CHAPTER XV. THE BEGINNING OF THE END, 1833-1834.

CCLVI. JOSEPH HENRY GREEN, April 8, 1833 767

CCLVII. MRS. ADERS [1833] 769

CCLVIII. JOHN STERLING, October 30, 1833 771

CCLIX. MISS ELIZA NIXON, July 9, 1834 773

CCLX. ADAM STEINMETZ KENNARD, July 13, 1834. (Early

Recollections, 1837, ii. 193) 775

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, aged sixty-one. From a pencil-sketch

by J. Kayser, of Kaserworth, now in the possession of the

editor _Frontispiece_

MRS. WILSON. From a pencil-sketch by Edward Nash, 1816, now

in the possession of the editor 460

HARTLEY COLERIDGE, aged ten. After a painting by Sir David

Wilkie, R. A., now in the possession of Sir George Beaumont,

Bart. 510

THE ROOM IN MR. GILLMAN’S HOUSE, THE GROVE, HIGHGATE, which

served as study and bedroom for the poet, and in which he

died. From a water-colour drawing now in the possession of

Miss Christabel Coleridge, of Cheyne, Torquay 616

DERWENT COLERIDGE, aged nineteen. From a pencil-sketch by

Edward Nash, now in the possession of the editor 704

THE REVEREND GEORGE COLERIDGE. From an oil painting now in

the possession of the Right Honourable Lord Coleridge 746

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, aged (about) fifty-six. From an oil

painting (taken at the Argyll Baths), now in the possession

of the editor 758

CHAPTER VII

A LONG ABSENCE

1804-1806

CHAPTER VII

A LONG ABSENCE

1804-1806

CXLIV. TO RICHARD SHARP.[1]

KING’S ARMS, KENDAL,

Sunday morning, January 15, 1804.

MY DEAR SIR,--I give you thanks--and, that I may make the best of so

poor and unsubstantial a return, permit me to say, that they are such

thanks as can only come from a nature unworldly by constitution and

by habit, and now rendered more than ever impressible by sudden

restoration--resurrection I might say--from a long, long sick-bed. I had

gone to Grasmere to take my farewell of William Wordsworth, his wife, and

his sister, and thither your letters followed me. I was at Grasmere a

whole month, so ill, as that till the last week I was unable to read your

letters. Not that my inner being was disturbed; on the contrary, it seemed

more than usually serene and self-sufficing; but the exceeding pain, of

which I suffered every now and then, and the fearful distresses of my

sleep, had taken away from me the connecting link of voluntary power,

which continually combines that part of us by which we know ourselves to

be, with that outward picture or hieroglyphic, by which we hold communion

with our like--between the vital and the organic--or what Berkeley, I

suppose, would call mind and its sensuous language. I had only just

strength enough to smile gratefully on my kind nurses, who tended me with

sister’s and mother’s love, and often, I well know, wept for me in their

sleep, and watched for me even in their dreams. Oh, dear sir! it does a

man’s heart good, I will not say, to know such a family, but even to know

that there _is_ such a family. In spite of Wordsworth’s occasional fits of

hypochondriacal uncomfortableness,--from which, more or less, and at

longer or shorter intervals, he has never been wholly free from his very

childhood,--in spite of this hypochondriacal graft in his nature, as dear

Wedgwood calls it, his is the happiest family I ever saw, and were it not

in too great sympathy with my ill health--were I in good health, and their

neighbour--I verily believe that the cottage in Grasmere Vale would be a

proud sight for Philosophy. It is with no idle feeling of vanity that I

speak of my importance to them; that it is _I_, rather than another, is

almost an accident; but being so very happy within themselves they are too

good, not the more, for that very reason, to want a friend and common

object of love out of their household. I have met with several genuine

Philologists, Philonoists, Physiophilists, keen hunters after knowledge

and science; but truth and wisdom are higher names than these--and

_revering_ Davy, I am half angry with him for doing that which would make

me laugh in another man--I mean, for prostituting and profaning the name

of “Philosopher,” “great Philosopher,” “eminent Philosopher,” etc., etc.,

etc., to every fellow who has made a lucky experiment, though the man

should be Frenchified to the heart, and though the whole Seine, with all

its filth and poison, flows in his veins and arteries.

Of our common friends, my dear sir, I flatter myself that you and I should

agree in fixing on T. Wedgwood and on Wordsworth as genuine

Philosophers--for I have often said (and no wonder, since not a day passes

but the conviction of the truth of it is renewed in me, and with the

conviction, the accompanying esteem and love), often have I said that T.

Wedgwood’s faults impress me with veneration for his moral and

intellectual character more than almost any other man’s virtues; for under

circumstances like his, to have a fault only in that degree is, I doubt

not, in the eye of God, to possess a high virtue. Who does not prize the

Retreat of Moreau[2] more than all the straw-blaze of Bonaparte’s

victories? And then to make it (as Wedgwood really does) a sort of crime

even to think of his faults by so many virtues retained, cultivated, and

preserved in growth and blossom, in a climate--where now the gusts so rise

and eddy, that deeply rooted must _that_ be which is not snatched up and

made a plaything of by them,--and, now, “the parching air burns frore.”

W. Wordsworth does not excite that almost painfully profound moral

admiration which the sense of the exceeding difficulty of a given virtue

can alone call forth, and which therefore I feel exclusively towards T.

Wedgwood; but, on the other hand, he is an object to be contemplated with

greater complacency, because he both deserves to be, and _is_, a happy

man; and a happy man, not from natural temperament, for therein lies his

main obstacle, not by enjoyment of the good things of this world--for even

to this day, from the first dawn of his manhood, he has purchased

independence and leisure for great and good pursuits by austere frugality

and daily self-denials; nor yet by an accidental confluence of amiable and

happy-making friends and relatives, for every one near to his heart has

been placed there by choice and after knowledge and deliberation; but he

is a happy man, because he is a Philosopher, because he knows the

intrinsic value of the different objects of human pursuit, and regulates

his wishes in strict subordination to that knowledge; because he feels,

and with a _practical_ faith, the truth of that which you, more than once,

my dear sir, have with equal good sense and kindness pressed upon me, that

we can do but one thing well, and that therefore we must make a choice. He

has made that choice from his early youth, has pursued and is pursuing it;

and certainly no small part of his happiness is owing to this unity of

interest and that homogeneity of character which is the natural

consequence of it, and which that excellent man, the poet Sotheby, noticed

to me as the characteristic of Wordsworth.

Wordsworth is a poet, a most original poet. He no more resembles Milton

than Milton resembles Shakespeare--no more resembles Shakespeare than

Shakespeare resembles Milton. He is himself and, I dare affirm that, he

will hereafter be admitted as the first and greatest philosophical poet,

the only man who has effected a complete and constant synthesis of thought

and feeling and combined them with poetic forms, with the music of

pleasurable passion, and with Imagination or the _modifying_ power in that

highest sense of the word, in which I have ventured to oppose it to Fancy,

or the _aggregating_ power--in that sense in which it is a dim analogue of

creation--not all that we can _believe_, but all that we can _conceive_ of

creation.--Wordsworth is a poet, and I feel myself a better poet, in

knowing how to honour _him_ than in all my own poetic compositions, all I

have done or hope to do; and I prophesy immortality to his “Recluse,” as

the first and finest philosophical poem, if only it be (as it undoubtedly

will be) a faithful transcript of his own most august and innocent life,

of his own habitual feelings and modes of seeing and hearing.--My dear

sir! I began a letter with a heart, Heaven knows! how full of gratitude

toward you--and I have flown off into a whole letter-full respecting

Wedgwood and Wordsworth. Was it that my heart demanded an outlet for

grateful feelings--for a long stream of them--and that I felt it would be

oppressive to you if I wrote to you of yourself half of what I wished to

write? Or was it that I knew I should be in sympathy with you, and that

few subjects are more pleasing to you than a detail of the merits of two

men, whom, I am sure, you esteem equally with myself--though accidents

have thrown me, or rather Providence has placed me, in a closer connection

with them, both as confidential friends and the one as my benefactor, and

to whom I owe that my bed of sickness has not been in a house of want,

unless I had bought the contrary at the price of my conscience by becoming

a priest.

I leave this place this afternoon, having walked from Grasmere yesterday.

I walked the nineteen miles through mud and drizzle, fog and stifling air,

in four hours and thirty-five minutes, and was not in the least fatigued,

so that you may see that my sickness has not much weakened me. Indeed, the

suddenness and seeming perfectness of my recovery is really astonishing.

In a single hour I have changed from a state that seemed next to death,

swollen limbs, racking teeth, etc., to a state of elastic health, so that

I have said, “If I have been dreaming, yet you, Wordsworth, have been

awake.” And Wordsworth has answered, “I could not expect any one to

believe it who had not seen it.” These changes have always been produced

by sudden changes of the weather. Dry hot weather or dry frosty weather

seem alike friendly to me, and my persuasion is strong as the life within

me, that a year’s residence in Madeira would renovate me. I shall spend

two days in Liverpool, and hope to be in London, coach and coachman

permitting, on Friday afternoon or Saturday at the furthest. And on this

day week I look forward to the pleasure of thanking you personally, for I

still hope to avail myself of your kind introductions. I mean to wait in

London till a good vessel sails for Madeira; but of this when I see you.

Believe me, my dear sir, with grateful and affectionate thanks, your

sincere friend,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CXLV. TO THOMAS POOLE.

KENDAL, Sunday, January 15, 1804.

MY DEAR POOLE,--My health is as the weather. That, for the last month, has

been unusually bad, and so has my health. I go by the heavy coach this

afternoon. I shall be at Liverpool tomorrow night. Tuesday, Wednesday, I

shall stay there; not more _certainly_, for I have taken my place all the

way to London, and this stay of two days is an indulgence and entered in

the road-bill, so I expect to be in London on Friday evening about six

o’clock, at the Saracen’s Head, Snow Hill. Now my dearest friend! will you

send a twopenny post letter directed, “Mr. Coleridge (Passenger in the

Heavy Coach from Kendal and Liverpool), to be left at the bar, Saracen’s

Head, Snow Hill,” informing me whether I can have a bed at your lodgings,

or whether Mr. Rickman could let me have a bed for one or two nights,--for

I have such a dread of sleeping at an Inn or Coffee house in London, that

it quite unmans me to think of it. To love and to be beloved makes

hothouse plants of us, dear Poole!

Though wretchedly ill, I have not yet been deserted by hope--less dejected

than in any former illness--and my mind has been active, and not vaguely,

but to that determinate purpose which has employed me the last three

months, and I want only one fortnight steady reading to have got _all_ my

materials before me, and then I neither stir to the right nor to the left,

so help me God! till the work is finished. Of its contents, the title

will, in part, inform you, “Consolations and Comforts from the exercise

and right application of the Reason, the Imagination, the Moral Feelings,

Addressed especially to those in sickness, adversity, or distress of mind,

_from speculative gloom_,[3] etc.”

I put that last phrase, though barbarous, for your information. I have

puzzled for hours together, and could never hit off a phrase to express

that idea, that is, at once neat and terse, and yet good English. The

whole plan of my literary life I have now laid down, and the exact order

in which I shall execute it, if God vouchsafe me life and adequate health;

and I have sober though confident expectations that I shall render a good

account of what may have appeared to you and others, a distracting

manifoldness in my objects and attainments. You are nobly employed,--most

worthily of you. _You_ are made to endear yourself to mankind as an

immediate benefactor: I must throw my bread on the waters. You sow corn

and I plant the olive. Different evils beset us. You shall give me advice,

and I will advise you, to look steadily at everything, and to see it as it

is--to be willing to see a thing to be evil, even though you see, at the

same time, that it is for the present an irremediable evil; and not to

overrate, either in the convictions of your intellect, or in the feelings

of your heart, the Good, because it is present to you, and in your

power--and, above all, not to be too hasty an admirer of the Rich, who

seem disposed to do good with their wealth and influence, but to make your

esteem strictly and severely proportionate to the worth of the Agent, not

to the _value_ of the Action, and to refer the latter wholly to the

Eternal Wisdom and Goodness, to God, upon whom it wholly depends, and in

whom alone it has a moral worth.

I love and honour you, Poole, for many things--scarcely for anything more

than that, trusting firmly in the rectitude and simplicity of your own

heart, and listening with faith to its revealing voice, you never suffered

either my subtlety, or my eloquence, to proselytize you to the pernicious

doctrine of Necessity.[4] All praise to the Great Being who has graciously

enabled me to find my way out of that labyrinth-den of sophistry, and, I

would fain believe, to bring with me a better clue than has hitherto been

known, to enable others to do the same. I have convinced Southey and

Wordsworth; and W., as you know, was, even to extravagance, a

Necessitarian. Southey never believed and abhorred the Doctrine, yet

thought the argument for it unanswerable by human reason. I have convinced

both of them of the sophistry of the argument, and wherein the sophism

consists, viz., that all have hitherto--both the Necessitarians and their

antagonists--confounded two essentially different things under one name,

and in consequence of _this_ mistake, the victory has been always hollow,

in favor of the Necessitarians.

God bless you, and

S. T. COLERIDGE.

P. S. If any letter come to your lodgings for me, of course you will take

care of it.

CXLVI. TO THE SAME.

[January 26, 1804.]

MY DEAREST POOLE,--I have called on Sir James Mackintosh,[5] who offered

me his endeavours to procure me a place under him in India, of which

endeavour he would not for a moment doubt the success; and assured me _on

his Honour, on his Soul_!! (N. B. _his_ Honour!!) (N. B. _his_ Soul!!)

that he was sincere. Lillibullero ahoo! ahoo! ahoo! Good morning, Sir

James!

I next called on Davy, who seems more and more determined to mould himself

upon the Age, in order to make the Age mould itself upon him. Into this

language at least I could have translated his conversation. Oh, it is a

dangerous business this bowing of the head in the Temple of Rimmon; and

such men I aptly christen _Theo-mammonists_, that is, those who at once

worship God and Mammon. However, God grant better things of so noble a

work of His! And, as I once before said, may that Serpent, the World,

climb around the club which supports him, and be the symbol of healing;

even as in Tooke’s “Pantheon,”[6] you may see the thing _done_ to your

eyes in the picture of Esculapius. Well! now for business. I shall leave

the note among the schedules. They will wonder, plain, sober people! what

damn’d madcap has got among them; or rather I will put it under the letter

just arrived for you, that at least it may perhaps be _under_ the

_Rose_.[7]

Well, once again. I will try to get at it, but I am landing on a surfy

shore, and am always driven back upon the open sea of various thoughts.

I dine with Davy at five o’clock this evening at the Prince of Wales’s

Coffee House, Leicester Square, an he can give us three hours of his

company; and I beseech you _do_ make a point and come. God bless you, and

may _His_ Grace be as a pair of brimstone gloves to guard against dirty

diseases from such bad company as you are keeping--Rose[8] and Thomas

Poole!--!!!

S. T. COLERIDGE.

T. POOLE, ESQ., Parliament Office.

[Note in Poole’s handwriting: “Very interesting _jeu d’esprit_, but not

sent.”]

CXLVII. TO THE WORDSWORTHS.

DUNMOW, ESSEX, Wednesday night, ½ past 11,

February 8, 1804.

MY DEAREST FRIENDS,--I must write, or I shall have delayed it till delay

has made the thought painful as of a duty neglected. I had meant to have

kept a sort of journal for you, but I have not been calm enough; and if I

had kept it, I should not have time to transcribe, for nothing can exceed

the bustle I have been in from the day of my arrival in town. The only

incident of any extraordinary interest was a direful quarrel between

Godwin and me,[9] in which, to use his own phrase (unless Lamb suggested

it to him), I “thundered and lightened with frenzied eloquence” at him for

near an hour and a half. It ended in a reconciliation next day; but the

affair itself, and the ferocious spirit into which a _plusquam sufficit_

of punch had betrayed me, has sunk deep into my heart. Few events in my

life have grieved me more, though the fool’s conduct richly merited a

flogging, but not with a scourge of scorpions. I wrote to Mrs. Coleridge

the next day, when my mind was full of it, and, when you go into Keswick,

she will detail the matter, if you have nothing better to talk of. My

health has greatly improved, and rich and precious wines (of several of

which I had never before heard the names) agree admirably with me, and I

fully believe, most dear William! they would with you. But still I am as

faithful a barometer, and previously to, and during all falling weather,

am as asthmatic and stomach-twitched as when with you. I am a perfect

conjuror as to the state of the weather, and it is such that I detected

myself in being somewhat flattered at finding the infallibility of my

uncomfortable feelings, as to falling weather, either coming or come. What

Sicily may do for me I cannot tell, but Dalton,[10] the Lecturer on

Natural Philosophy at the R. Institution, a man devoted to Keswick,

convinced me that there was five times the duration of falling weather at

Keswick compared with the flat of midland counties, and more than twice

the gross quantity of water fallen. I have as yet been able to do nothing

for myself. My plans are to try to get such an introduction to the Captain

of the war-ship that shall next sail for Malta, as to be taken as his

friend (from Malta to Syracuse is but six hours passage in a spallanza).

At Syracuse I shall meet with a hearty welcome from Mr. Lecky, the Consul,

and I hope to be able to have a letter from Lord Nelson to the Convent of

Benedictines at Catania to receive and lodge me for such time as I may

choose to stay. Catania is a pleasant town, with pleasant, hospitable

inhabitants, at the foot of Etna, though fifteen miles, alas! from the

woody region. Greenough[11] has read me an admirable, because most minute,

journal of his Sights, Doings, and Done-untos in Sicily.

As to money, I shall avail myself of £105, to be repaid to you on the

first of January, 1805, and another £100, to be employed in paying the

Life Assurance, the bills at Keswick, Mrs. Fricker, next half year; and if

any remain, to buy me comforts for my voyage, etc., Dante and a

dictionary. I shall borrow part from my brothers, and part from Stuart. I

can live a year at Catania (for I have no plan or desire of travelling

except up and down Etna) for £100, and the getting back I shall trust to

chance.

O my dear, dear friends! if Sicily should become a British island,--as all

the inhabitants intensely desire it to be,--and if the climate agreed with

you as well as I doubt not it will with me,--and if it be as much cheaper

than even Westmoreland, as Greenough reports, and if I could get a

Vice-Consulship, of which I have little doubt, oh, what a dream of

happiness could we not realize! But mortal life seems destined for no

continuous happiness, save that which results from the exact performance

of duty; and blessed are you, dear William! whose path of duty lies

through vine-trellised elm-groves, through Love and Joy and Grandeur. “O

for one hour of Dundee!”[12] How often shall I sigh, “Oh! for one hour of

‘The Recluse’!”

I arrived at Dunmow on Tuesday, and shall stay till Tuesday morning. You

will direct No. 116 Abingdon St., Westminster. I was not received here

with mere kindness; I was welcomed _almost_ as you welcomed me when first

I visited you at Racedown. And their solicitude and attention is enough to

effeminate one. Indeed, indeed, they _are_ kind and good people; and old

Lady Beaumont, now eighty-six, is a sort of miracle for beauty and clear

understanding and cheerfulness. The house is an old house by a tan-yard,

with nothing remarkable but its awkward passages. We talk by the long

hours about you and Hartley, Derwent, Sara, and Johnnie; and few things, I

am persuaded, would delight them more than to live near you. I wish you

would write out a sheet of verses for them, and I almost promised for you

that you should send that delicious poem on the Highland Girl at

Inversnade. But of more importance, incomparably, is it, that Mary and

Dorothy should begin to transcribe _all_ William’s MS. poems _for me_.

Think what they will be to me in Sicily! They should be written in pages

and lettered up in parcels not exceeding two ounces and a quarter each,

including the seal, and _three_ envelopes, one to the Speaker, under that,

one to John Rickman, Esqre, and under that, one to _me_. (Terrible

mischief has happened from foolish people of R.’s acquaintance

_neglecting_ the middle envelope, so that the Speaker, opening his letter,

finds himself made a letter smuggler to Nicholas Noddy or some other

unknown gentleman.) But I will send you the exact form. The weight is not

of much importance, but better not exceed two ounces and a quarter. I will

write again as soon as I hear from you. In the mean time, God bless you,

dearest William, Dorothy, Mary, S., and my godchild.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CXLVIII. TO HIS WIFE.

February 19, 1804.

“J. Tobin, Esqre.,[13] No. 17 Barnard’s Inn, Holborn. For Mr. Coleridge.”

_So_, if you wish me to answer it by return of post: but if it be of no

consequence, whether I receive it four hours sooner or four hours later,

then direct “Mr. Lambe,[14] East India House, London.”

I did not receive your last letter written on the “very, very windy and

very cold Sunday night,” till yesterday afternoon, owing to Poole’s

neglect and forgetfulness. But Poole is one of those men who have one good

quality, namely, that they always _do_ one thing at a time; but who

likewise have one defect, that they can seldom _think_ but of one thing at

a time. For instance, if Poole is intent on his matter while he is

speaking, he cannot give the least attention to his language or

pronunciation, in consequence of which there is no one error in his

dialect which he has ever got rid of. My mind is in general of the

contrary make. I too often _do_ nothing, in consequence of being impressed

all at once (or so rapidly consecutively as to appear all at once) by a

variety of impressions. If there are a dozen people at table I hear, and

cannot help giving some attention to what each one says, even though there

should be three or four talking at once. The detail of the Good and the

Bad, of the two different _makes_ of mind, would form a not uninteresting

brace of essays in a _Spectator_ or _Guardian_.

You will of course repay Southey instantly all the money you may have

borrowed either for yourself or for Mr. Jackson,[15] and do not forget to

remember that a share of the _wine-bill_ belonged to me. Likewise when

you pay Mr. Jackson, you will pay him just as if he had not had any money

from you. Is it half a year? or a year and a half’s rent that we owe him?

Did we pay him up to July last? If we did, _then_, were I you, I would now

pay him the whole year’s rent up to July next, and tell him that you shall

not want the twenty pounds which you have lent him till the beginning of

May. Remember me to him in the most affectionate manner, and say how

sincerely I condole with him on his sprain. Likewise, and as

affectionately, remember me to Mrs. Wilson.

[Illustration]

It gave me pain and a feeling of anxious concern on our own account, as

well as Mr. Jackson’s, to find him so distressed for money. I fear that he

will be soon induced to sell the house.

Now for our darling Hartley. I am myself not at all anxious or uneasy

respecting his _habits_ of idleness; but I should be very unhappy if he

were to go to the town school, unless there were any steady lad that Mr.

Jackson knew and could rely on, who went to the same school regularly, and

who would be easily induced by half-a-crown once in two or three months to

take care of him, let him always sit by him, and to whom you should

instruct the child to yield a certain degree of obedience. If this can be

done (and you will read what I say to Mr. Jackson), I have no great

objection to his going to school and making a fair trial of it. Oh, may

God vouchsafe me health that he may go to school to his own father! I

exceedingly wish that there were any one in Keswick who would give him a

little instruction in the elements of drawing. I will go to-morrow and

enquire for some very elementary book, if there be any, that proposes to

teach it without the assistance of a drawing master, and which you might

make him _read_ to you instead of his other books. Sir G. Beaumont was

very much pleased and interested by Hartley’s promise of attachment to his

darling Art. If I can find the book I will send it off instantly, together

with the Spillĕkins (Spielchen, or Gamelet, I suppose), a German

refinement of our Jack Straw. You or some one of your sisters will be so

good as to play with Hartley, at first, that Derwent may learn it. Little

Albert at Dr. Crompton’s, and indeed all the children, are quite spillekin

mad. It is certainly an excellent game to teach children steadiness of

hand and quickness of eye, and a good opportunity to impress upon them the

beauty of strict truth, when it is against their own interest, and to give

them a pride in it, and habits of it,--for the slightest perceptible

motion produced in any of the spillekins, except the one attempted to be

_crooked_ off the heap, destroys that turn, and there is a good deal of

foresight executed in knowing when to give it a lusty pull, so as to move

the spillekins under, if only you see that your adversary who will take

advantage of this pull, will himself not succeed, and yet by _his_ or the

second pull put the spillekin easily in the power of the third pull.... I

am now writing in No. 44 Upper Titchfield Street, where I have for the

first time been breakfasting with A. Welles, who seems a kind, friendly

man, and instead of recommending any more of his medicine to me, advises

me to persevere in and expedite my voyage to a better climate, and has

been very pressing with me to take up my home at his house. To-morrow I

dine with Mr. Rickman at his own house; Wednesday I dine with him at

Tobin’s. I shall dine with Mr. Welles to-day, and thence by eight o’clock

to the Royal Institution to the lecture.[16] On Thursday afternoon, two

o’clock to the lecture, and Saturday night, eight o’clock to the lecture.

On Friday, I spend the day with Davy certainly, and I hope with Mr.

Sotheby likewise. To-morrow or Wednesday I expect to know certainly what

my plans are to be, whither to go and when, and whether the intervening

space will make it worth my while to go to Ottery, or whether I shall go

back to Dunmow, and return with Sir George and Lady B. when they come to

their house in Grosvenor Square. I cannot express to you how very, very

affectionate the behaviour of these good people has been to me; and how

they seem to love by anticipation those very few whom I love. If Southey

would but permit me to copy that divine passage of his “Madoc,”[17]

respecting the Harp of the Welsh Bard, and its imagined divinity, with the

Two Savages, or any other detachable passage, or to transcribe his

“Kehama,” I will pledge myself that Sir George Beaumont and Lady B. will

never suffer a single individual to hear or see a single line, you

_saying_ that it is to be kept sacred to them, and not to be seen by any

one else.

[No signature.]

CXLIX. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

Rickman’s Office, H. of Commons,

February 20, 1804, Monday noon.

DEAR SOUTHEY,--The affair with Godwin began thus. We were talking of

reviews, and bewailing their ill effects. I detailed my plan for a review,

to occupy regularly the fourth side of an evening paper, etc., etc.,

adding that it had been a favourite scheme with me for two years past.

Godwin very coolly observed that it was a plan which “no man who had a

spark of honest pride” could join with. “No man, not the slave of the

grossest egotism, could unite in,” etc. Cool and civil! I asked whether he

and most others did not already do what I proposed in prefaces. “Aye! in

_prefaces_; that is quite a different thing.” I then adverted to the

extreme rudeness of the speech with regard to myself, and added that it

was not only a very rough, but likewise a very mistaken opinion, for I was

nearly if not quite sure that it had received the approbation both of you

and of Wordsworth. “Yes, sir! just so! of Mr. Southey--just what I said,”

and so on _mōrĕ Godwiniāno_ in language so ridiculously and exclusively

appropriate to himself, that it would have made you merry. It was even as

if he was looking into a sort of moral looking-glass, without knowing what

it was, and, seeing his own very, very Godwinship, had by a merry conceit

christened it in your name, not without some annexment of me and

Wordsworth. I replied by laughing in the first place at the capricious

nature of his nicety, that what was gross in folio should become

double-refined in octavo foolscap or _pickpocket_ quartos, blind slavish

egotism in small pica, manly discriminating self-respect in double primer,

modest as maiden’s blushes between boards, or in calf-skin, and only not

obscene in naked sheets. And then in a deep and somewhat sarcastic tone,

tried to teach him to speak more reverentially of his betters, by stating

what and who they were, by whom honoured, by whom depreciated. Well! this

gust died away. I was going home to look over his Duncity; he begged me to

stay till his return in half an hour. I, meaning to take nothing more the

whole evening, took a crust of bread, and Mary Lamb made me a glass of

punch of most deceitful strength. Instead of half an hour, Godwin stayed

an hour and a half. In came his wife, Mrs. Fenwick,[18] and four young

ladies, and just as Godwin returned, supper came in, and it was now

useless to go (at supper I was rather a mirth-maker than merry). I was

disgusted at heart with the grossness and vulgar insanocecity of this

dim-headed prig of a philosophocide, when, after supper, his ill stars

impelled him to renew the contest. I begged him not to goad me, for that I

feared my feelings would not long remain in my power. He (to my wonder and

indignation) persisted (I had not deciphered the cause), and then, as he

well said, I did “thunder and lighten at him” with a vengeance for more

than an hour and a half. Every effort of self-defence only made him more

ridiculous. If I had been Truth in person, I could not have spoken more

accurately; but it was Truth in a war-chariot, drawn by the three Furies,

and the reins had slipped out of the goddess’s hands!... Yet he did not

absolutely give way till that stinging _contrast_ which I drew between him

as a man, as a writer, and a benefactor of society, and those of whom he

had spoken so irreverently. In short, I suspect that I seldom, at any time

and for so great a length of time, so continuously displayed so much

power, and do hope and trust that never did I display one half the scorn

and ferocity. The next morning, the moment when I awoke, O mercy! I did

feel like a very wretch. I got up and immediately wrote and sent off by a

porter, a letter, I dare affirm an affecting and eloquent letter to him,

and since then have been working for him, for I was heart-smitten with the

recollection that I had said all, all in the presence of his _wife_. But

if I had known all I now know, I will not say that I should not have

apologised, but most certainly I should not have made such an apology, for

he confessed to Lamb that he should not have persisted in irritating me,

but that Mrs. Godwin had twitted him for his prostration before me, as if

he was afraid to say his life was his own in my presence. He admitted,

too, that although he never to the very last suspected that I was tipsy,

yet he saw clearly that something unusual ailed me, and that I had not

been my natural self the whole evening. What a poor creature! To attack a

man who had been so kind to him at the instigation of such a woman![19]

And what a woman to instigate him to quarrel with _me_, who with as much

power as any, and more than most of his acquaintances, had been perhaps

the only one who had never made a butt of him--who had uniformly spoken

respectfully to him. But it is past! And I trust will teach me wisdom in

future.

I have undoubtedly suffered a great deal from a cowardice in not daring to

repel unassimilating acquaintances who press forward upon my friendship;

but I dare aver, that if the circumstances of each particular case were

examined, they would prove on the whole honourable to me rather than

otherwise. But I have had enough and done enough. Hereafter I shall show a

different face, and calmly inform those who press upon me that my health,

spirits, and occupation alike make it necessary for me to confine myself

to the society of those with whom I have the nearest and highest

connection. So help me God! I will hereafter be quite sure that I do

really and in the whole of my heart esteem and like a man before I permit

him to call me friend.

I am very anxious that you should go on with your “Madoc.” If the thought

had happened to suggest itself to you originally and with all these

modifications and polypus tendrils with which it would have caught hold of

your subject, I am afraid that you would not have made the first voyage

_as_ interesting at least as it ought to be, so as to preserve entire the

fit proportion of interest. But go on!

I shall call on Longman as soon as I receive an answer from him to a note

which I sent....

God bless you and

S. T. COLERIDGE.

P. S. I have just received Sara’s four lines added to my brother George’s

letter, and cannot explain her not having received my letters. If I am not

mistaken I have written three or four times: upon an average I have

written to Greta Hall once every five days since I left Liverpool--if you

will divide the letters, one to each five days. I will write to my brother

immediately. I wrote to Sara from Dunmow; to you instantly on my return,

and now again. I do not deserve to be scolded at present. I met G. Burnett

the day before yesterday in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, so nervous, so helpless

with such opium-stupidly-wild eyes.

Oh, it made the place one calls the heart feel as it was going to ache.

CL. TO HIS WIFE.

Mr. J. C. Motley’s, Thomas Street, Portsmouth,

Sunday, April 1, 1804.

MY DEAR SARA,--I am waiting here with great anxiety for the arrival of the

Speedwell. The Leviathan, Man of War, our convoy, has orders to sail with

the first fair wind, and whatever wind can bring in the Speedwell will

carry out the Leviathan, unless she have other orders than those

generally known. I have left the Inn, and its _crumena-mulga natio_, and

am only at the expense of a lodging at half a guinea a week, for I have

all my meals at Mr. Motley’s, to whom a letter from Stuart introduced me,

and who has done most especial honour to the introduction. Indeed he could

not well help, for Stuart in his letter called me his very, very

particular friend, and that every attention would sink more into his heart

than one offered to himself or his brother. Besides, you know it is no new

thing for people to take sudden and hot likings to me. How different Sir

G. B.! He disliked me at first. When I am in better spirits and less

flurried I will transcribe his last letter. It breathed the very soul of

calm and manly yet deep affection.

Hartley will receive his and Derwent’s Spillekins with a letter from me by

the first waggon that leaves London after Wednesday next.

My dear Sara! the mother, the attentive and excellent mother of my

children must needs be always more than the word friend can express when

applied to a woman. I pray you, use no word that you use with reluctance.

Yet what we have been to each other, our understandings will not permit

our hearts to forget! God knows, I weep tears of blood, but so it is! For

I greatly esteem and honour you. Heaven knows if I can leave you really

comfortable in your circumstances I shall meet Death with a face, which I

feel at the moment I say it, it would rather shock than comfort you to

imagine.

My health is indifferent. I am rather endurably unwell than tolerably

well. I will write Southey to-morrow or next day, though Motley rides and

drives me about sightseeing so as to leave me but little time. I am not

sure that I shall see the Isle of Wight.

Write to Wordsworth. Inform him that I have received all and everything

and will write him very soon, as soon as I can command spirits and

time.... Motley can send off all letters to Malta under Government

covers. You direct, therefore, at all times merely to me at Mr. J. C.

Motley’s, Portsmouth.

My very dear Sara, may God Almighty bless you and your affectionate

S. T. COLERIDGE.

I mourn for poor Mary.

CLI. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

Off Oporto and the coast of Portugal,

Monday noon, April 16, 1804.

MY DEAR SOUTHEY,--I was thinking long before daylight this morning, that I

ought, spite of toss and tumble and cruel rocking, to write a few letters

in the course of this and the three following days; at the end of which,

if the northwest wind still blows behind, we may hope to be at Gibraltar.

I have two or three very unpleasant letters to write, and I was planning

whether I should not begin with these, have them off my hands and

thoughts, in short, whistle them down into the sea, and then take up the

paper, etc., a _whole_ man. When, lo! I heard the Captain above deck

talking of Oporto, slipped on my greatcoat and went shoeless up to have a

look. And a beautiful scene verily it was and is! The high land of

Portugal, and the mountain land behind it, and behind that fair mountains

with blue pyramids and cones. By the glass I could distinguish the larger

buildings in Oporto, a scrambling city, part of it, seemingly, walls

washed by the sea, part of it upon hills. At first view, it looked much

like a vast brick kiln in a sandy, clayey country on a hot summer

afternoon; seen more distinctly, it gave the nobler idea of a ruined city

in a wilderness, its houses and streets lying low in ruins under its

ruined walls, and a few temples and palaces standing untouched. But over

all the sea between us and the land, short of a stone’s throw on the left

of the vessel, there is such a delicious warm olive green, almost yellow,

on the water, and now it has taken in the vessel, and its boundary is a

gunshot to my right, and one fine vessel exactly on its edge. This, though

occasioned by the impurity of the nigh shore and the disemboguing rivers,

forms a home scene; it is warm and landlike. The air is balmy and genial,

and all that the fresh breeze can do can scarcely keep under its vernal

warmth. The country round about Oporto seems darkly wooded; and in the

distant gap far behind and below it on the _curve_ of that high ridge

forming a gap, I count seventeen conical and pyramidal summits; below that

the high hills are saddlebacked. (In picturesque cant I ought to have said

BUT below that, etc.) To me the saddleback is a pleasant form which it

never would have occurred to me to christen by that name. Tents and

marquees with little points and summits made by the tent-poles suggest a

more striking likeness. Well! I need not say that the sight of the coast

of Portugal made it impossible for me to write to any one before I had

written to you--I now seeing for the first time a country you love so

dearly. But you, perhaps, are not among my mountains! God Almighty grant

that you may not. Yes! you are in London: all is well, and Hartley has a

younger sister than tiny Sally. If it be so, call her Edith--Edith by

itself--Edith. But somehow or other I would rather it were a boy, _then_

let nothing, I conjure you, no false compliment to another, no false

feeling indulged in yourself, deprive your eldest son of his father’s

name. Such was ever the manner of our forefathers, and there is a dignity,

a self-respect, or an awful, preëminently self-referring event in the

custom, that makes it well worthy of our imitation. I would have done

[so], but that from my earliest years I have had a feeling of dislike and

disgust connected with my own Christian name--such a vile short plumpness,

such a dull abortive smartness in the first syllable, and this so harshly

contrasted by the obscurity and indefiniteness of the syllabic vowel, and

the feebleness of the uncovered liquid with which it ends, the wobble it

makes, and struggling between a dis- and a tri-syllable, and the whole

name sounding as if you were abeeceeing S. M. U. L. Altogether, it is,

perhaps, the worst combination of which vowels and consonants are

susceptible. While I am writing we are in 41° 10m. latitude, and are

almost three leagues from land; at one time we were scarcely one league

from it, and about a quarter of an hour ago, the whole country looked so

very like the country from Hutton Moor to Saddleback and the adjoining

part of Skiddaw.

I cannot help some anxious feelings respecting you, nor some superstitious

twitches within, as if it were wrong at this distance to write so

prospectively and with such particularization of that which is contingent,

which may be all otherwise. But--God forbid! and, surely, hope is less

ominous than fear. We set sail from St. Helier’s, April 9th, Monday

morning, having dropped down thither from Spithead on Sunday evening. We

lost twenty-six hours of fair wind before our commodore gave the

signal--our brig, a most excellent and first-rate sailor, but laden deep

with heavy goods (eighty-four large cannon for Trieste in the hold), which

makes it rock most cruelly. I can only--

Wed. April 18. I was going to say I can only compare it to a wench kept at

home on some gay day to nurse a fretful infant and who, having long rocked

it in vain, at length rocks it in spite.... But though the rough weather

and the incessant rocking does not disease me, yet the damn’d rocking

depresses one inconceivably, like hiccups or itching; it is troublesome

and impertinent and forces you away from your thoughts like the presence

and gossip of an old aunt, or long-staying visitor, to two lovers. Oh with

what envy have I gazed at our commodore, the Leviathan of seventy-four

guns, the majestic and beautiful creature sailing right before us,

sometimes half a mile, oftener a furlong (for we are always first), with

two or at most three topsails that just bisect the naked masts--as much

naked mast above as below, upright, motionless as a church with its

steeple, as though it moved by its will, as though its speed were

spiritual, the being and essence without the body of motion, or as though

the distance passed away by it and the objects of its pursuit hurried

onward to it! In all other respects I cannot be better off, except perhaps

the two passengers; the one a gay, worldly-minded fellow, not deficient in

sense or judgment, but inert to everything except gain and eating; the

other, a woman once housekeeper in General Fox’s family, a creature with a

horrible superfluity of envelope, a monopolist and patentee of flabby

flesh, or rather _fish_. Indeed, she is at once fish, flesh, and _fowl_,

though no chicken. But, ... to see the man eat and this Mrs. Carnosity

talk about it! “I must have that little potato” (baked in grease under the

meat), “it looks so smilingly at me.” “Do cut me, if you please” (for she

is so fat she cannot help herself), “that small bit, just there, sir! a

leetle, tiny bit below if you please.” “Well, I have brought plenty of

pickles, I always think,” etc. “I have always three or four jars of brandy

cherries with me: for with boil’d rice now,” etc., “for I always think,”

etc. And true enough, if it can be called thinking, she does always think

upon some little damned article of eating that belongs to the

housekeeper’s cupboard’s locker. And then her plaintive yawns, such a

mixture of moan and petted child’s dry _cry_, or _try_ at a cry in them.

And then she said to me this morning, “How unhappy, I always think, one

always is, when there is nothing and nobody as one may say, about _one_ to

amuse _one_. It makes me so _nervous_.” She eats, drinks, snores, and

simply the being stupid, and silly, and vacant the learned body calls

nervous. Shame on me for talking about her! The sun is setting so exactly

behind my back that a ball from it would strike the stem of the vessel

against which my back rests. But sunsets are not so beautiful, I think, at

sea as on land. I am sitting at _my_ desk, namely the rudder-case, on the

duck coop, the ducks quacking at my legs. The chicken and duck coops run

thus [Illustration] and so inclose on three sides the rudder-case. But now

immediately that the sun has sunk, the sea runs high, and the vessel

begins its old trick of rocking, which it had intermitted the whole

day--the second intermission only since our voyage. Oh, how glad I was to

see Cape Mondego, and then yesterday the Rock of Lisbon and the fine

mountains at its interior extremity, which I conceived to be Cintra! Its

outline from the sea is something like this

[Illustration]

and just at A. where the fine stony M. begins, with a C. lying on its

back, is a village or villages, and before we came abreast of this, we saw

far inland, seemingly close by, several breasted peaks, two towers, and,

by the glass, three, of a very large building, be it convent or palace.

However, I knew you had seen all these places over and over again. The

dome-shaped mountain or Cape Esperichel, between Lisbon and Cape St.

Vincent, is one of the finest I ever saw; indeed all the mountains have a

noble outline. We sail on at a wonderful rate, and considering that we are

in convoy, shall have made a most lucky voyage to Gibraltar, if we are not

becalmed and taken in the Gut; for we shall be there to-morrow afternoon

if the wind hold, and have gone it in ten days. It is unlucky to prophesy

good things, but if we have as good fortune in the Mediterranean, instead

of nine or eleven weeks, we may reach Malta in a month or five weeks,

including the week which we shall most probably stay at Gibraltar. I

shall keep the letters open till we arrive there, simply put two strokes

under the word “=Gibraltar=,” and close up the letter, as I may gain

thereby a fortnight’s post. You will not expect to hear from me again till

we get to Malta. I had hoped to have done something during my voyage; at

all events, to have written some letters, etc. But what with the rains,

the incessant rocking, and my consequent ill health or stupefaction, I

have done little else than read through the Italian Grammar. I took out

with me some of the finest wine and the oldest in the kingdom, some

marvellous brandy, and rum twenty years old, and excepting a pint of wine,

which I had mulled at two different times, and instantly ejected again, I

have touched nothing but lemonade from the day we set sail to the present

time. So very little does anything grow into a habit with me! This I

should say to poor Tobin, who continued _advising_ and _advising_ to the

last moment. O God, he is a good fellow, but this rage of _advising_ and

_discussing character_, and (as almost all men of strong habitual health

have the trick of doing) of finding out the cause of everybody’s ill

health in some one malpractice or other. This, and the self-conceit and

presumption necessarily generated by it, added to his own marvellous

genius at utterly misunderstanding what he hears, and transposing words

often in a manner that would be ludicrous if one did not suspect that his

blindness had a share in producing it--all this renders him a sad

mischief-maker, and with the best intentions, a manufacturer and

propagator of calumnies. I had no notion of the extent of the mischief

till I was last in town. I was low, even to sinking, when I was at the

Inn. Stuart, best, kindest man to me! was with me, and Lamb, and Sir G.

B.’s valet. But Tobin fastened upon me, and advised and reproved, and just

before I stepped into the coach, reminded me of a debt of ten pounds which

I had borrowed of him for another person, an intimate friend of his, on

the condition that I was not to repay him till I could do it out of my

own purse, not borrowing of another, and not embarrassing myself--in his

very words, “till he wanted it more than I.” I was calling to Stuart in

order to pay the sum, but he stopped me with fervour, and, fully convinced

that he did it only in the _rage_ of admonition, I was vexed that it had

angered me. Therefore say nothing of it, for really he is at bottom a good

man.

I dare say nothing of home. I will write to Sara from Malta, the moment of

my arrival, if I have not time to write from Gibraltar. One of you write

to me by the regular post, “S. T. Coleridge, Esqre. Dr. Stoddart’s,

Malta:” the other to me at Mr. J. C. Motley’s, Portsmouth, that I may see

whether Motley was right or no, and which comes first.

God bless you all and

S. T. COLERIDGE.

Remember me kindly to Mr. Jackson, Mrs. Wilson, to the Calverts and Mrs.

Wilkinson, to Mary Stamper, etc.

CLII. TO DANIEL STUART.

On board the Speedwell, at anchor in the Bay of Gibraltar,

Saturday night, April 21, 1804.

MY DEAR STUART,--We dropped anchor half a mile from the landing place of

the Rock of Gibraltar on Thursday afternoon between four and five; a most

prosperous voyage of eleven days....

Since we anchored I have passed nearly the whole of each day in scrambling

about on the back of the rock, among the monkeys. I am a match for them in

climbing, but in hops and flying leaps they beat me. You sometimes see

thirty or forty together of these our poor relations, and you may be a

month on the rock and go to the back every day and not see one. Oh, my

dear friend! it is a most interesting place, this! A rock which thins as

it rises up, so that you can sit a-straddle on almost any part of its

summit, between two and three miles from north to south.

[Illustration]

Rude as this line is, it gives you the outline of its appearance, from the

sea close to it, tolerably accurately; only, in nature, it gives you very

much the idea of a rude statue of a lion couchant, like that in the

picture of the Lion and the Gnat, in the common spelling-books, or of some

animal with a great dip in the neck. The lion’s head [turns] towards the

Spanish, his stiffened tail (4) to the African coast. At (5) a range of

Moorish towers and wall begins; and at (6) the town begins, the Moorish

wall running straight down by the side of it. Above the town, little

gardens and neat small houses are scattered here and there, wherever they

can force a bit of gardenable ground; and in these are poplars, with a

profusion of geraniums and other flowers unknown to me; and their fences

are most commonly that strange vegetable monster, the prickly aloe; its

leaves resembling the head of a battledore, or the wooden wings of a

church-cherub, and one leaf growing out of another. Under the Lion’s Tail

is Europa Point, which is full of gardens and pleasant trees; but the

highest head of this mountain is a heap of rocks, with the palm-trees

growing in vast quantities in their interstices, with many flowering weeds

very often peeping out of the small holes or slits in the body of the

rock, just as if they were growing in a bottle. To have left England only

eleven days ago, with two flannel waistcoats on, and two others over them;

with two flannel drawers under cloth pantaloons, and a thick pair of yarn

stockings; to have had no temptation to lay any part of these aside during

the whole voyage, and now to find myself in the heat of an English summer,

among flowers, and seeking shade, and courting the sea-breezes; all the

trees in rich foliage, and the corn knee-high, and so exquisitely green!

and to find myself forced to retain only one flannel waistcoat, and roam

about in a pair of silk stockings and nankeen pantaloons, is a delightful

transition. How I shall bear the intensity of a Maltese or even a Sicilian

summer I cannot guess; but if I get over it, I am confident, from what I

have experienced the last four days, that their late autumn and winter

will almost re-create me. I could fill a fresh sheet with the description

of the singular faces, dresses, manners, etc., etc., of the Spaniards,

Moors, Jews (who have here a peculiar dress resembling a college dress),

Greeks, Italians, English, etc., that meet in the hot crowded streets of

the town, or walk under the aspen poplars that form an _Exchange_ in the

very centre. But words would do nothing. I am sure that any young man who

has a turn for character-painting might pass a year on the Rock with

infinite advantage. A dozen plates by Hogarth from this town! We are told

that we shall not sail to-morrow evening. The Leviathan leaves us and goes

to join the fleet, and the Maidstone Frigate is to convoy us to Malta.

When you write, send one letter to me at Mr. J. C. Motley’s, Portsmouth,

and another by the post to me at Dr. Stoddart’s,[20] Malta, that I may see

which comes first. God grant that my present health may continue, and then

my after-letters will be better worth the postage. But even this scrawl

will not be unwelcome to you, since it tells you that I am safe, improving

in my health, and ever, ever, my dear Stuart, with true affection, and

willing gratitude, your sincere friend,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

In the diary of his voyage on the Speedwell Coleridge records at greater

length and in a more impassioned strain his first impressions of

Gibraltar. “Saturday, April 21st, went again on shore, walked up to the

furthermost signal-house, the summit of that third and last segment of the

mountain ridge which looks over the blue sea to Africa. The mountains

around me did not anywhere arrange themselves strikingly, and few of their

shapes were striking. One great pyramidal summit far above the rest, on

the coast of Spain, and an uncouth form, an old Giant’s Head and

shoulders, looking in upon us from Africa far inland, were the most

impressive; but the sea was so blue, calm, sunny, so majestic a lake where

it is enshored by mountains, and, where it is not [enshored], having its

indefiniteness the more felt from those huge mountain boundaries, which

yet by their greatness prepared the mind for the sublimity of unbounded

ocean--altogether it reposed in the brightness and quietness of the

noon--majestic, for it was great with an inseparable character of unity,

and, thus, the more touching to me who had looked from far loftier

mountains over a far more manifold landscape, the fields and habitations

of Englishmen, children of one family, one religion, and that my own, the

same language and manners--by every hill, by every river some sweet name

familiar to my ears, or, if first heard, remembered as soon as heard! But

here, on this side of me, Spaniards, a degraded race that dishonour

Christianity; on the other, Moors of many nations, wretches that dishonour

human nature! If any one were near me and could tell me, ‘that mountain

yonder is called so and so, and at its foot runs such and such a river,’

oh, with how blank an ear should I listen to sounds which probably my

tongue could not repeat, and which I should be sure to forget, and take no

pleasure in remembering! And the Rock itself, on which I stand (nearly the

same in length as our Carrock, but not so high, nor one tenth as wide),

what a complex Thing! At its feet mighty ramparts establishing themselves

in the sea with their huge artillery, hollow trunks of iron where Death

and Thunder sleep; the gardens in deep moats between lofty and massive

walls; a town of all nations and all languages--close below me, on my

left, fields and gardens and neat small mansions--poplars, cypresses, and

willow-leaved aspens, with fences of prickly aloe--strange plant that does

not seem to be alive, but to have been so, a thing fantastically carved in

wood, and coloured--some hieroglyphic or temple ornament of undiscovered

meaning. On my right and immediately with and around me white stone above

stone, an irregular heap of marble rocks, with flowers growing out of the

holes and fissures, and palmettoes everywhere ... beyond these an old

Moorish tower, and then galleries and halls cut out by human labour out of

the dense hard rock, with enormous cannon the apertures for which no eye

could distinguish, from the sea or the land below them, from the

nesting-holes of seafowl. On the north side, aside these, one absolutely

perpendicular precipice, the absolute length of the Rock, at its highest a

precipice of 1,450 feet--the whole eastern side an unmanageable mass of

stones and weeds, save one place where a perpendicular precipice of stone

slants suddenly off in a swelling slope of sand like the Screes on

Wastwater. The other side of this rock 5,000 men in arms, and no less than

10,000 inhabitants--in this [side] sixty or seventy apes! What a

multitude, an almost discordant complexity of associations! The Pillars of

Hercules, Calpe, and Abyla, the realms of Masinissa, Jugurtha, and Syphax:

Spain, Gibraltar: the Dey of Algiers, dusky Moor and black African, and

others. Quiet it is to the eye, and to the heart, which in it will

entrance itself in the present vision, and know nothing, feel nothing, but

the abiding things of Nature, great, calm, majestic, and one! From the

road I climbed up among the rocks, crushing the tansy, the strong smell of

which the open air reconciled to me. I reached the ‘striding edge,’ where,

as I sate, I fell into the above musing.”

CLIII. TO HIS WIFE.

[MALTA,] June, 1804.

[MY DEAR SARA,]--[I wrote] to Southey from Gibraltar, directing you to

open the letter in case Southey should be in town. You received it, I

trust, and learnt from it that I had been pretty well, and that we had had

a famous quick passage. At Gibraltar we stayed five days, and so lost our

fair wind, and [during our] after-voyage to Malta [there] was [a] storm,

that carried away our main yard, etc., long dead calms, every rope of the

whole ship reflected in the bright, soft blue sea, and light winds, often

varying every quarter of an hour, and more often against us than for us.

We were the best sailing vessel in the whole convoy; but every day we had

to lie by and wait for the laggards. This is very disheartening; likewise

the frequent danger in light winds or calms, or in foggy weather of

running foul of each other is another heavy inconvenience of convoy, and,

in case of a deep calm in a narrow sea, as in the Gut of Gibraltar and in

the Archipelago, etc., where calms are most common, a privateering or

piratical row-boat might board you and make slaves of you under the very

nose of the man-of-war, which would lie a lifeless hulk on the smooth

water. For these row-boats, mounting from one to four or five guns, would

instantly sink a man-of-war’s boat, and one of them, last war, had very

nearly made a British frigate _strike_. I mention these facts because it

is a common notion that going under convoy you are “as snug as a bug in a

rug.” If I had gone without convoy on board the Speedwell, we should have

reached Malta in twenty days from the day I left Portsmouth, but, however,

we were congratulated on having had a _very good_ passage for the time of

the year, having been only forty days including our stay at Gibraltar; and

if there be inconvenience in a convoy, I have reason to know and to be

grateful for its advantages. The whole of the voyage from Gibraltar to

Malta, excepting the four or five last days, I was wretchedly unwell....

The harbour at Valetta is narrow as the neck of a bottle in the entrance;

but instantly opens out into a lake with tongues of land, capes, one

little island, etc., etc., where the whole navy of England might lie as in

a dock in the worst of weather. All around its banks, in the form of an

amphitheatre, rise the magnificent houses of Valetta, and its two

over-the-water towns, Burmola and Flavia (which are to Valetta what the

Borough is to London). The houses are all lofty and built of fine white

freestone, something like Bath, only still whiter and _newer_ looking, yet

the windows, from the prodigious thickness of the walls, being all out of

sight, the whole appeared to me as Carthage to Æneas, a proud city, well

nigh but not quite finished. I walked up a long street of good breadth,

all a flight of stairs (no place for beast or carriage, each broad stair

composed of a cement-sand of _terra pozzolana_, hard and smooth as the

hardest pavement of smooth rock by the seaside and very like it). I soon

found out Dr. Stoddart’s house, which seemed a large pile of building. He

was not at home, but I stayed for him, and in about two hours he came, and

received me with an explosion of surprise and welcome--more _fun_ than

_affection_ in the manner, but just as I wished it.... Yesterday and

to-day I have been pretty well. In a hot climate, now that the glass is

high as 80 in the shade, the healthiest persons are liable to fever on the

least disagreement of food with the first passages, and my general health

is, I would fain believe, better _on the whole_.... I will try the most

scrupulous regimen of diet and exercise; and I rejoice to find that the

heat, great as it is, does not at all annoy me. In about a fortnight I

shall probably take a trip into Sicily, and spend the next two or three

months in some cooler and less dreary place, and return in September. For

eight months in the year the climate of Malta is delightful, but a

drearier place eye never saw. No stream in the whole island, only one

place of springs, which are conveyed by aqueducts and supply the island

with about one third of its water; the other two thirds they depend for

upon the rain. And the reservoirs under the houses, walls, etc., to

preserve the rain are _stupendous_! The tops of all the houses are flat,

and covered with that smooth, hard composition, and on these and

everywhere where rain can fall are channels and pipes to conduct it to the

reservoirs. Malta is about twenty miles by twelve--a mere rock of

freestone. In digging out this they find large quantities of vegetable

soil. They separate it, and with the stones they build their houses and

garden and field walls, all of an enormous thickness. The fields are

seldom so much as half an acre [Illustration] one above another in that

form, so that everything grows as in huge garden pots. The whole island

looks like one monstrous fortification. Nothing _green_ meets your

eye--one dreary, grey-white,--and all the country towns from the

retirement and invisibility of the windows look like towns burnt out and

desolate. Yet the fertility is marvellous. You almost see things grow, and

the population is, I suppose, unexampled. The town of Valetta itself

contains about one hundred and ten streets, all at right angles to each

other, each having from twelve to fifty houses; but many of them very

steep--a few _staired_ all across, and almost all, in some part or other,

if not the whole, having the footway on each side so staired. The houses

lofty, all looking new. The good houses are built with a court in the

centre, and the rooms large and lofty, from sixteen to twenty feet high,

and walls enormously thick, all necessary for coolness. The fortifications

of Valetta are endless. When I first walked about them, I was struck all

of a heap with their strangeness, and when I came to understand a little

of their purpose, I was overwhelmed with wonder. Such vast masses--bulky

mountain-breasted heights; gardens with pomegranate trees--the prickly

pears in the fosses, and the caper (the most beautiful of flowers) growing

profusely in the interstices of the high walls and on the battlements. The

Maltese are a dark, light-limbed people. Of the women five tenths are

ugly; of the remainder, four fifths would be ordinary but that they look

so _quaint_, and one tenth, perhaps, may be called quaint-pretty. The

prettiest resemble pretty Jewesses in England. They are the noisiest

race[21] under heaven, and Valetta the noisiest place. The sudden

shot-up, explosive bellows-cries you ever heard in London would give you

the faintest idea of it. Even when you pass by a fruit stall the fellow

will put his hand like a speaking trumpet to his mouth and shoot such a

thunderbolt of sound full at you. Then the endless jangling of those

cursed bells, etc. Sir Alexander Ball and General Valette (the civil and

military commanders) have been marvellously attentive--Sir A. B. even

friendly and confidential to me.

Poor Mrs. Stoddart was brought to bed of a little girl on the 24th of May,

and it died on Tuesday, June 5th. On the night of its birth, poor little

lamb! I had such a lively vision of my little Sara, that it brought on a

sort of hysterical fit on me. O merciful God! how I tremble at the thought

of letters from England. I should be most miserable _without_ them, and

yet I shall receive them as a sentence of death! So terribly has fear got

the upper hand in my habitual feelings, from my long destitution of hope

and joy.

Hartley, Derwent, my sweet children! a father’s blessing on you! With

tears and clasped hands I bless you. Oh, I must write no more of this. I

have been haunted by the thought that I have lost a box of books

containing Shakespeare (Stockdale’s), the four or five first volumes of

the “British Poets,” Young’s “Syllabus” (a red paper book), Condillac’s

“Logic,” “Thornton on Public Credit,” etc. Be sure you inform me whether

or no I did take these books from Keswick. I will write to Southey by the

next opportunity. You recollect that I went away without knowing the

result of Edith’s confinement; not a day in which I do not think of it.

My love to dear Southey, and remember me to Mr. Jackson, and Mrs. Wilson

with the kindest words, and to Mary Stamper. My kind remembrances to Mr.

and Mrs. Wilkinson, and to the Calverts. How is your sister Mary in her

spirits? My wishes and prayers attend her. I am anxious to hear about poor

George and shall write about him to Portsmouth in the course of a week,

for by that time a convoy will be going to England as we expect. I hope

that in the course of three weeks or a month I may be able to give a more

promising account of my health. As it is, I have reason to be satisfied.

The effect of years cannot be done away in a few weeks. I am tranquil and

resigned, and, even if I should not bring back health, I shall at least

bring back experience, and suffer with patience and in silence. Again and

again God bless you, my dear Sara! Let me know everything of your health,

etc., etc. Oh, the letters are on the sea for me, and what tidings may

they not bring to me!

S. T. COLERIDGE.

Single sheet. Per Germania a Londra. An. 1804.

CLIV. TO DANIEL STUART.

SYRACUSE,[22] October 22, 1804.

MY DEAR STUART,--I have written you a long letter this morning by way of

Messina, and from other causes am so done up and brain weary that I must

put you to the expense of this as almost a blank, except that you will be

pleased to observe my attention to business in having written two letters

of advice, as well as transmitted first and second of exchange for £50

which I have drawn upon you, payable to order of Dr. Stoddart at usance. I

shall want no more for my return. I shall stay a month at Messina, and in

that time visit Naples. Supposing the letter of this morning to miss, I

ought to repeat to you that I leave the publication of THE PACQUET,[23]

which is waiting for convoy at Malta for you, to your own opinion. If the

information appear new or valuable to you, and the letters themselves

entertaining, etc., publish them; only do not sell the copyright of more

than the right of two editions to the bookseller. He will not give more,

or much more for the copyright of the whole.

May God bless you! I am, and shall be as long as I exist, your truly

grateful and affectionate friend,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CLV. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

Sat. morning, 4 o’clock. Treasury, Malta.

February 2, 1805.

DEAR SOUTHEY,--A Privateer is to leave this Port to-day at noon for

Gibraltar, and, it chancing that an officer of rank takes his passage in

her, Sir A. Ball trusts his dispatches with due precaution to this unusual

mode of conveyance, and I must enclose a letter to you in the government

parcel. I pray that the lead attached to it will not be ominous of its

tardy voyage, much less of its making a diving tour whither the spirit of

Shakespeare went, under the name of the Dreaming Clarence.[24] Certain it

is that I awoke about some half hour ago from so vivid a dream that the

work of sleep had completely destroyed all sleepiness. I got up, went to

my office-room, rekindled the wood-fire for the purpose of writing to you,

having been so employed from morn till eve in writing public letters, some

as long as memorials, from the hour that this opportunity was first

announced to me, that for once in my life, at least, I can with strict

truth affirm that I have had _no time_ to write to you, if by time be

understood the moments of life in which our powers are alive. I am

well--at least, till within the last fortnight I _was_ perfectly so, till

the news of the sale of my blessed house played “the foe intestine” with

me. But of that hereafter.

My dear Southey![25] the longer I live, and the more I see, know, and

think, the more deeply do I seem to know and feel your goodness; and why,

at this distance, may I not allow myself to utter forth my whole thought

by adding your _greatness_? “Thy kingdom come” will have been a petition

already granted, when in the minds and hearts of all men both words mean

the same; or (to shake off a state of feeling deeper than may be

serviceable to me) when gulielmosartorially speaking (_i. e._ William

“Taylorice”) the latter word shall have become an incurable synonym, a

lumberly duplicate, thrown into the kennel of the Lethe-lapping Chronos

Anubioeides,[26] as a carriony, bare-ribbed tautology. Oh me! it will not

do! You, my children, the Wordsworths, are at Keswick and Grasmere, and I

am at Malta, and it is a silly hypocrisy to pretend to joke when I am

heavy at heart. By the accident of the sale of a dead Colonel’s effects,

who arrived in this healing climate too late to be healed, I procured the

perusal of the second volume of the “Annual Review.” I was suddenly and

strangely affected by the marked attention which you had paid to my few

hints, by the insertion of my joke on Booker; but more, far more than all,

by the affection for me which peeped forth in that “William Brown of

Ottery.” I knew you stopped before and after you had written the words.

But I am to speak of your reviews in general. I am confident, for I have

carefully reperused almost the whole volume, and what I knew or detected

to be yours I have read over and over again, with as much care and as

little warping of partiality as if it had been a manuscript of my own

going to the press--I can say confidently that in my best judgment they

are models of good sense and correct style; of high and honest feeling

intermingled with a sort of wit which (I now translate as truly, though

not as verbally, as I can, the sense of an observation which a literary

Venetian, who resides here as the editor of a political journal, made to

me after having read your reviews of Clarke’s “Maritime Discoveries”)

unites that happy _turn_ of words, which is the essence of French wit,

with those comic picture-making combinations of fancy that characterises

the old wit of old England. If I can find time to copy off what in the

hurry of the moment I wrote on loose papers that cannot be made up into a

letter without subjecting you to an expense wholly disproportionate to

their value, I shall prove to you that I have been watchful in marking

what appeared to me false, or _better-not_, or _better-otherwise_, parts,

no less than what I felt to be excellent. It is enough to say at present,

that seldom in my course of reading have I been more deeply impressed than

by the sense of the diffused good they were likely to effect. At the same

time I could not help feeling to how many false and pernicious principles,

both in taste and in politics, they were likely, by their excellence, to

give a non-natural circulation. W. Taylor grows worse and worse. As to his

political dogmata concerning Egypt, etc., God forgive him! He knows not

what he does! But as to his spawn about Milton and Tasso--nay, Heaven

forbid it should be _spawn_, it is pure toad-spit, not as toad-spit is,

but as it is vulgarly believed to be. (_See, too, his Article in the

“Critical Review.”_) Now for your feelings respecting “Madoc.” I regard

them as all nerve and stomach-work, you having too recently quitted the

business. Genius, too, has its intoxication, which, however divine, leaves

its headaches and its nauseas. Of the very best of the few bad, good, and

indifferent things, I have had the same sensations. Concerning the

immediate chryso-poetic powers of “Madoc” I can only fear somewhat and

hope somewhat. Midas and Apollo are as little cronies as Marsyas and

Apollo. But of its great and lasting effects on your fame, if I doubted, I

should then doubt all things in which I had hitherto had firm faith.

Neither am I without cheerful belief respecting its _ultimate_ effects on

your worldly fortune. O dear Southey! when I see this booby with his ten

pound a day as Mr. Commissary X., and _that_ thorough-rogue two doors off

him with his fifteen pound a day as Mr. General Paymaster Y. Z., it stirs

up a little bile from the liver and gives my poor stomach a pinch, when I

hear you talk of having to look forward to an £100 or £150. But cheerily!

what do we complain of? would we be either of these men? Oh, had I

domestic happiness, and an assurance only of the health I now possess

continuing to me in England, what a blessed creature should I be, though I

found it necessary to feed me and mine on roast potatoes for two days in

each week in order to make ends meet, and to awake my beloved with a kiss

on the first of every January. “Well, my best darling! we owe nobody a

farthing! and I have you, my children, two or three friends, and a

thousand books!” I have written very lately to Mrs. Coleridge. If my

letter reaches her, as I have quoted in it a part of yours of Oct. 19th,

she will wonder that I took no notice of the house and the _Bellygerent_.

From Mrs. C. I have received no letter by the last convoy. In truth I am

and have reason to be ashamed to own to what a diseased excess my

sensibility has worsened into. I was so agitated by the receipt of

letters, that I did not bring myself to open them for two or three days,

half-dreaming that from there being no letter from Mrs. C. some one of the

children had died, or that she herself had been ill, or--for so help me

God! most ill-starred as our marriage has been, there is perhaps nothing

that would so frightfully affect me as any change respecting her health or

life; and, when I had read about a third of your letter, I walked up and

down and then out, and much business intervening, I wrote to her before I

had read the remainder, or my other letters. I grieve exceedingly at the

event, and my having foreseen it does not diminish the shock. My dear

study! and that house in which such persons have been! where my Hartley

has made his first love-commune with Nature, to belong to White. Oh, how

could Mr. Jackson have the heart to do it! As to the climate, I am fully

convinced that to an invalid all parts of England are so much alike, that

no disadvantages on that score can overbalance any marked advantages from

other causes. Mr. J. well knows that but for my absolute confidence in him

I should have taken the house for a long lease--but, poor man! I am rather

to soothe than to reproach him. When will he ever again have loving

friends and housemates like to us? And dear good Mrs. Wilson! Surely Mrs.

Coleridge must have written to me, though no letter has arrived. Now for

myself. I am most anxiously expecting the arrival of Mr. Chapman from

Smyrna, who is (by the last ministry if that should hold valid) appointed

successor to Mr. Macaulay, as Public Secretary of Malta, the second in

rank to the Governor. Mr. M., an old man of eighty, died on the 18th of

last month, calm as a sleeping baby, in a tremendous thunder-and-lightning

storm. In the interim, I am and some fifty times a day subscribe myself,

_Segretario Pubblico dell’ Isole di Malta, Gozo, e delle loro dipendenze_.

I live in a perfect palace and have all my meals with the Governor; but my

profits will be much less than if I had employed my time and efforts in my

own literary pursuits. However, I gain new insights and if (as I doubt not

I shall) I return having expended nothing, having paid all my prior debts

as well as interim expense (of the which debts I consider the £100

borrowed by me from Sotheby on the firm of W. Wordsworth, the heaviest),

with health, and some additional knowledge both in things and languages, I

surely shall not have lost a year. My intention is, assuredly, to leave

this place at the farthest in the latter end of this month, whether by the

convoy, or over-land by Trieste, Vienna, Berlin, Embden, and Denmark, but

I must be guided by circumstances. At all events, it will be well if a

letter should be left for me at the “Courier” office in London, by the

first of May, informing me of all which it is necessary for me to know.

But of one thing I am most anxious, namely, that my assurance money should

be paid. I pray you, look to that. You will have heard long before this

letter reaches you that the French fleet have escaped from Toulon. I have

no heart for politics, else I could tell you how for the last nine months

I have been working in memorials concerning Egypt, Sicily, and the coast

of Africa. Could France ever possess these, she would be, in a far grander

sense than the Roman, an Empire of the World. And what would remain to

England? England; and that which our miserable diplomatists affect now to

despise, now to consider as a misfortune, our language and institutions in

America. France is blest by nature, for in possessing Africa she would

have a magnificent outlet for her population as near her own coasts as

Ireland to ours; an America that must forever be an integral part of the

mother-country. Egypt is eager for France--only eager, far more eager for

G. Britain. The universal cry there (I have seen translations of twenty,

at least, mercantile letters in the Court of Admiralty here (in which I

have made a speech with a wig and gown, a true Jack of all Trades), all

stating that the _vox populi_) is English, English, if we can! but _Hats_

at all events! (HATS means Europeans in contradistinction to Turbans.) God

bless you, Southey! I wish earnestly to kiss your child. And all whom you

love, I love, as far as I can, for your sake.

For England. Per Inghilterra.

ROBERT SOUTHEY, Esqre, Greta Hall, Keswick, Cumberland.

CLVI. TO DANIEL STUART.

Favoured by Captain Maxwell of the Artillery.--N. B., an amiable mild man,

who is prepared to give you any information.

MALTA, April 20, 1805.

DEAR STUART,--The above is a duplicate, or rather a _sex_ or

_septem_-plicate of an order sent off within three weeks after my draft on

you had been given by me; and very anxious I have been, knowing that all

or almost all of my letters have failed. It seems like a judgment on me.

Formerly, when I had the sure means of conveying letters, I neglected my

duty through indolence or procrastination. For the last year, when, having

_all_ my heart, _all_ my hope in England, I found no other gratification

than that of writing to Wordsworth and his family, his wife, sister, and

wife’s sister; to Southey, to you, to T. Wedgwood, Sir. G. Beaumont, etc.

Indeed, I have been supererogatory in some instances--but an evil destiny

has dogged them--one large and (forgive my vanity!) rather important set

of letters to you on Sicily and Egypt were destroyed at Gibraltar among

the papers of a most excellent man, Major Adye, to whom I had entrusted

them on his departure from Sicily, and who died of the Plague FOUR DAYS

after his arrival at Gibraltar. But still was I afflicted (shame on me!

even to violent weeping) when all my many, many letters were thrown

overboard from the Arrow, the Acheron, and a merchant vessel, to all which

I had entrusted them; the last through my own over care. For I delivered

them to the captain with great pomp of seriousness, in my official

character as Public Secretary of the Islands.[27] He took them, and

considering them as public papers, on being close chased and expecting to

be boarded, threw them overboard; and he, however, escaped, steering for

Africa, and returned to Malta. But regrets are idle things.

In my letter, which will accompany this, I have detailed my health and all

that relates to me. In case, however, that letter should not arrive, I

will simply say, that till within the last two months or ten weeks my

health had improved to the utmost of my hopes, though not without some

intrusions of sickness; but _latterly_ the loss of my letters to England,

the almost entire non-arrival of letters from England, not a single one

from Mrs. Coleridge or Southey or you; and only one from the Wordsworths,

and that dated September, 1804! my consequent heart-saddening anxieties,

and still, still more, the depths which Captain John Wordsworth’s

death[28] sunk into my heart, and which I heard abruptly, and in the very

painfullest way possible in a public company--all these joined to my

disappointment in my expectation of returning to England by this convoy,

and the quantity and variety of my public occupations from eight o’clock

in the morning to five in the afternoon, having besides the most anxious

duty of writing public letters and memorials which belongs to my talents

rather than to my _pro-tempore_ office; these and some other causes that I

cannot mention relative to my affairs in England have produced a sad

change indeed on my health; but, however, I hope all will be well.... It

is my present intention to return home over-land by Naples, Ancona,

Trieste, etc., on or about the second of next month.

The gentleman who will deliver this to you is Captain Maxwell of the Royal

Artillery, a well-informed and very amiable countryman of yours. He will

give you any information you wish concerning Malta. An intelligent friend

of his, an officer of sense and science, has entrusted to him an essay on

Lampedusa,[29] which I have advised him to publish in a newspaper, leaving

it to the Editor to divide it. It may, perhaps, need a little _softening_,

but it is an accurate and well-reasoned memorial. He only wishes to give

it _publicity_, and to have not only his name concealed, but every

circumstance that could lead to a suspicion. If after reading it you

approve of it, you would greatly oblige him by giving it a place in the

“Courier.” He is a sensible, independent man. For all else to my other

letter.--I am, dear Stuart, with faithful recollections, your much obliged

and truly grateful friend and servant,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

April 20, 1805.

CLVII. TO HIS WIFE.

MALTA, July 21, 1805.

DEAR SARA,--The Niger is ordered off for Gibraltar at a moment’s warning,

and the Hall is crowded with officers and merchants whose oaths I am to

take, and accompts to sign. I will not, however, suffer it to go without a

line, and including a draft for £110--another opportunity will offer in a

week or ten days, and I will enclose a duplicate in a letter at large. Now

for the most important articles. My health _had_ greatly improved; but

latterly it has been very, very bad, in great measure owing to dejection

of spirits, my letters having failed, the greater part of those to me, and

almost all mine homeward.... My letters and the duplicates of them,

written with so much care and minuteness to Sir George Beaumont--those to

Wedgwood, to the Wordsworths, to Southey, Major Adye’s sudden death, and

then the loss of the two frigates, the capture of a merchant’s privateer,

all have seemed to spite. No one not absent on a dreary island, so many

leagues of sea from England, can conceive the effect of these accidents on

the spirit and inmost soul. So help me Heaven! they have nearly broken my

heart. And, added to this, I have been hoping and expecting to get away

for England for five months past, and Mr. Chapman not arriving, Sir

Alexander’s importunities have always overpowered me, though my gloom has

increased at each disappointment. I am determined, however, to go in less

than a month. My office, as Public Secretary, the next civil dignitary to

the Governor, is a very, very busy one, and not to involve myself in the

responsibility of the Treasurer I have but half the salary. I oftentimes

subscribe my name 150 times a day, S. T. Coleridge, Pub. Sec. to H. M.

Civ. Commiss{r}, or (if in Italian) Seg. Pub. del Commiss’ Regio, and

administer half as many oaths--besides which I have the public memorials

to write, and, worse than all, constant matters of arbitration. Sir A.

Ball is indeed exceedingly kind to me. The officers will be impatient. I

would I could write a more cheerful account of my health; all I can say is

that I am better than I have been, and that I was very much better before

so many circumstances of dejection happened. I should overset myself

completely, if I ventured to mention a _single name_. How deeply I love, O

God! it is agony at morning and evening.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

P. S. On being abruptly told by Lady Ball of John Wordsworth’s fate, I

attempted to stagger out of the room (the great saloon of the Palace with

fifty people present), and before I could reach the door fell down on the

ground in a convulsive hysteric fit. I was confined to my room for a

fortnight after; and now I am afraid to open a letter, and I never dare

ask a question of any new-comer. The night before last I was much affected

by the sudden entrance of poor Reynell (our inmate at Stowey);[30] more of

him in my next. May God Almighty bless you and--

(Signed with seal, ΕΣΤΗΣΕ.)

For England.

MRS. COLERIDGE, Keswick, Cumberland.

Postmark, Sept. 8, 1805.

CLVIII. TO WASHINGTON ALLSTON.

Direct to me at Mr. Degens, Leghorn. God bless you!

Tuesday, June 17, 1806.[31]

MY DEAR ALLSTON,--No want of affection has occasioned my silence. Day

after day I expected Mr. Wallis. Benvenuti received me with almost

insulting coldness, not even asking me to sit down; neither could I, by

any enquiry, find that he ever returned my call, and even in answer to a

very polite note enquiring for letters, sent a verbal message, that there

was one, and that I might call for it. However, within the last seven or

eight days he has called and made his _amende honourable_; he says he

forgot the name of my inn, and called at two or three in vain. Whoo! I did

not tell him that within five days I sent him a note in which the inn was

mentioned, and that he sent me a message in consequence, and yet never

called for ten days afterwards. However, yester-evening the truth came

out. He had been bored by letters of recommendation, and till he received

a letter from Mr. ---- looked upon me as a bore--which, however, he might

and ought to have got rid of in a more gentlemanly manner. Nothing more

was necessary than the day after my arrival to have sent his card by his

servant. But I forgive him from my heart. It should, however, be a lesson

to Mr. Wallis, to whom, and for whom, he gives letters of recommendation.

I have been dangerously ill for the last fortnight, and unwell enough,

Heaven knows, previously; about ten days ago, on rising from my bed, I had

a manifest stroke of palsy along my right side and right arm. My head felt

like another man’s head, so dead was it, that I seemed to know it only by

my left hand, and a strange sense of numbness....

Enough of it, continual vexations and preyings upon the spirit--I gave

life to my children,[32] and they have repeatedly given it to me; for, by

the Maker of all things, but for them I would try my chance. But they

pluck out the wing-feathers from the mind. I have not entirely recovered

the sense of my side or hand, but have recovered the use. I am harassed by

local and partial fevers. This day, at noon, we set off for Leghorn;[33]

all passage through the Italian States and Germany is little other than

impossible for an Englishman, and Heaven knows whether Leghorn may not be

blockaded. However, we go thither, and shall go to England in an American

ship. Inform Mr. Wallis of this, and urge him to make his way--assure him

of my anxious thoughts and fervent wishes respecting him and of my love

for T----, and his family. Tell Mr. Migliorus [?] that I should have

written him long ago but for my ill health; and will not fail to do it on

my arrival at Pisa--from thence, too, I will write a letter to you, for

this I do not consider as a letter. Nothing can surpass Mr. Russell’s[34]

kindness and tender-heartedness to me, and his understanding is far

superior to what it appears on first acquaintance. I will write likewise

to Mr. Wallis and _conjure_ him not to leave Amelia. I have heard in

Leghorn a sad, sad character of one of those whom you called acquaintance,

but who call you their dear friend.

My dear Allston, somewhat from increasing age, but more from calamity and

intense fra[ternal affections], my heart is not open to more than kind,

good wishes in general. To you, and to you alone, since I left England, I

have felt more, and had I not known the Wordsworths, should have esteemed

and loved you _first_ and _most_; and, as it is, next to them I love and

honour you. Heaven knows, a part of such a wreck as my head and heart is

scarcely worth your acceptance.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CLIX. TO DANIEL STUART.

Bell Inn, Friday Street,

Monday morning, August 18, 1806.

MY DEAR SIR,--I arrived here from Stangate Creek last night, a little

after ten, and have found myself so unusually better ever since I leaped

on land yester-afternoon, that I am glad that neither my strength nor

spirits enabled me to write to you on my arrival in Quarantine on the

eleventh. Both the captain and my fellow-passengers were seriously alarmed

for my life; and indeed such have been my unremitting sufferings from

pain, sleeplessness, loathing of food, and spirits wholly despondent, that

no motive on earth short of an awful duty would ever prevail on me to take

any sea-voyage likely to be longer than three or four days. I had rather

starve in a hovel, and, if life through disease become worthless, will

choose a Roman death. It is true I was very low before I embarked.... To

have been working so hard for eighteen months in a business I detested; to

have been flattered, and to have flattered myself that I should, on

striking the balance, have paid all my debts and maintained both myself

and family during my exile out of my savings and earnings, including my

travels through Germany, through which I had to the very last hoped to

have passed, and found myself!--but enough! I cannot charge my conscience

with a single extravagance, nor even my judgment with any other

imprudences than that of suffering one good and great man to overpersuade

me from month to month to a delay which was gnawing away my very vitals,

and in being duped in disobedience to my first feelings and previous ideas

by another diplomatic Minister.... A gentleman offered to take me without

expense to Rome, which I accepted with the full intention of staying only

a fortnight, and then returning to Naples to pass the winter.... I left

everything but a good suit of clothes and my shirts, etc., all my letters

of credit, manuscripts, etc. I had not been ten days in Rome before the

French torrent rolled down on Naples. All return was impossible, and all

transmission of papers not only insecure, but being English and many of

them political, highly dangerous both to the sender and sendee.... But

this is only a fragment of a chapter of contents, and I am too much

agitated to write the details, but will call on you as soon as my two or

three remaining [_guineas_] shall have put a decent hat upon my head and

shoes upon my feet. I am literally afraid, even to cowardice, to ask for

any person or of any person. Including the Quarantine we had fifty-five

days of shipboard, working up against head-winds, rotting and sweating in

calms, or running under hard gales with the dead lights secured. From the

captain and my fellow-passenger I received every possible tenderness, only

when I was very ill they laid their wise heads together, and the latter in

a letter to his father begged him to inform my family that I had arrived,

and he trusted that they would soon see me in better health and spirits

than when I had quitted them; a letter which must have alarmed if they saw

into it, and wounded if they did not. I was not informed of it till this

morning. God bless you, my dear sir! I have yet cheerful hopes that Heaven

will not suffer me to die degraded by any other debts than those which it

ever has been, and ever will be, my joy and pride still to pay and still

to owe; those of a truly grateful heart, and to you among the first of

those to whom they are due.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CHAPTER VIII

HOME AND NO HOME

1806-1807

CHAPTER VIII

HOME AND NO HOME

1806-1807

CLX. TO DANIEL STUART.

Monday, (?) September 15, 1806.

MY DEAR STUART,--I arrived in town safe, but so tired by the next evening,

that I went to bed at nine and slept till past twelve on Sunday. I cannot

keep off my mind from the last subject we were talking about; though I

have brought my notions concerning it to hang so well on the balance that

I have in my own judgment few doubts as to the relative weight of the

arguments persuasive and dissuasive. But of this “face to face.” I sleep

at the “Courier” office, and shall institute and carry on the inquiry into

the characters of Mr. Pitt and Mr. Fox, and having carried it to the

Treaty of Amiens, or rather to the recommencement of the War, I propose to

give a full and severe Critique of the “Enquiry into the State of the

Nation,” taking it for granted that this work does, on the whole, contain

Mr. Fox’s latest political creed; and this for the purpose of answering

the “Morning Chronicle”(!) assertions, that Mr. Fox was the greatest and

wisest statesman; that Mr. Pitt was no statesman. I shall endeavour to

show that both were undeserving of that high character; but that Mr. Pitt

was the better; that the evils which befell him were undoubtedly produced

in great measure by blunders and wickedness on the Continent which it was

almost impossible to foresee; while the effects of Mr. Fox’s measures must

in and of themselves produce calamity and degradation.

To confess the truth, I am by no means pleased with Mr. Street’s character

of Mr. Fox as a speaker and man of intellect. As a piece of panegyric, it

falls woefully short of the Article in the “Morning Chronicle” in style

and selection of thoughts, and runs at least equally far beyond the bounds

of truth. Persons who write in a hurry are very liable to contract a sort

of snipt, convulsive style, that moves forward by short repeated PUSHES,

with iso-chronous asthmatic pants, “He--He--He--He--,” or the like,

beginning a dozen short sentences, each making a period. In this way a man

can get rid of all that happens at any one time to be in his memory, with

very little choice in the arrangement and no expenditure of logic in the

connection. However, it is the matter more than the manner that displeased

me, for fear that what I shall write for to-morrow’s “Courier” may involve

a kind of contradiction. To one outrageous passage I persuaded him to add

a note of amendment, as it was too late to alter the Article itself. It

was impossible for me, seeing him satisfied with the Article himself, to

say more than that he appeared to me to have exceeded in eulogy. But

beyond doubt in the political position occupied by the “Courier,” with so

little danger of being anticipated by the other papers in anything which

it _ought_ to say, except some obvious points which being common to all

the papers can give credit to none, it would have been better to have

announced his death, and simply led the way for an after disquisition by a

sort of shy disclosure with an appearance of suppression of the spirit

with which it could be conducted.

There are letters at the Post Office, Margate, for me. Be so good as to

send them to me, directed to the “Courier” office. I think of going to Mr.

Smith’s[35] to-morrow, or not at all. Whether Mr. Fox’s death[36] will

keep Mr. S. in town, or call him there, I do not know. At all events I

shall return by the time of your arrival.

May God bless you! I am ever, my dear sir, as your obliged, so your

affectionately grateful friend,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CLXI. TO HIS WIFE.

September 16, [1806.]

MY DEAR SARA,--I had determined on my arrival in town to write to you at

full, the moment I could settle my affairs and speak decisively of myself.

Unfortunately Mr. Stuart was at Margate, and what with my journey to and

fro, day has passed on after day, Heaven knows, counted by me in sickness

of heart. I am now obliged to return to Parndon to Mr. W. Smith’s, at

whose house Mr. and Mrs. Clarkson are, and where I spent three or four

days a fortnight ago. The reason at present is that Lord Howick has sent a

very polite message to me through Mr. Smith, expressing his desire to make

my acquaintance. To this I have many objections which I want to discuss

with Mr. S., and at all events I had rather go with him to his Lordship’s

than by myself. Likewise I have had application from the R. Institution

for a course of lectures, which I am much disposed to accept, both for

money and reputation. In short, I must stay in town till Friday sen’night;

for Mr. Stuart returns to town on Monday next, and he relies on my being

there for a very interesting private concern of his own, in which he needs

both my counsel and assistance. But on Friday sen’night, please God, I

shall quit town, and trust to be at Keswick on Monday, Sept. 29th. If I

finally accept the lectures, I must return by the middle of November, but

propose to take you and Hartley with me, as we may be sure of rooms either

in Mr. Stuart’s house at Knightsbridge, or in the Strand. My purpose is to

divide my time steadily between my reflections moral and political,

grounded on information obtained during two years’ residence in Italy and

the Mediterranean, and the lectures on the “Principles common to all the

Fine Arts.” It is a terrible misfortune that so many important papers are

not in my power, and that I must wait for Stoddart’s care and alertness,

which, I am sorry to say, is not to be relied on. However, it is well that

they are not in Paris.

My heart aches so cruelly that I do not dare trust myself to the writing

of any tenderness either to you, my dear, or to our dear children. Be

assured, I feel with deep though sad affection toward you, and hold your

character in general in more than mere esteem--in reverence.... I do not

gather strength so fast as I had expected; but this I attribute to my very

great anxiety. I am indeed _very feeble_, but after fifty-five days of

such horrors, following the dreary heart-wasting of a year and more, it is

a wonder that I am as I am. I sent you from Malta £110, and a duplicate in

a second letter. If you have not received it, the triplicate is either at

Malta or on its way from thence. I had sent another £100, but by Elliot’s

villainous treatment of me[37] was obliged to recall it. But these are

trifles.

Mr. Clarkson is come, and is about to take me down to Parndon (Mr. S.’s

country seat in Essex, about twenty miles from town). I shall return by

Sunday or Monday, and my address, “S. T. Coleridge, Esqre, No. 348 Strand,

London.”

My grateful love to Southey, and blessing on his little one. And may God

Almighty preserve you, my dear! and your faithful, though long absent

husband,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CLXII. TO THE SAME.

[Farmhouse near Coleorton,]

December 25, 1806.

MY DEAR SARA,--By my letter from Derby you will have been satisfied of our

safety so far. We had, however, been grossly deceived as to the

equi-distance of Derby and Loughborough. The expense was nearly double.

Still, however, I was in such torture and my boils bled, throbbed, and

_stabbed_ so _con furia_, that perhaps I have no reason for regret. At

Coleorton we found them dining, Sunday, ½ past one o’clock. To-day is Xmas

day. Of course we were welcomed with an uproar of sincere joy: and Hartley

hung suspended between the ladies for a long minute. The children, too,

jubilated at Hartley’s arrival. He has behaved very well indeed--only that

when he could get out of the coach at dinner, I was obliged to be in

incessant watch to prevent him from rambling off into the fields. He twice

ran into a field, and to the further end of it, and once after the dinner

was on table, I was out five minutes seeking him in great alarm, and found

him at the further end of a wet meadow, on the marge of a river. After

dinner, fearful of losing our places by the window (of the long coach), I

ordered him to go into the coach and sit in the place where he was before,

and I would follow. In about five minutes I followed. No Hartley!

Halloing--in vain! At length, where should I discover him! In the same

meadow, only at a greater distance, and close down on the very edge of

the water. I was angry from downright fright! And what, think you, was

Cataphract’s excuse! “It was a misunderstanding, Father! I thought, you

see, that you bid me go to the very same place, in the meadow where I

was.” I told him that he had interpreted the text by the suggestions of

the flesh, not the inspiration of the spirit; and _his Wish_ the naughty

father of the baseborn Thought. However, saving and excepting his passion

for field truantry, and his hatred of confinement [in which his fancy at

least--

Doth sing a doleful song about green fields;

How sweet it were in woods and wild savannas;

To hunt for food and be a naked man

And wander up and down at liberty!],[38]

he is a very good and sweet child, of strict honour and truth, from which

he never deviates except in the form of sophism when he sports his logical

false dice in the game of excuses. This, however, is the mere effect of

his activity of thought, and his aiming at being clever and ingenious. He

is exceedingly amiable toward children. All here love him most dearly: and

your namesake takes upon her all the duties of his mother and darling

friend, with all the mother’s love and fondness. He is very fond of _her_;

but it is very pretty to hear how, without any one set declaration of his

attachment to Mrs. Wilson and Mr. Jackson, his love for them continually

breaks out--so many things remind him of them, and in the coach he talked

to the strangers of them just as if everybody _must_ know Mr. J. and Mrs.

W. His letter is only half written; so cannot go to-day. We all wish you a

merry Christmas and many following ones. Concerning the London Lectures,

we are to discuss it, William and I, this evening, and I shall write you

at full the day after to-morrow. To-morrow there is no post, but this

letter I mean merely as bearer of the tidings of our safe arrival. I am

better than usual. Hartley has coughed a little every morning since he

left Greta Hall; but only such a little cough as you heard from him at the

door. He is in high health. All the children have the hooping cough; but

in an exceedingly mild degree. Neither Sarah Hutchinson nor I ever

remember to have had it. Hartley is made to keep at a distance from them,

and only to play with Johnny in the open air. I found my spice-megs; but

many papers I miss.

The post boy waits.

My love to Mrs. Lovell, to Southey and Edith, and believe me anxiously and

for ever,

Your sincere friend

S. T. COLERIDGE.

[Illustration]

CLXIII. TO HARTLEY COLERIDGE, ÆTAT. X.[39]

April 3, 1807.

MY DEAR BOY,--In all human beings good and bad qualities are not only

found together, side by side, as it were, but they actually tend to

produce each other; at least they must be considered as twins of a common

parent, and the amiable propensities too often sustain and foster their

unhandsome sisters. (For the old Romans personified virtues and vices

both as women.) This is a sufficient proof that mere natural qualities,

however pleasing and delightful, must not be deemed virtues until they are

broken in and yoked to the plough of _Reason_. Now to apply this to your

own case--I could equally apply it to myself--but you know yourself more

accurately than you can know me, and will therefore understand my argument

better when the facts on which it is built exist in your own

consciousness. You are by nature very kind and forgiving, and wholly free

from revenge and sullenness; you are likewise gifted with a very active

and self-gratifying fancy, and such a high tide and flood of pleasurable

feelings, that all unpleasant and painful thoughts and events are hurried

away upon it, and neither remain in the surface of your memory nor sink to

the bottom of your heart. So far all seems right and matter of

thanksgiving to your Maker; and so all really _is_ so, and will be so, if

you exert your reason and free will. But on the other hand the very same

disposition makes you less impressible both to the censure of your anxious

friends and to the whispers of your conscience. Nothing that gives you

pain dwells long enough upon your mind to do you any good, just as in some

diseases the medicines pass so quickly through the stomach and bowels as

to be able to exert none of their healing qualities. In like manner, this

power which you possess of shoving aside all disagreeable reflections, or

losing them in a labyrinth of day-dreams, which saves you from some

present pain, has, on the other hand, interwoven with your nature habits

of procrastination, which, unless you correct them in time (and it will

require all your best exertions to do it effectually), must lead you into

lasting unhappiness.

You are now going with me (if God have not ordered it otherwise) into

Devonshire to visit your Uncle G. Coleridge. He is a very good man and

very kind; but his notions of right and of propriety are very strict, and

he is, therefore, exceedingly shocked by any gross deviations from what

is right and proper. I take, therefore, this means of warning you against

those bad habits, which I and all your friends here have noticed in you;

and, be assured, I am not writing in anger, but on the contrary with great

love, and a comfortable hope that your behaviour at Ottery will be such as

to do yourself and me and your dear mother _credit_.

First, then, I conjure you never to do anything of any kind when out of

sight which you would not do in my presence. What is a frail and faulty

father on earth compared with God, your heavenly Father? But God is always

present. Specially, never pick at or snatch up anything, eatable or not. I

know it is only an idle, foolish trick; but your Ottery relations would

consider you as a little thief; and in the Church Catechism _picking_ and

_stealing_ are both put together as two sorts of the same vice, “And keep

my hands from picking and stealing.” And besides, it is a dirty trick; and

people of weak stomachs would turn sick at a dish which a young

_filth-paw_ had been fingering.

Next, when you have done wrong acknowledge it at once, like a man. Excuses

may show your ingenuity, but they make your _honesty_ suspected. And a

grain of honesty is better than a pound of wit. We may admire a man for

his cleverness; but we love and esteem him only for his goodness; and a

strict attachment to truth, and to the whole truth, with openness and

frankness and simplicity is at once the foundation stone of all goodness,

and no small part of the superstructure. Lastly, do what you have to do at

once, and put it out of hand. No procrastination; no self-delusion; no “I

am sure I can say it, I need not learn it again,” etc., which _sures_ are

such very unsure folks that nine times out of ten their sureships break

their word and disappoint you.

Among the lesser faults I beg you to endeavour to remember not to stand

between the half-opened door, either while you are speaking, or spoken to.

But come _in_ or go out, and always speak and listen with the door shut.

Likewise, not to speak so loud, or abruptly, and never to interrupt your

elders while they are speaking, and not to talk at all during meals. I

pray you, keep this letter, and read it over every two or three days.

Take but a little trouble with yourself, and every one will be delighted

with you, and try to gratify you in all your reasonable wishes. And, above

all, you will be at peace with yourself, and a double blessing to me, who

am, my dear, my very dear Hartley, most anxiously, your fond father,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

P. S. I have not spoken about your mad passions and frantic looks and

pout-mouthing; because I trust that is all over.

HARTLEY COLERIDGE, Coleorton, Leicestershire.

CLXIV. TO SIR H. DAVY.

September 11, 1807.

... Yet how very few are there whom I esteem and (pardon me for this

seeming deviation from the language of friendship) admire equally with

yourself. It is indeed, and has long been, my settled persuasion, that of

all men known to me I could not justly equal any one to you, combining in

one view powers of intellect, and the steady moral exertion of them to the

production of direct and indirect good; and if I give you pain, my heart

bears witness that I inflicted a greater on myself,--nor should I have

written such words, if the chief feeling that mixed with and followed them

had not been that of shame and self-reproach, for having profited neither

by your general example nor your frequent and immediate incentives.

Neither would I have oppressed you at all with this melancholy statement,

but that for some days past I have found myself so much better in body and

mind, as to cheer me at times with the thought that this most morbid and

oppressive weight is gradually lifting up, and my will acquiring some

degree of strength and power of reaction.

* * * * *

I have, however, received such manifest benefit from horse exercise, and

gradual abandonment of fermented and total abstinence from spirituous

liquors, and by being alone with Poole, and the renewal of old times, by

wandering about among my dear old walks of Quantock and Alfoxden, that I

have seriously set about composition, with a view to ascertain whether I

can conscientiously undertake what I so very much wish, a series of

Lectures at the Royal Institution. I trust I need not assure you how much

I feel your kindness, and let me add, that I consider the application as

an act of great and unmerited condescension on the part of the managers as

may have consented to it. After having discussed the subject with Poole,

he entirely agrees with me, that the former plan suggested by me is

invidious in itself, unless I disguised my real opinions; as far as I

should deliver my sentiments respecting the _arts_, [it] would require

references and illustrations not suitable to a public lecture room; and,

finally, that I ought not to reckon upon spirits enough to seek about for

books of Italian prints, etc. And that, after all, the general and most

philosophical principles, I might naturally introduce into lectures on a

more confined plan--namely, the principles of poetry, conveyed and

illustrated in a series of lectures. 1. On the genius and writings of

Shakespeare, relatively to his predecessors and contemporaries, so as to

determine not only his merits and defects, and the proportion that each

must bear to the whole, but what of his merits and defects belong to his

age, as being found in contemporaries of genius, and what belonged to

himself. 2. On Spenser, including the metrical romances, and Chaucer,

though the character of the latter as a manner-painter I shall have so far

anticipated in distinguishing it from, and comparing it with, Shakespeare.

3. Milton. 4. Dryden and Pope, including the origin and after history of

poetry of witty logic. 5. On Modern Poetry and its characteristics, with

no introduction of any particular names. In the course of these I shall

have said all I know, the whole result of many years’ continued reflection

on the subjects of taste, imagination, fancy, passion, the source of our

pleasures in the fine arts, in the _antithetical_ balance-loving nature of

man, and the connexion of such pleasures with moral excellence. The

advantage of this plan to myself is, that I have all my materials ready,

and can rapidly reduce them into form (for this is my solemn

determination, not to give a single lecture till I have in fair writing at

least one half of the whole course), for as to trusting anything to

immediate effort, I shrink from it as from guilt, and guilt in me it would

be. In short, I should have no objection at once to pledge myself to the

immediate preparation of these lectures, but that I am so surrounded by

embarrassments....

For God’s sake enter into my true motive for this wearing detail; it would

torture me if it had any other effect than to impress on you my desire and

hope to accord with your plan, and my incapability of making any final

promise till the end of this month.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CHAPTER IX

A PUBLIC LECTURER

1807-1808

CHAPTER IX

PUBLIC LECTURER

1807-1808

CLXV. TO THE MORGAN FAMILY.

HATCHETT’S HOTEL, Piccadilly, Monday evening,

[November 23, 1807.]

MY DEAR FRIENDS,--I arrived here in safety this morning between seven and

eight, coach-stunned, and with a cold in my head; but I had dozed away the

whole night with fewer disturbances than I had reason to expect, in that

sort of _whether-you-will-or-no_ slumber brought upon me by the movements

of the vehicle, which I attribute to the easiness of the mail. About one

o’clock I moaned and started, and then took a wing of the fowl and the

rum, and it operated as a preventive for the after time. If very, very

affectionate thoughts, wishes, recollections, anticipations, can score

instead of _grace_ before and after meat, mine was a very religious meal,

for in this sense my inmost heart prayed _before_, _after_, and _during_.

After breakfast, on attempting to clean and dress myself from crown to

sole, I found myself quite unfit for _any_thing, and my legs were painful,

or rather my feet, and nothing but an horizontal position would remove the

feeling. So I got into bed, and did not get up again till Mr. Stuart

called at my chamber, past three. I have seen no one else, and therefore

must defer all intelligence concerning my lectures, etc., to a second

letter, which you will receive in a few days, God willing, with the

D’Espriella, etc. When I was leaving you, one of the little alleviations

which I looked forward to, was that I could write with less embarrassment

than I could utter in your presence the many feelings of grateful

affection and most affectionate esteem toward you, that pressed upon my

heart almost, as at times it seemed, with a bodily weight. But I suppose

it is yet too short a time since I left you--you are scarcely out of my

eyes yet, dear Mrs. M. and Charlotte! To-morrow I shall go about the

portraits. I have not looked at the profile since, nor shall I till it is

framed. An absence of four or five days will be a better test how _far_ it

is a _likeness_. For a day or two, farewell, my dear friends! I bless you

all three fervently, and shall, I trust, as long as I am

S. T. COLERIDGE.

I shall take up my lodgings at the “Courier” office, where there is a nice

suite of rooms for me and a quiet bedroom without expense. My address

therefore, “_Squire_ Coleridge,” or “S. T. Coleridge, Esq: ‘Courier’

Office, Strand,”--unless you are in a sensible mood, and then you will

write _Mr._ Coleridge, if it were only in compassion to that poor,

unfortunate exile, from the covers of letters at least, despised _MR._

MR. JNO. JAS. MORGAN,

St. James’s Square, Bristol.

CLXVI. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

[Postmark, December 14, 1807.]

MY DEAR SOUTHEY,--I have been confined to my bedroom, and, with exceptions

of a few hours each night, to my bed for near a week past--having once

ventured out, and suffered in consequence. My complaint a low bilious

fever. Whether contagion or sympathy, I know not, but I had it hanging

about me from the time I was with Davy. It went off, however, by a journey

which I took with Stuart, to Bristol, in a cold frosty air. Soon after my

return Mr. Ridout informed me from Drs. Babbington and Bailly, that Davy

was not only ill, but his life precarious, his recovery doubtful. And to

this day no distinct symptom of safety has appeared, though to-day he is

better. I cannot express what I have suffered. Good heaven! in the very

springtide of his honour--his? his country’s! the world’s! after

discoveries more intellectual, more ennobling, and impowering human nature

than Newton’s! But he must not die! I am so much better that I shall go

out to-morrow, if I awake no worse than I go to sleep. Be so good as to

tell Mrs. Coleridge that I will write to her either Tuesday or Wednesday,

and to Hartley and Derwent, with whose letters I was much both amused and

affected. I was with Hartley and Mrs. Wilson and Mr. Jackson in spirit at

their meeting. Howel’s bill I have paid, tell Mrs. C. (for this is what

she will be most anxious about), and that I _had_ no other debt at all

weighing upon me, either prudentially or from sense of propriety or

delicacy, till the one I shall mention, after better subjects, in the tail

of this letter.

I very thoroughly admired your letter to W. Scott,[40] concerning the

“Edinburgh Review.” The feeling and the resolve are what any one knowing

you half as well as I must have anticipated, in any case where you had

room for ten minutes thinking, and relatively to any person, with regard

to whom old affection and belief of injury and unworthy conduct had made

none of those mixtures, which people the brains of the best men--none but

good men having the component drugs, or at least the drugs in that state

of composition--_but_ it is admirably expressed--if I had meant only

_well_ expressed, I should have said, “_and_ it is well expressed,”--but,

to my feeling, it is an unusual specimen of honourable feeling supporting

itself by sound sense and conveyed with simplicity, dignity, and a warmth

evidently under the complete control of the understanding. I am a fair

judge as to such a sentence, for from morbid wretchedness of mind I have

been in a far, far greater excess, indifferent about what is said, or

written, or supposed, concerning me or my compositions, than W. can have

been ever supposed to be interested respecting his--and the “Edinburgh

Review” I have not seen for years, and never more than four or five

numbers. As to reviewing W.’s poems, my sole objection would rest on the

_time_ of the publication of the “Annual Review.” Davy’s illness has put

off the commencement of my Lectures to the middle of January. They are to

consist of at least twenty lectures, and the subject of modern poetry

occupies at least three or four. Now I do not care in how many forms my

sentiments are printed: if only I do not defraud my hirers, by causing my

lectures to be anticipated. I would not review them at all, unless I can

do it systematically, and with the whole strength of my mind. And, when I

do, I shall express my convictions of the faults and defects of the poems

and system, as plainly as of the excellencies. It has been my constant

reply to those who have charged me with bigotry, etc.,--“While you can

perceive no excellencies, it is my duty to appear conscious of no defects,

because, even though I should agree with you in the instances, I should

only confirm you in what I deem a pernicious error, as our principle of

disapprobation must necessarily be different.” In my Lectures I shall

speak out, of Rogers, Campbell, yourself (that is “Madoc” and “Thalaba;”

for I shall speak only of _poems_, not of poets), and Wordsworth, as

plainly as of Milton, Dryden, Pope, etc.... I did not overhugely admire

the “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” but saw no likeness whatever to the

“Christabel,” much less any improper resemblance.

I heard by accident that Dr. Stoddart had arrived a few days ago, and

wrote him a letter expostulating with him for his unkindness in having

detained for years my books and MSS., and stating the great loss it had

been to me (a loss not easy to be calculated. I have as witnesses T. Poole

and Squire Acland[41] (who calls me infallible Prophet), that from the

information contained in them, though I could not dare trust my

recollection sufficiently for the proofs, I foretold distinctly _every_

event that has happened of importance, with one which has not _yet_

happened, the evacuation of Sicily). This, however, of course, I did not

write to Dr. S., but simply requested he would send me my chests. In

return I received yesterday an abusive letter confirming what I suspected,

that he is writing a book himself. In this he conjures up an indefinite

debt, customs, and some old affair before I went to Malta, amounting to

more than fifty pounds (the customs twenty-five pounds, all of which I

should have had remitted, if he had sent them according to his promise),

and informing me that when I send a person properly documented to settle

this account, that person may then take away my goods. This I shall do

to-morrow, though without the least pledge that I shall receive all that I

left.... This will prevent my sending Mrs. C. any money for three weeks, I

mean exclusive of the [annuity of] £150 which, assure her, is, and for the

future will remain, sacred to her. By Wallis’ attitude to Allston I lost

thirty pounds in customs, by my brother’s refusal[42] all the expenses up

and down of my family. So it has been a baddish year; but I am not

disquieted.

S. T. C.

Poor Godwin is going to the dogs. He has a tragedy[43] to come out on

Wednesday. I will write again to you in a few days. After my Lectures I

would willingly undertake any Review with you, because I shall then have

given my Code. I omit other parts of your letter, not that they interested

me less, but because I have no room, and am too much exhausted to take up

a second sheet. God bless you. My kisses to your little ones, and love to

your wife. The only vindictive idea I have to Dr. S. is the anticipation

of showing his letter to Sir Alexander Ball!! The folly of sinning against

our first and pure impressions! It is the sin against _our own_ ghost at

least!

CLXVII. TO MRS. MORGAN.

348, Strand, Friday morning, January 25, 1808.

DEAR AND HONOURED MARY,--Having had you continually, I may almost say,

present to me in my dreams, and always appearing as a compassionate

comforter therein, appearing in shape as your own dear self, most innocent

and full of love, I feel a strong impulse to address a letter to you by

name, though it equally respects all my three friends. If it had been told

me on that evening when dear Morgan was asleep in the parlour, and you and

beloved Caroletta asleep at opposite corners of the sopha in the

drawing-room, of which I occupied the centre in a state of blessed

half-unconsciousness as a drowsy guardian of your slumbers; if it had been

then told me that in less than a fortnight the time should come when I

should not wish to be with you, or wish you to be with me, I should have

out with one of Caroletta’s harmless “_condemn its_” (commonly pronounced

“_damn it_”), “_that’s no truth!_” And yet since on Friday evening, my

lecture having made an impression far beyond its worth or my expectation,

I have been in such a state of wretchedness, confined to my bed, in such

almost continued pain ... that I have been content to see no one but the

unlovable old woman, as feeling that I should only receive a momently

succession of pangs from the presence of those who, giving no pleasure,

would make my wretchedness appear almost unnatural, even as if the fire

should cease to be warm. Who would not rather shiver on an ice mount than

freeze before the fire which had used to spread comfort through his fibres

and thoughts of social joy through his imagination? Yet even this, yet

even from _this_ feeling that your society would be an agony, oh I know, I

feel how I love you, my dear sisters and friends.

I have been obliged, of course, to put off my lecture of to-day; a most

painful necessity, for I disappoint some hundreds! I have sent for

Abernethy, who has restored Mr. De Quincey to health! Could I have

foreseen my present state I would have stayed at Bristol and taken

lodgings at Clifton in order to be within the power of being seen by you,

without being a domestic nuisance, for still, still I feel the

comfortlessness of seeing no face, hearing no voice, feeling no hand that

is dear, though conscious that the pang would outweigh the solace.

When finished, let the two dresses, etc., be sent to me; but if my illness

should have a completed conclusion, of me as well as of itself, and there

seems to be a distinct inflammation of the mesentery,--then let them be

sent to Grasmere for Mrs. Wordsworth and Miss Hutchinson,--gay dresses,

indeed, for a mourning.

I write in great pain, but yet I deem, whatever become of me, that it will

hereafter be a soothing thought to you that in sickness or in health, in

hope or in despondency, I have thought of you with love and esteem and

gratitude.

My dear Mary! dear Charlotte! May Heaven bless you! With such a wife and

such a sister, my friend is already blest! May Heaven give him health and

elastic spirits to enjoy these and all other blessings! Once more bless

you, bless you. Ah! who is there to bless

S. T. COLERIDGE?

P. S. Sunday Night. I do not know when this letter was written--probably

_Thursday_ morning, not Wednesday, as I have said in my letter to John. I

have opened this by means of the steam of a tea-kettle, merely to say that

I have, I know not how or where, lost the pretty shirt-pin Charlotte gave

me. I promise her solemnly never to accept one from any other, and never

to wear one hereafter as long as I live, so that the sense of its real

absence shall make a sort of imaginary presence to me. I am more vexed at

the accident than I ought to be; but had it been either of your locks of

hair or her profile (which must be by force and association _your_ profile

too, and a far more efficacious one than that done for you, which had no

other merit than that of having _no_ likeness at all, and this certainly

_is_ a sort of negative advantage) I should have fretted myself into

superstition and been haunted with it as by an omen. Of the lady and her

poetical daughter I had never before heard even the name. Oh these are

shadows! and all my literary admirers and flatterers, as well as despisers

and calumniators, pass over my heart as the images of clouds over dull

sea. So far from being retained, they are scarcely made visible there. But

I love you, dear ladies! substantially, and pray do write at least a line

in Morgan’s letter, if neither will write me a whole one, to comfort me by

the assurance that you remember me with esteem and some affection. Most

affectionately have you and Charlotte treated me, and most gratefully do

I remember it. Good-night, good-night!

To be read after the other.

MRS. MORGAN,

St. James’s Square, Bristol.

CLXVIII. TO FRANCIS JEFFREY.

348 Strand, May 23, 1808.

DEAR SIR,--Without knowing me you have been, perhaps rather unwarrantably,

severe on my morals and understanding, inasmuch as you have, I

understand,--for I have not seen the Reviews,--frequently introduced my

name when I had never brought any publication within your court. With one

slight exception, a shilling pamphlet[44] that never obtained the least

notice, I have not published anything with my name, or known to be mine,

for thirteen years. Surely I might quote against you the complaint of Job

as to those who brought against him “the iniquities of his youth.” What

harm have I ever done you, dear sir, by act or word? If you knew me, you

would yourself smile at some of the charges, which, I am told, you have

fastened on me. Most assuredly, you have mistaken my sentiments, alike in

morality, politics, and--what is called--metaphysics, and, I would fain

hope, that if you knew me, you would not have ascribed self-opinion and

arrogance to me. But, be this as it may, I write to you now merely to

intreat--for the sake of mankind--an honourable review of Mr. Clarkson’s

“History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade.”[45] I know the man, and if

you knew him you, I am sure, would revere him, and your reverence of him,

as an agent, would almost supersede all judgment of him as a mere

literary man. It would be presumptuous in me to offer to write the review

of his work. Yet I should be glad were I permitted to submit to you the

many thoughts which occurred to me during its perusal. Be assured, that

with the greatest respect for your talents--as far as I can judge of them

from the few numbers of the “Edinburgh Review” which I have had the

opportunity of reading--and every kind thought respecting your motives,

I am, dear sir, your ob. humb. ser’t,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

---- JEFFRAY (_sic_), ESQ.,

to the care of Mr. Constable, Bookseller, Edingburgh (_sic_).

CLXIX. TO THE SAME.

[Postmark] BURY ST. EDMUNDS,

July 20, 1808.

DEAR SIR,--Not having been gratified by a letter from you, I have feared

that the freedom with which I opened out my opinions may have given you

offence. Be assured, it was most alien from my intention. The purport of

what I wrote was simply this--that severe and long-continued bodily

disease exacerbated by disappointment in the great hope of my Life had

rendered me insensible to blame and praise, even to a faulty degree,

unless they proceeded from the one or two who love me. The

entrance-passage to my heart is choked up with heavy lumber, and I am thus

barricadoed against attacks, which, doubtless, I should otherwise have

felt as keenly as most men. Instead of censuring a certain quantum of

irritability respecting the reception of published composition, I rather

envy it--it becomes ludicrous then only, when it is disavowed, and the

opposite temper pretended to. The ass’s skin is almost

scourge-proof--while the elephant thrills under the movements of every fly

that runs over it. But though notoriously almost a zealot in behalf of my

friend’s poetic reputation, yet I can leave it with cheerful confidence to

the fair working of his own powers. I have known many, very many instances

of contempt changed into admiration of his genius; but I neither know nor

have heard of a single person, who having been or having become his

admirer had ceased to be so. For it is honourable to us all that our kind

affections, the attractions and elective affinities of our nature, are of

more permanent agency than those passions which repel and dissever. From

this cause we may explain the final growth of honest fame, and its

tenacity of life. Whenever the struggle of controversy ceases, we think no

more of works which give us no pleasure and apply our satire and scorn to

some new object, and thus the field is left entire to friends and

partisans.

But the case of Mr. Clarkson appeared to me altogether different. I do not

hold his fame dear because he is my friend; but I sought and cultivated

his acquaintance, because a long and sober enquiry had assured me, that he

had been, in an aweful sense of the word, a benefactor of mankind: and

this from the purest motives unalloyed by the fears and hopes of selfish

superstition--and _not_ with that feverish power which fanatics acquire by

crowding together, but in the native strength of his own moral impulses.

He, if ever human being did it, listened exclusively to his conscience,

and obeyed its voice at the price of all his youth and manhood, at the

price of his health, his private fortune, and the fairest prospects of

honourable ambition. Such a man I cannot regard as a mere author. I cannot

read or criticise such a work as a mere literary production. The opinions

publicly expressed and circulated concerning it must of necessity in the

author’s feelings be entwined with the cause itself, and with his own

character as a _man_, to which that of the historian is only an accidental

accession. Were it the pride of authorship alone that was in danger of

being fretted, I should have remained as passive in this instance as in

that of my most particular friend, to whom I am bound by ties more close

and of longer standing than those which connect me personally with Mr.

Clarkson. But I know that any sarcasms or ridicule would deeply wound his

feelings, as a veteran warrior in a noble contest, feelings that claim the

reverence of all good men.

The Review was sent, addressed to you, by the post of yester-evening.

There is not a sentence, not a word in it, which I should not have

written, had I never seen the author.

I am myself about to bring out two works--one a small pamphlet[46]--the

second of considerable size--it is a _rifacciamento_, a very free

translation with large additions, etc., etc., of the masterly work for

which poor Palm was murdered.

I hope to be in the North, at Keswick, in the course of a week or eight

days. I shall be happy to hear from you on this or any other occasion.

Yours, dear sir, sincerely,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CHAPTER X

GRASMERE AND THE FRIEND

1808-1810

CHAPTER X

GRASMERE AND THE FRIEND

1808-1810

CLXX. TO DANIEL STUART.

[December 9, 1808.]

MY DEAR STUART,--Scarcely when listening to count the hour, have I been

more perplexed by the “_Inopem me copia fecit_” of the London church

clocks, than by the press of what I have to say to you. I must do one at a

time. Briefly, a very happy change[47] has taken place in my health and

spirits and mental activity since I placed myself under the care and

inspection of a physician, and I dare say with confident hope, “Judge me

from the 1st January, 1809.”

I send you the Prospectus, and intreat you to do me all the good you can;

which like the Lord’s Prayer is Thanksgiving in the disguise of petition.

If you think that it should be advertized in any way, or if Mr. Street can

do anything for me--but I know you will do what you can.

I have received promises of contribution from many tall fellows with big

names in the world of Scribes, and count even Pharisees (two or three

Bishops) in my list of patrons. But whether I shall have 50, 100, 500, or

1,000 subscribers I am not able even to conjecture. All must depend on

the zeal of my friends, on which I fear I have thrown more water than

oil--but some like the Greek fire burn beneath the wave!

Wordsworth has nearly finished a series of most masterly Essays[48] on the

Affairs of Portugal and Spain, and by my advice he will first send them to

you that if they suit the “Courier” they may be inserted.

I have not heard from Savage, but I suppose that he has printed a thousand

of these Prospectuses, and you may have any number from him. He lives hard

by some of the streets in Covent Garden which I do not remember, but a

note to Mr. Savage, R. Institution, Albemarle Street, will find him.

May God Almighty bless you! I feel that I shall yet live, to give proof of

what is deep within me towards you.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CLXXI. TO FRANCIS JEFFREY.

GRASMERE, December 14, 1808.

DEAR SIR,--The only thing in which I have been able to detect any degree

of hypochrondriasis in my feelings is the reading and answering of

letters, and in this instance I have been at times so wofully under its

domination as to have left every letter received lie unopened for weeks

together, all the while thoroughly ashamed of the weakness and yet without

power to get rid of it. This, however, has not been the case of late, and

I was never yet so careless as knowingly to suffer a letter relating to

money to remain unanswered by the next post in my power. I, therefore, on

reading your very kind letter of 8 Dec. conclude that one letter from you

during my movements from Grasmere, now to Keswick, now to Bratha and

Elleray, and now to Kendal, has been mislayed.

As I considered your insertion of the review of Mr. Clarkson’s as an act

of personal kindness and attention to the request of one a stranger to you

except by name, the thought of any pecuniary remuneration never once

occurred to me; and had it been written at your request I should have

thought twenty guineas a somewhat extravagant price whether I considered

the quantity or quality of the communication. As to the alterations, your

character and interest, as the known Editor of the Review, are pledged for

a general consistency of principle in the different articles with each

other, and you had every possible right to alter or omit _ad libitum_,

unless a special condition had been insisted on of _aut totum aut nihil_.

As the writer, therefore, I neither thought nor cared about the

alterations; as a general reader, I differed with you as [to] the scale of

merit relatively to Mr. Wilberforce, whose services I deem to have been

overrated, not, perhaps, so much absolutely as by comparison. At all

events, some following passages should have been omitted, as they are in

blank contradiction to the paragraph inserted, and betrayed a co-presence

of two writers in one article. As to the longer paragraph, Wordsworth

thinks you on the true side; and Clarkson himself that you were not far

from the truth. As to my own opinion, I believed what I wrote, and deduced

my belief from all the facts pro and con, with which Mr. Clarkson’s

conversation have furnished [me]; but such is my detestation of that

pernicious Minister,[49] such my contempt of the cowardice and fatuity of

his measures, and my horror at the yet unended train of their direful

consequences, that, if obedience to truth could ever be painful to me,

this would have been. I acted well in writing what on the whole I believed

the more probable, and I was pleased that you acted equally well in

altering it according to your convictions.

I had hoped to have furnished a letter of more interesting contents to

you, but an honest gentleman in London having taken a great fancy to two

thirds of the possible profits of my literary labours without a shadow of

a claim, and having over-hurried the business through overweening of my

simplicity and carelessness, has occasioned me some perplexity and a great

deal of trouble and letter-writing. I will write, however, again to you my

first leisure evening, whether I hear from you or no in the interim.

I trust you have received my scrawl with the prospectus[50] and feel

sincerely thankful to you for your kindness on the arrival of the

prospectuses, prior to your receipt of the letter which was meant to have

announced them. But our post here is very irregular as well as

circuitous--but three times a week--and then, too, we have to walk more

than two miles for the chance of finding letters. This you will be so good

as to take into account whenever my answers do not arrive at the time they

might have been expected from places in general. I remain, dear sir, with

kind and respectful feeling, your obliged,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

I entirely coincide in your dislike of “speculative gloom”--it is

illogical as well as barbarous, and almost as bad as “picturesque eye.” I

do not know how I came to pass it; for when I first wrote it, I

undermarked it, not as the expression, but as a remembrancer of some

better that did not immediately occur to me. “Year-long absences” I think

doubtful--had any one objected to it, I should have altered it; but it

would not _much_ offend me in the writings of another. But to “moral

impulses” I see at present no objections, nor does any other phrase

suggest itself to me which would have expressed my meaning. That there is

a semblance of presumptuousness in the manner I exceedingly regret, if so

it be--my heart bears me witness that the feeling had no place there. Yet

I need not say to you that it is impossible to succeed in such a work

unless at the commencement of it there be a quickening and throb in the

pulse of hope; and what if a blush from inward modesty disguise itself on

these occasions, and the hectic of unusual self-assertion increase the

appearance of that excess which it in reality resists and modifies? It

will amuse you to be informed that from two correspondents, both of them

men of great literary celebrity, I have received reproof for a supposed

affectation of humility in the style of the prospectus. In my own

consciousness I was guilty of neither. Yet surely to advance as a teacher,

and in the very act to declare yourself inferior to those whom you propose

to teach, is incongruous; and must disgust a pure mind by its evident

hypocrisy.

CLXXII. TO THOMAS WILKINSON.[51]

GRASMERE, December 31, 1808.

DEAR SIR,--I thank you for your exertions in my behalf, and--which more

deeply interests me--for the openness with which you have communicated

your doubts and apprehensions. So much, indeed, am I interested, that I

cannot lay down my head on my pillow in perfect tranquillity, without

endeavoring to remove them. First, however, I must tell you that ... “The

Friend” will not appear at the time _conditionally_ announced. There are,

besides, great difficulties at the Stamp Office concerning it. But the

particulars I will detail when we meet. Myself, with William Wordsworth

and the family, are glad that we are so soon to see you. Now then for what

is so near my heart. Only a certain number of prospectuses were printed at

Kendal, and sent to acquaintances. The much larger number, which were to

have been printed at London, have not been printed. When they are, you

will see in the article, noted in this copy, that I neither intend to

omit, nor from any fear of offence have scrupled to announce my intention

of treating, the subject of religion. I had supposed that the words

“speculative gloom” would have conveyed this intention. I had inserted

another article, which I was induced to omit, from the fear of exciting

doubts and queries. This was: On the transition of natural religion into

revelation, or the principle of internal guidance: and the grounds of the

possibility of the connection of spiritual revelation with historic

events; that is, its manifestation in the world of the senses. This meant

as a preliminary--leaving, as already performed by others, the proof of

the reality of this connection in the particular fact of Christianity.

Herein I wished to prove only that true philosophy rather leads to

Christianity, than contained anything preclusive of it, and therefore

adopted the phrase used in the definition of philosophy in general:

namely, The science which answers the question of things _actual_, how

they are _possible_? Thus the laws of gravitation illustrate the

_possibility_ of the motion of the heavenly bodies, the action of the

lever, etc.; the reality of which was already known. I mention this,

because the argument assigned which induced me to omit it in a prospectus

was, that by making a distinction between revelation _in itself_ (_i. e._

a principle of internal supernatural guidance), and the same revelation

conjoined with the power of external manifestation by supernatural works,

would proclaim me to be a Quaker, and “The Friend” as intended to

propagate peculiar and sectarian principles. Think then, dear Friend! what

my regret was at finding that you had taken it for granted that I denied

the existence of an internal monitor! I trust I am neither of Paul, or of

Apollos, or of Cephas; but of Christ. Yet I feel reverential gratitude

toward those who have conveyed the spirit of Christ to my heart and

understanding so as to afford light to the latter and vital warmth to the

former. Such gratitude I owe and feel toward W. Penn. Take his Preface to

G. Fox’s Journal, and his Letter to his Son,--if they contain a faithful

statement of genuine Christianity according to your faith, I am one with

you. I subscribe to each and all of the principles therein laid down; and

by them I propose to try, and endeavour to justify, the charge made by me

(my conscience bears me witness) in the spirit of entire love against some

passages of the journals of later Friends. Oh--and it is a groan of

earnest aspiration! a strong wish of bitter tears and bitter

self-dissatisfaction,--Oh that in all things, in self-subjugation,

unwearied beneficence, and unfeigned listening and obedience to the Voice

within, I were as like the evangelic John Woolman, as I know myself to be

in the belief of the existence and the sovran authority of that Voice!

When we meet, I will endeavour to be wholly known to you as I am, in

principle at least.

A few words more. Unsuspicious of the possibility of misunderstanding, I

had inserted in this prospectus Dress and Dancing among the fine Arts, the

principles common to which I was to develope. Now surely anything common

to Dress or Dancing with Architecture, Gardening, and Poetry could contain

nothing to alarm any man who is not alarmed by Gardening, Poetry, etc.,

and secondly, principles common to Poetry, Music, etc., etc., could hardly

be founded in the ridiculous hopping up and down in a modern ball-room, or

the washes, paints, and patches of a fine lady’s toilet. It is well known

how much I admired Thomas Clarkson’s Chapter on Dancing. The truth is,

that I referred to the drapery and ornamental decoration of Painting,

Statuary, and the Greek Spectacles; and to the scientific dancing of the

ancient Greeks, the business of a life confined to a small class, and

placed under the direction of particular magistrates. My object was to

prove the truth of the principles by shewing that even dress and dancing,

when the ingenuity and caprice of man had elaborated them into Fine Arts,

were bottomed in the same principles. But desirous even to avoid

suspicion, the passage will be omitted in the future prospectuses.

Farewell! till we meet.

S. T. COLERIDGE. _See P. S._