My Dearest Friend,
I have been much more than ordinarily unwell for more than a week
past--my sleeps worse than my vigils, my nights than my days;
--The night's dismay
Sadden'd and stunned the intervening day;
but last night I had not only a calmer night, without roaming in my
dreams through any of Swedenborg's Hells _modérés_; but arose this
morning lighter and with a sense of _relief_....
I shall make you smile, as I did dear Mary Lamb, when I say that you
sometimes mistake my position. As individual to individual, from
my childhood, I do not remember feeling myself either superior or
inferior to any human being; except by an act of my own will in cases
of real or imagined moral or intellectual superiority. In regard to
worldly rank, from eight years old to nineteen, I was habituated,
nay, naturalised, to look up to men circumstanced as you are, as my
superiors--a large number of our governors, and almost _all_ of those
whom we regarded as greater men still, and whom we saw most of, _viz._
our committee governors, were such--and as neither awake nor asleep
have I any other feelings than what I had at Christ's Hospital,
I distinctly remember that I felt a little flush of pride and
consequence--just like what we used to feel at school when the boys
came running to us--'Coleridge! here's your friends want you--they are
quite _grand_,' or 'It is quite a _lady_'--when I first heard who you
were, and laughed at myself for it with that pleasurable sensation
that, spite of my sufferings at that school, still accompanies any
sudden reawakening of our school-boy feelings and notions. And oh,
from sixteen to nineteen what hours of Paradise had Allen and I in
escorting the Miss Evanses home on a Saturday, who were then at a
milliner's whom we used to think, and who I believe really was, such
a nice lady;--and we used to carry thither, of a summer morning, the
pillage of the flower gardens within six miles of town, with Sonnet
or Love Rhyme wrapped round the nose-gay. To be feminine, kind, and
genteelly (what I should now call neatly) dressed, these were the only
things to which my head, heart, or imagination had any polarity, and
what I was then, I still am.
God bless you and yours.