9 March 1796 issue of The Watchman under the title “The Present State of Society.” Coleridge’s contemporaries wrote glowingly of the poem. Charles Lamb wrote to him "I have re-read [“Religious Musings”] in a more favourable moment, and hesitate not to pronounce it sublime. If there be anything approaching to timidity [...] it is the gigantic hyperbole by which you describe the evils of existing society… I have read all your Rel. Musings with uninterrupted feelings of profound admiration. You may safely rest your fame on it”. Modern scholars have been no less impressed, Richard Cronin saying that "the poem, as it subtitle acknowledges, signally fails to embody in itself the kind of whole that it celebrates. It remains a fragmentary poem that lauds the process by which fragments collapse into unity… Religious Musings is at once a poem spoken by a prophet, from a commanding height, and a poem made up of a series of bulletins scribbled down by someone caught up in the press of events, and the difficulty of defining whom the poem is spoken by is matched by the difficulty of deciding whom it is spoken to" (Cronin, Richard. The Politics of Romantic Poetry . New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000, pp. 21, 27).