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Revolution and Romanticism
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A facsimile reprint in the Revolution & Romanticism series chosen and introduced by Jonathan Wordsworth ISBN 1 85477 166 3 174 x 110 mm 404 pages |
SARA COLERIDGE Phantasmion 1837 Sara was the last of Coleridge’s three surviving children, and in some ways the most interesting. Like Derwent, she was a linguist and translator; like Hartley, she was a poet. Phantasmion is an imaginative fairy tale on a grand scale, in prose interspersed with lyrical verse passages. The hero encounters spirits of the earth and storm, has many adventures (including being transformed into a flying serpent), and finally triumphs over the forces of darkness. After her father’s death in 1834 Sara edited a number of his works, at first with her husband and cousin Henry Nelson Coleridge, then on her own. Her 1847 edition of Biographia Literaria is especially impressive. She died in 1852. £42 $65 The wind came by fits, whistling through the pine grove, and whenever it shook the fragile ash, a shower of yellow leaves fell from its delicate branches on the steely pool below. ... Streaks of dull clouds covered great part of the heavens, but, just where the sun was sinking on the horizon, they showed a spectral whiteness, edged with faintest yellow and sea-green. In the opposite quarter, the moon appeared like a wan face gradually kindling into life; she looked out from the sky in full splendour while Phantasmion was yet on his way; and, when he saw her beams resting on an ancient castle, surrounded by a moat and a high and thick wall, he knew that he beheld the domain of Penselimer. |
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Revolution and Romanticism | Hibernia | |
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