This is one of four small notebooks—all written in soft pencil— that DGR used between 1871-1880 to jot down memoranda of various kinds, including ideas for his literary and artistic work. The material from this notebook is mostly quite late, dating from 1880. This is especially true for the material that is written into the pages that proceed from the end of the book in terms of conventional pagination. DGR scripted this notebook, as he did with the other small notebooks, from both ends. Consequently when one finds, as here, five different draft texts associated with his sonnet on Keats, the sequence of these texts in compositional terms is from the back forward: in the case of the Keats sonnet, from [40r] to [38r], [38v], and ending at [37r].
This is a notebook of Gabriel's belonging to
his last year or
two—contains
some notable entries
WMR
1905
B M
Ashley Library
Passages in
Crabb Robinson
11 Russell Sq
from 10 to 12
Cyanide &
Potassium
(photography)
Mem: A. Dixon (known
to I. Dixon) might know
a useful art - [??]
Childermas—the day
of the week on which the
Holy Innocents
fell The
preceding years Nativity
Gradual graduation
a Letter
to
one who has now
culminated
frontispiece
The Oxford Prophet
from MA's Prophetic Series
Permanganate of Potash
A small quantity will
make gallons of Con[?]'s
fluid
To be got of those who
supply photographic
chemicals
Mrs Asher. Worboys
Hunts
Luca Antonio di Giunta
Venice 1543
I am
is their own
? Ellis—Dict of Proper
Names
virtuous ring & glass
galliard gardens
But in the in what may
be called the Anglo-Hebraic
order of aphoristic truth
Shakspeare Blake &
Wells
are nearly akin, nor cd
any fourth poet be named
so
absolutely in the same
connexion or link the
Shakspearean element
fragmentary play of Edward
III that the one as
[?] as in some of
his songs
is no conjecturing now
how near Shakspere
he might have [?]
on the same road had he
taken it
November
p. 51 (Vala Hyle Skofield)
2 seated — S in chains
26 —Hand as a spectre
(for D. at Verona in the
Respublica parenthesis)
Chemical Company
corner shop W. of
Oxford Quadrant
infuse small
quantity
of soda
after break fast
Tarax[?]ium
bottle 3/6
teaspoonful in wine
2 cups of water once a day
sisterly sestet
hand-in-hand
True Woman
If an isolated life has
any sting, it is felt in
the absence of [?]
those friends
who made for years unneeded
avowals of obligation
&
gratitude. Still this will
come in time to pass
&
be forgotten if not
visits once or twice a year.
Life is a coin which we
once shared together, but
which has now quite passed
from my
pocket into yours,
doubtless rightly enough:
only I desire no half-fart
half-farthing of its
small change.
There are moments when
Truth must come
not as serene dawn
but
as jagged lightning.
There are few indeed whom
the facile enthusiasm for
contemporary
models does
not deaden to the truly
balanced claims of successive
effort in art
Conway—take [?]
express
Chatterton can only be
underrated if we
expect that he shd
have
done by intuition
all that was ac
-complished by gradual
inheritance from him
half a century later.
Red Cap & Red Shirts
Furnish Revds & Garibaldis
P Richards
30 Cromwell Rd
Upper Holloway N
Invention absolute is
a thing slow of acceptance
& must be so.
This
Coleridge & others have
found. Why make a
place for what is neither
inven adaptation nor
reproduction? Let it
hew its way if it can.
Size of Memory
48 x 23 1/2
on light right 3/4
of an inch to go into
rebate—on left
side fillet to be added
To find that
an unknown
man hates you is
but a tempest in
the outer air— but
to find that your
friend has
turned against
you—
Dilute aromatic
sulphuric Acid
(for flatulence)
take 15 drops in
a
little water
[?] perhaps [?] here
accompany the work of the same
date
Devoted as my time
has necessarily been to
another art, I have
never hoped to produce
in poetry more than
a small amount of
quintessential work.
Thus the intervals of
poetic exercise
hover[?]/ reached between
poetic effort have after
lasted for years at a
time; & of these the
present is not
the
longest.
[?] from Robinson
25 Aug/
Mrs Silvester
Agnes Silvester
25
17 Hotten Street
Edgeware Road
10 Mos
Red[?]
sorrowful solitude
Frank
Wm
JM
Leyland
Watts
Smith
[?]
Miss Boyd
Tebbs
Mrs [?]
Stevens
Miss [?]
Mrs Stillman
F Marsden
Knight
Caine
Dixon
Swinburne
Forman
Mrs Arlinghy[?]
14 St. Georges Row
£14 7[?] [?] Bridge
Mary Hockey
24
sussurro sonoro.
Nichols
nearly opposite
Oxford
When printing in 1870
I omitted the piece on
W[ellington]'s funeral
as being
referring to so old a date.
but year by year such
themes
become more dateless
& rank only with im
mortal things.
Flower
in [?]
6 inch bulb
Cyclamen
For cleaning off
painting—
sp turp. with one
fourth of
[?] of
lemon
Pia—wife of Nello
della Pietra—in
Purg. though
repenting
only at last moment
J. C. Guillett frame maker
79 Bedford Gardens
Camden Hill
Thursday
not Wed—not Sat.
The add[?] hours are
Still a part only
[?] worth &
in
part recovered relived
of youth
If I could die like the
Arthur's Seat &
Salisburg crag seen
from Firth
The critic of the new
school sits down before a
picture, &
saturates it
with silence.
Bass Rock
Berwick Law—a low
peak on
stands
stands T[?] Castle
of the Douglas family
[????]
small rocks
Mr Atkinson
[?]
87 Cleveland St
Mrs Ward
23 Rutland
Street
Pimlico
Mrs Mac[?]
99 Kennington Rd
28 Jessie Kyles
Major Douglas
2 1/2 years
£15
Mrs Salem
42 Formosa St
Maida Hill
6 weeks
Mary Cox 22
32 Elcho St
Battersea
£16
Mrs Sylvester
492 Edward Rd
It has been
written so
many years
that at last
& is so much
less tempting
to take up
than a
new
thing that if
I venture to
follow the
perilous
precedent
of a Coleridge
& to print it
as it has
long stood
new yeast from the
brewery. A dessert
spoonful in water
first
thing in morning
(for boils)
Middenstead
Mabel the short of
Aimable —
Robt de Bilesme
Hervey of Winwick
his son Boyn
Here the world's his byway
write by one who had seen
it all but whose
world
was then his cell. The
terrestrial globe he
spanned in
spirit, &
the Celestial Globe, when
the planets played &
while the zodiac guided
till from this cell
his soul issued into
infinity
When we are senseless grown,
to make stones speak
The Shakespearean English
ideal of Blake's poetry
groyne
Who tuned the strong
[?]
(Chatterton)
Pink Tamarisk by
the seashore
(Michael Scott)
The archer Apollo fledges
his arrow for thy soul
& if that
be not pierced
he has not no fellow shaft
for another:
but if it
reach thy soul it shall
rebound & reach another
In may [?] superfluous I may say that It may seem needless
to
say that
these poems are in no
sense
“occasional”. The “Life”
involved
life nor your life, but
Life
purely & simply representative as
coupled with
Love & Death.
S. in his prose grinds the
alliterative epithets between
his teeth
& trills them
on his tongue with equal
fury. He is a
kind of
epileptic epithetometer.
Subject for picture—
Laocoon
Ditto—M A. at the
Colonna
Coleridge had to
endure through life
the self-preserving
attacks of relentless
mediocrity in high places
56 Marion Parade
24 Lewis Crescent
Watts has
Lautrec
Dobree
Wilkinson
Whistler
Little Masters
Mallett's N
n Antiquities
([?] Diaries)
Lane
Poetry of Bible
The English Castaly
A Quintessence
Being a Collection of all
that is best in all English Poetry
excepting works of greater length
London [?]
No 62
S's Blake
Woman's desire awakened
by desire in the object of
her soul's
affection—cold
to all others
end of [?] &
[?] of [?]
How strange a thing
her mental side also
influenced by her affection
Ditto — True Woman
[?]
Sonnets—Woman
To be a body desirable like
any wine &c—how strange!
To be a soul purer than
man can reach &c—how strange!
Endymion is a magic toy
fit for the childhood of
a divine poet. The
man
however already appears in
the interview with Diana
(part
II). Nothing but hu
-manity wd do here, & this
it is
that the poet employs, art
fully entwining it with
supernatural exclamation,
descripsissy[?]
descripsist
Eglantine—the wild rose
Milton at a relative's
in St. Martin's Lane,
when his first wife
appeared
& implored his forgiveness.
They mingled
their
tears & were reunited.
The sense of the
momentous is strongest
in Coleridge— not
the
weird and ominous only,
but the value of
monumental moments.
I assure you that to touch
them is condemnation.
They are written
by the
basest creatures &
littered with the vilest
purposes. With your
exceptional discerment[?]
you may perhaps
have
learnt this by now.
Bill to C. Ellis
payable 15 Feb /80
£115.8d
Bill to F. & D.
payable May 24
£99.18.6
Chemical [?]
60 3/4 x 35
60 1/2 x 34 7/8
ASHLEY 1410 (4)
48 FF. July 1949
Ex'd by:
JMR JM