Named source · 1816

Christabel Quotes by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Context & Meanings

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Alas! they had been friends in youth; But whispering tongues can poison truth;

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“Alas! they had been friends in youth; But whispering tongues can poison truth;”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Meaning & context

Coleridge summarizes how rumor and hostile speech can turn an old friendship into estrangement even when the original bond was genuine.

Source details

Christabel, Part II, reviewed against the scan-backed 1816 first-edition transcription on Wikisource. The narrator's 'friends in youth / whispering tongues' stanza explains the broken friendship of Sir Leoline and Lord Roland; the passage is Romantic narrative poetry about estrangement, not empirical relationship research.

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