Note 376:2 — HYMN BEFORE SUN-RISE, IN THE VALE OF CHAMOUNI[376:2]

First published in the Morning Post, Sept. 11, 1802: reprinted in the Poetical Register for 1802 (1803), ii. 308, 311, and in The Friend, No. XI, Oct. 26, 1809: included in Sibylline Leaves, 1817, 1828, 1829, and 1834. Three MSS. are extant: (1) MS. A, sent to Sir George Beaumont, Oct. 1803 (see Coleorton Letters, 1886, i. 26); (2) MS. B, the MS. of the version as printed in The Friend, Oct. 26, 1809 (now in the Forster Collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum); (3) MS. C, presented to Mrs. Brabant in 1815 (now in the British Museum). The Hymn before Sunrise, &c., 'Hymn in the manner of the Psalms,' is an expansion, in part, of a translation of Friederika Brun's 'Ode to Chamouny', addressed to Klopstock, which numbers some twenty lines. The German original (see the Appendices of this edition) was first appended to Coleridge's Poetical Works in 1844 (p. 372). A translation was given in a footnote, P. W. (ed. by T. Ashe), 1885, ii. 86, 87. In the Morning Post and Poetical Register the following explanatory note preceded the poem:—

'Chamouni, the Hour before Sunrise.

'[Chamouni is one of the highest mountain valleys of the Barony of Faucigny in the Savoy Alps; and exhibits a kind of fairy world, in which the wildest appearances (I had almost said horrors) of Nature alternate with the softest and most beautiful. The chain of Mont Blanc is its boundary; and besides the Arve it is filled with sounds from the Arveiron, which rushes from the melted glaciers, like a giant, mad with joy, from a dungeon, and forms other torrents of snow-water, having their rise in the glaciers which slope down into the valley. The beautiful Gentiana major, or greater gentian, with blossoms of the brightest blue, grows in large companies a few steps from the never-melted ice of the glaciers. I thought it an affecting emblem of the boldness of human hope, venturing near, and, as it were, leaning over the brink of the grave. Indeed, the whole vale, its every light, its every sound, must needs impress every mind not utterly callous with the thought—Who would be, who could be an Atheist in this valley of wonders! If any of the readers of the Morning Post [Those who have P. R.] have visited this vale in their journeys among the Alps, I am confident that they [that they om. P. R.] will not find the sentiments and feelings expressed, or attempted to be expressed, in the following poem, extravagant.']