"First published in the Morning Post for 17 September 1799; included in the Annual Anthology (1800). The lines were sent to Sara Fricker Coleridge in a letter of 23 April 1799 (L l: 504-5): 'At the inn they brought us an Album, or Stamm-Buch, requesting that we would write our names and something or other as a remembrance that we had been there. I wrote the following lines which I send to you, not that they possess a grain of merit as poetry, but because they contain a true account of my journey from the Brocken to Elbinr‘ode [Elbingerode].'" From The Complete Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1997), p.532, edited by William Keach (Penguin Books)