seems to imply that the ballad was then extant. Coleridge, as we know (see _Letters_, ii, 717), was engaged between 1822 and 1825 writing his _Aids to Reflection_, and the following curious passage occurs in Aphorism XXXI (Moral and Religious Aphorisms). Speaking of slander, he says: "It is not expressible how deep a wound a tongue sharpened to this work will give, with no noise and a very little word. This is the true white gunpowder, which the dreaming projectors of silent mischief and insensible poisons sought for in the laboratories of art and nature, in a world of good; but which was to be found in its most destructive form, in _the world of evil_, the Tongue" (Bohn Library edition, p. 70). _Alice Du Clos, or the Forked Tongue_, is the full title of the ballad; and it looks as if it had been written to illustrate the passage, though it has an affinity with Lewis's _Ellen of Eglantine_ and _The Troubadour, or Lady Alice's Bower_ (_Tales of Terror and Wonder_).[142] In a letter to William Blackwood of 20th October 1829 Coleridge says he has among other poems for the Magazine, "a Lyrical Tale, 250 lines," which he could give if desired (_William Blackwood and his Sons_, by Mrs. Oliphant, i, 415). The date of the poem may therefore be put down as 1822-1829. _Alice Du Clos_ ranks with the _Ancient Mariner_, _Christabel_, _Kubla Khan_, _Love_ and the _Ballad of the Dark Ladye_, among Coleridge's poems in which he rises out of his own subjectivity into the clear realm of objective art. The remark of Thomas Ashe (Preface to the Aldine Edition of the _Poems_, cxxxvi), that "the great fault of Coleridge is that he puts too much of himself, _unidealized_, into his verses," is perfectly true. Coleridge was himself aware of this defect, and in Letter 167, speaking of the _Hymn before Sunrise_, he admits that there is in the Hymn too much of the _idiosyncratic_ for true poetry, a piece of self-criticism that can be alleged against a great number of his poems, beautiful of their kind yet savouring too often of the Ego. The _Lime Tree Bower_, _Dejection, an Ode_, the _Lines to Wordsworth_, the _Pains of Sleep_, the _Tombless Epitaph_, _Youth and Age_, the _Garden of Boccaccio_, _Work without Hope_, are not exceptions. It is only in the _Ancient Mariner_, _Christabel_, _Kubla Khan_, _The Three Graves_, _Love_, _The Ballad of the Dark Ladye_, and _Alice Du Clos_, that Coleridge succeeds in hiding his own personal identity behind his melodious utterance, and attains to that simplicity which is truly classical. Most of his other poems are autobiographical, and can be thoroughly understood only as part of his epistolary correspondence. His finest ode, _Dejection_, is only a versified letter to Wordsworth, afterwards denuded of its most personal references, and addressed to a "Lady," to give it a more artistic cast.