_A friend in need_
_Thursday, 11 June_, 1796.
... After all, you cannot, nor ever will, write anything with which I
shall be so delighted as what I have heard yourself repeat. You came
to town, and I saw you at a time when your heart was yet bleeding
with recent wounds. Like yourself, I was sore galled with disappointed
hope. You had
--many an holy lay
That, mourning, soothed the mourner on his way;
I had ears of sympathy to drink them in, and they yet vibrate pleasant
on the sense. When I read in your little volume your nineteenth
effusion, or the twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth, or what you call the
_Sigh_, I think I hear _you_ again. I image to myself the little smoky
room at the _Salutation and Cat_, where we have sat together through
the winter nights, beguiling the cares of life with Poesy. When you
left London, I felt a dismal void in my heart. I found myself cut off,
at one and the same time, from two most dear to me. 'How blest with
ye the path could I have trod of quiet life!' In your conversation you
had blended so many pleasant fancies that they cheated me of my grief.
But in your absence the tide of melancholy rushed in again, and did
its worst mischief by overwhelming my reason. I have recovered, but
feel a stupor that makes me indifferent to the hopes and fears of
this life. I sometimes wish to introduce a religious turn of mind,
but habits are strong things, and my religious fervours are confined,
alas! to some fleeting moments of occasional solitary devotion. A
correspondence, opening with you, has roused me a little from my
lethargy, and made me conscious of existence. Indulge me in it: I will
not be very troublesome! At some future time I will amuse you with
an account, as full as my memory will permit, of the strange turn my
frenzy took. I look back upon it at times with a gloomy kind of envy:
for, while it lasted, I had many, many hours of pure happiness. Dream
not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of
fancy till you have gone mad! All now seems to me vapid, comparatively
so.