When I was at Bowood there was a plan suggested between Bowles and myself,

to engage among the cleverest literary characters of our knowledge, six or

eight, each of whom was to engage to take some one subject of those into

which the “Edinburgh Review” might be aptly divided; as Science, Classical

Knowledge, Style, Taste, Philosophy, Political Economy, Morals, Religion,

and Patriotism; to state the number of Essays he could write and the time

at which he would deliver each; and so go through the whole of the

“Review”:--to be published in the first instance in the “Courier” during

the Recess of Parliament. We thought of Southey, Wordsworth, Crowe,

Crabbe, Wollaston; and Bowles thought he could answer for several single

Articles from persons of the highest rank in the Church and our two

Universities. Such a plan, adequately executed, seven or eight years ago,

would have gone near to blow up this Magazine of Mischief.

As to Ridgeway[127] and the Essays, I have not only no objection to my

name being given, but I should prefer it. I have just as much right to

call myself dramatically an Irish Protestant, when writing in the

character of one, as Swift had to call himself a draper.[128] I have waded

through as mischievous a Work, as two huge quartos, very dull, can be, by

a Mr. Edward Wakefield, called an Account of Ireland. Of all scribblers

these agricultural quarto-mongers are the vilest. I thought of making the

affairs of Ireland, _in toto_, chiefly however with reference to the

Catholic Question, a new series, and of republishing in the Appendix to

the eight letters to Mr. Justice Fletcher, Lord Clare’s (then Chancellor

Fitzgibbon’s) admirable speech, worthy of Demosthenes, of which a copy was

brought me over from Dublin by Rickman, and given to Lamb. It was never

printed in England, nor is it to be procured. I never met with a person

who had heard of it. Except that one main point is omitted (and it is

remarkable that the poet Edmund Spenser in his Dialogue on Ireland[129] is

the only writer who has urged this point), viz., the forcing upon savages

the laws of a comparatively civilised people, instead of adopting measures

gradually to render them susceptible of those laws, this speech might be

deservedly called the philosophy of the past and present history of

Ireland. It makes me smile to observe, how all the mediocre men exult in a

Ministry that have been so successful without any overpowering talent of

eloquence, etc. It is true that a series of gigantic events like those of

the last eighteen months, will lift up any cock-boat to the skies upon

their billows; but no less true that, sooner or later, parliamentary

talent will be found absolutely requisite for an English Ministry.

With sincere regard and esteem, your obliged

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CCIV. TO JOHN KENYON.[130]

Mr. B. Morgan’s, Bath, November 3 [1814].

MY DEAR SIR,--At Binn’s, Cheap Street, I found Jeremy Taylor’s “Dissuasive

from Popery,” in the largest and only complete edition of his Polemical

Tracts. Mr. Binns had no objection to the paragraphs being transcribed any

morning or evening at his house, and I put in a piece of paper with the

words at which the transcript should begin and with which end--p. 450, l.

5, to p. 451, l. 31, I believe. But indeed I am ashamed, rather I feel

awkward and uncomfortable at obtruding on you so long a task, much longer

than I had imagined. I don’t like to use any words that might give you

_un_pleasure, but I cannot help fearing that, like a child spoilt by your

and Mrs. Kenyon’s great indulgence, I may have been betrayed into

presuming on it more than I ought. Indeed, my dear sir! I do feel very

keenly how exceeding kind you and Mrs. K. have been to me. It makes this

scrawl of mine look dim in a way that was less uncommon with me formerly

than it has been for the last eight or ten years.

But to return, or turn off, to the good old Bishop. It would be worth your

while to read Taylor’s “Letter on Original Sin,” and what follows. I

compare it to an old statue of Janus, with one of the faces, that which

looks towards his opponents, the controversial phiz in highest

preservation,--the force of a mighty one, all power, all life,--the face

of a God rushing on to battle, and, in the same moment, enjoying at once

both contest and triumph; the other, that which should have been the

countenance that looks toward his followers, that with which he

substitutes his own opinion, all weather eaten, dim, useless, a _Ghost_ in

_marble_, such as you may have seen represented in many of Piranesi’s

astounding engravings from Rome and the Campus Martius. Jer. Taylor’s

discursive intellect dazzle-darkened his intuition. The principle of

becoming all things to all men, if by _any_ means he might save _any_,

with him as with Burke, thickened the protecting epidermis of the

tact-nerve of truth into something like a callus. But take him all in all,

such a miraculous combination of erudition, broad, deep, and omnigenous;

of logic subtle as well as acute, and as robust as agile; of psychological

insight, so fine yet so secure! of public prudence and practical

_sageness_ that one ray of _creative Faith_ would have lit up and

transfigured into wisdom, and of genuine imagination, with its streaming

face unifying all at one moment like that of the setting sun when through

an interspace of blue sky no larger than itself, it emerges from the cloud

to sink behind the mountain, but a face seen only at _starts_, when some

breeze from the higher air scatters, for a moment, the cloud of butterfly

fancies, which flutter around him like a morning-garment of ten thousand

colours--(now how shall I get out of this sentence? the tail is too big to

be taken up into the coiler’s mouth)--well, as I was saying, I believe

such a complete man hardly shall we meet again.

May God bless you and yours!

Your obliged

S. T. COLERIDGE.

P. S. My address after Tuesday will be (God permitting) Mr. Page’s,

Surgeon, Calne.

J. KENYON, Esq., 9, Argyle Street.

CCV. TO LADY BEAUMONT.

April 3, 1815.

DEAR MADAM,--Should your Ladyship still have among your papers those lines

of mine to Mr. Wordsworth after his recitation of the poem on the growth

of his own spirit,[131] which you honoured by wishing to take a copy, you

would oblige me by enclosing them for me, addressed--“Mr. Coleridge,

Calne, Wilts.” Of “The Excursion,” excluding the tale of the ruined

cottage, which I have ever thought the finest poem in our language,

comparing it with any of the same or similar _length_, I can truly say

that one half the number of its beauties would make all the beauties of

all his contemporary poets collectively mount to the balance:--but

yet--the fault may be in my own mind--I do not think, I did not feel, it

equal to the work on the growth of his own spirit. As proofs meet me in

every part of “The Excursion” that the poet’s genius has not flagged, I

have sometimes fancied that, having by the conjoint operation of his own

experiences, feelings, and reason, _himself_ convinced _himself_ of

truths, which the generality of persons have either taken for granted from

their infancy, or, at least, adopted in early life, he has attached all

their own depth and weight to doctrines and words, which come almost as

truisms or commonplaces to others. From this state of mind, in which I was

comparing Wordsworth with himself, I was roused by the infamous

“Edinburgh” review of the poem. If ever guilt lay on a writer’s head, and

if malignity, slander, hypocrisy, and self-contradictory baseness can

constitute guilt, I dare openly, and openly (please God!) I will, impeach

the writer of that article of it. These are awful times--a dream of

dreams! To be a prophet is, and ever has been, an unthankful office. At

the Illumination for the Peace I furnished a design for a friend’s

transparency--a vulture, with the head of Napoleon, chained to a rock, and

Britannia bending down, with one hand stretching out the wing of the

vulture, and with the other clipping it with shears, on the one blade of

which was written Nelson, on the other Wellington. The motto--

We’ve fought for peace, and conquer’d it at last;

The ravening Vulture’s leg is fetter’d fast.

Britons, rejoice! and yet be wary too!

The chain may break, the clipt wing sprout anew.[132]

And since I have conversed with those who first returned from France, I

have weekly expected the event. Napoleon’s object at present is to

embarrass the Allies, and to cool the enthusiasm of their subjects. The

latter he unfortunately will be too successful in. In London, my Lady, it

is scarcely possible to distinguish the opinions of the people from the

ravings and railings of the mob; but in country towns we must be blind not

to see the real state of the popular mind. I do not know whether your

Ladyship read my letters to Judge Fletcher. I can assure you it is no

exaggerated picture of the predominance of Jacobinism. In this small town

of Calne five hundred volunteers were raised in the last war. I am

persuaded that five could not be raised now. A considerable landowner,

and a man of great observation, said to me last week, “A famine, sir,

could scarce have produced more evil than the Corn Bill[133] has done

under the present circumstances.” I speak nothing of the Bill itself,

except that, after the closest attention and the most sedulous inquiry

after facts from landowners, farmers, stewards, millers, and bakers, I am

convinced that both opponents and advocates were in extremes, and that an

evil produced by many causes was by many remedies to have been cured, not

by the universal elixir of one sweeping law.

My poems will be put to press by the middle of June. A number adequate to

one volume are already in the hands of my friends at Bristol, under

conditions that _they_ are to be published at all events, even though I

should not add another volume, which I never had so little reason to

doubt. Within the last two days I have composed three poems, containing

500 lines in the whole.

Mr. and Mrs. Morgan present their respective compliments to your Ladyship

and Sir George.

I remain, my Lady, your Ladyship’s obliged humble servant,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CCVI. TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

CALNE, May 30, 1815.

MY HONOURED FRIEND,--On my return from Devizes, whither I had gone to

procure some vaccine matter (the small-pox having appeared in Calne, and

Mrs. Morgan’s sister believing herself never to have had it), I found your

letter: and I will answer it immediately, though to answer it as I could

wish to do would require more recollection and arrangement of thought

than is always to be commanded on the instant. But I dare not trust my own

habit of procrastination, and, do what I would, it would be impossible in

a single letter to give more than _general_ convictions. But, even after a

tenth or twentieth letter, I should still be disquieted as knowing how

poor a substitute must letters be for a _vivâ voce_ examination of a work

with its author, line by line. It is most uncomfortable from many, many

causes, to express anything but sympathy, and gratulation to an absent

friend, to whom for the more substantial third of a life we have been

habituated to look up: especially where a love, though increased by many

and different influences, yet begun and throve and knit its joints in the

perception of his superiority. It is not in _written words_, but by the

hundred modifications that looks make and tone, and denial of the _full_

sense of the very words used, that one can reconcile the struggle between

sincerity and diffidence, between the persuasion that I am in the right,

and that as deep though not so vivid conviction, that it may be the

positiveness of ignorance rather than the certainty of insight. Then come

the human frailties, the dread of giving pain, or exciting suspicions of

alteration and dyspathy, in short, the almost inevitable insincerities

between imperfect beings, however sincerely attached to each other. It is

hard (and I am Protestant enough to doubt whether _it is_ right) to

confess the whole truth (even _of_ one’s self, human nature scarce endures

it, even _to_ one’s self), but to me it is still harder to do this of and

to a revered friend.

But to your letter. First, I had never determined to print the lines

addressed to you. I lent them to Lady Beaumont on her promise that they

should be copied, and returned; and not knowing of any copy in my own

possession, I sent for them, because I was making a MS. collection of

_all_ my poems--publishable and unpublishable--and still more perhaps for

the handwriting of the only perfect copy, that entrusted to her ladyship.

Most assuredly, I never once thought of printing them without having

consulted you, and since I lit on the first rude draught, and corrected it

as well as I could, I wanted no additional reason for its not being

published in my lifetime than its _personality_ respecting myself. After

the opinions I had given publicly, in the preference of “Lycidas” (moral

no less than poetical) to Cowley’s Monody, I could not have printed it

consistently. It is for the biographer, not the poet, to give the

_accidents_ of _individual_ life. Whatever is not representative, generic,

may be indeed most poetically expressed, but is not poetry. Otherwise, I

confess, your prudential reasons would not have weighed with me, except as

far as my name might haply injure your reputation, for there is nothing in

the lines, as far as your powers are concerned, which I have not as fully

expressed elsewhere; and I hold it a miserable cowardice to withhold a

deliberate opinion only because the man is alive.

Secondly, for “The Excursion,” I feared that had I been silent concerning

“The Excursion,” Lady Beaumont would have drawn some strange inference;

and yet I had scarcely sent off the letter before I repented that I had

not run that risk rather than have approach to dispraise communicated to

you by a third person. But what did my criticism amount to, reduced to its

full and naked sense? This, that _comparatively_ with the _former_ poem,

“The Excursion,” as far as it was new to me, had disappointed my

expectations; that the excellencies were so many and of so high a class

that it was impossible to attribute the inferiority, if any such really

existed, to any flagging of the writer’s own genius--and that I

conjectured that it might have been occasioned by the influence of

self-established convictions having given to certain thoughts and

expressions a depth and force which they had not for readers in general.

In order, therefore, to explain the _disappointment_, I must recall to

your mind what my _expectations_ were: and, as these again were founded on

the supposition that (in whatever order it might be published) the poem on

the growth of your own mind was as the ground plot and the roots, out of

which “The Recluse” was to have sprung up as the tree, as far as [there

was] the same sap in both, I expected them, doubtless, to have formed one

complete whole; but in matter, form, and product to be different, each not

only a distinct but a different work. In the first I had found “themes by

thee first sung aright,”

Of smiles spontaneous and mysterious fears

(The first-born they of reason and twin-birth)

Of tides obedient to external force,

And currents self-determin’d, as might seem,

Or by some central breath; of moments awful,

Now in thy inner life, and now abroad,

When power stream’d from thee, and thy soul received

The light reflected as a light bestowed;

Of fancies fair, and milder hours of youth,

Hyblæan murmurs of poetic thought

Industrious in its joy, in vales and glens

Native or outland, lakes and famous hills!

Or on the lonely highroad, when the stars

Were rising; or by secret mountain streams,

The guides and the companions of thy way;

Of more than _fancy_--of the _social sense_

Distending wide, and man beloved as man,

Where France in all her towns lay vibrating,

Ev’n as a bark becalm’d beneath the burst

Of Heaven’s immediate thunder, when no cloud

Is visible, or shadow on the main!

For Thou wert there, thy own brows garlanded,

Amid the tremor of a realm aglow,

Amid a mighty nation jubilant,

When from the general heart of human kind

_Hope_ sprang forth, like a full-born Deity!

Of that dear Hope afflicted, and amaz’d,

So homeward summon’d! thenceforth calm and sure

From the dread watch-tower of man’s absolute self,

With light unwaning on her eyes, to look

Far on! herself a glory to behold,

The Angel of the vision! Then (last strain)

Of duty, chosen laws controlling choice,

Action and Joy! _An Orphic song indeed,

A song divine of high and passionate truths,

To their own music chaunted!_

Indeed, through the whole of that Poem, με Αὔρα τις εἰσ έπνευσε

μουσικωτάτη. This I considered as “The Excursion;”[134] and the second, as

“The Recluse” I had (from what I had at different times gathered from your

conversation on the Place [Grasmere]) anticipated as commencing with you

set down and settled in an abiding home, and that with the description of

that home you were to begin a _philosophical poem_, the _result_ and

fruits of a spirit so framed and so disciplined as had been told in the

former.

Whatever in Lucretius is poetry is not philosophical, whatever is

philosophical is not poetry; and in the very pride of confident hope I

looked forward to “The Recluse” as the _first_ and _only_ true

philosophical poem in existence. Of course, I expected the colours, music,

imaginative life, and passion of _poetry_; but the matter and arrangement

of _philosophy_; not doubting from the advantages of the subject that the

totality of a system was not only capable of being harmonised with, but

even calculated to aid, the unity (beginning, middle, and end) of a poem.

Thus, whatever the length of the work might be, still it was a

_determinate_ length; of the subjects announced, each would have its own

appointed place, and, excluding repetitions, each would relieve and rise

in interest above the other. I supposed you first to have meditated the

faculties of man in the abstract, in their correspondence with his sphere

of action, and, first in the feeling, touch, and taste, then in the eye,

and last in the ear,--to have laid a solid and immovable foundation for

the edifice by removing the sandy sophisms of Locke, and the mechanic

dogmatists, and demonstrating that the senses were living growths and

developments of the mind and spirit, in a much juster as well as higher

sense, than the mind can be said to be formed by the senses. Next, I

understood that you would take the human race in the concrete, have

exploded the absurd notion of Pope’s “Essay on Man,” Darwin, and all the

countless believers even (strange to say) among Christians of man’s having

progressed from an ourang-outang state--so contrary to all history, to all

religion, nay, to all possibility--to have affirmed a Fall in some sense,

as a fact, the possibility of which cannot be understood from the nature

of the will, but the reality of which is attested by experience and

conscience. Fallen men contemplated in the different ages of the world,

and in the different states--savage, barbarous, civilised, the lonely cot,

or borderer’s wigwam, the village, the manufacturing town, seaport, city,

universities, and, not disguising the sore evils under which the whole

creation groans, to point out, however, a manifest scheme of redemption,

of reconciliation from this enmity with Nature--what are the obstacles,

the _Antichrist_ that must be and already is--and to conclude by a grand

didactic swell on the necessary identity of a true philosophy with true

religion, agreeing in the results and differing only as the analytic and

synthetic process, as discursive from intuitive, the former chiefly useful

as perfecting the latter; in short, the necessity of a general revolution

in the modes of developing and disciplining the human mind by the

substitution of life and intelligence (considered in its different powers

from the plant up to that state in which the difference of degree becomes

a new kind (man, self-consciousness), but yet not by essential opposition)

for the philosophy of mechanism, which, in everything that is most worthy

of the human intellect, strikes _Death_, and cheats itself by mistaking

clear images for distinct conceptions, and which idly demands conceptions

where intuitions alone are possible or adequate to the majesty of the

Truth. In short, facts elevated into theory--theory into laws--and laws

into living and intelligent powers--true idealism necessarily perfecting

itself in realism, and realism refining itself into idealism.

Such or something like this was the plan I had supposed that you were

engaged on. Your own words will therefore explain my feelings, viz., that

your object “was not to convey recondite, or refined truths, but to place

commonplace truths in an interesting point of view.” Now this I suppose to

have been in your two volumes of poems, as far as was desirable or

possible, without an insight into the whole truth. How can common truths

be made permanently interesting but by being _bottomed_ on our common

nature? It is only by the profoundest insight into numbers and quantity

that a sublimity and even religious wonder become attached to the simplest

operations of arithmetic, the most evident properties of the circle or

triangle. I have only to finish a preface, which I shall have done in two,

or, at farthest, three days; and I will then, dismissing all comparison

either with the poem on the growth of your own support, or with the

imagined plan of “The Recluse,” state fairly my main objections to “The

Excursion” as it is. But it would have been alike unjust both to you and

to myself, if I had led you to suppose that any disappointment I may have

felt arose wholly or chiefly from the passages I do not like, or from the

poem considered irrelatively.

Allston lives at 8, Buckingham Place, Fitzroy Square. He has lost his

wife, and been most unkindly treated and most unfortunate. I hope you will

call on him. Good God! to think of such a grub as _Dawe_ with more than he

can do, and such a genius as Allston without a single patron!

God bless you! I am, and never have been other than your most affectionate

S. T. COLERIDGE.

Mr. and Mrs. Morgan desire to be affectionately remembered to you, and

they would be highly gratified if you could make a little tour and spend a

short time at Calne. There is an admirable collection of pictures at

Corsham. Bowles left Bremhill (two miles from us, where he has a perfect

paradise of a place) for town yesterday morning.

CCVII. TO THE REV. W. MONEY.[135]

CALNE, Wednesday, 1815.

DEAR SIR,--I have seldom made a greater sacrifice and gratification to

prudence than in the determination most reluctantly formed, that the state

of my health, which requires hourly regimen, joined with the uncertain

state of the weather and the perilous consequences of my taking cold in

the existing weakness of the viscera, renders it improper for me to hazard

a night away from my home. No pleasure, however intellectual (and to all

but intellectual _pleasures_ I have long been dead, for surely the staving

off of pain is no pleasure), could repay me even for the chance of being

again unwell in any house but my own. I have a great, a gigantic effort to

make, and I will go through with it or die. Gross have been the calumnies

concerning me; but enough remains of truth to enforce the necessity of

considering all other things as unimportant compared with the necessity of

_living them down_. This letter is, of course, sacred to yourself, and a

pledge of the high respect I entertain for your moral being; for you need

not the feelings of friendship to feel as a friend toward every fellow

Christian.

To turn to another subject, Mr. Bowles, I understand, is about to publish,

at least is composing a reply to some answer to the “Velvet Cushion.”[136]

I have seen neither work. But this I will venture to say, that if the

respondents in favour of the Church take upon them to justify in the most

absolute sense, as if Scripture were the subject of the controversy,

every minute part of our admirable Liturgy, and liturgical and sacramental

services, they will only furnish new triumph to ungenerous adversaries.

The Church of England has in the Articles solemnly declared that all

Churches are fallible--and in another, to assert its absolute

immaculateness, sounds to me a mere contradiction. No! I would first

overthrow what can be fairly and to all men intelligibly overthrown in the

adversaries’ objections (and of this kind the instances are as twenty to

one). For the remainder I would talk like a special pleader, and from the

defensive pass to the offensive, and then prove from St. Paul (for of the

practice of the early Church even in its purest state, before the reign of

Constantine, our opponents make no account) that errors in a Church that

neither directly or indirectly injure morals or oppugn salvation are

exercises for mutual charity, not excuses for schism. In short, is there

or is there [not] such a condemnable thing as schism? In the proof of

consequences of the affirmative lies, in my humble opinion, the complete

confutation of the (so-called) Evangelical Dissenters.

I shall be most happy to converse with you on the subject. If Mr. Bowles

were not employed on it, I should have had no objection to have reduced my

many thoughts to order and have published them; but this might now seem

invidious and like rivalry.

Present my best respects to Mrs. Money, and be so good as to make the

fitting apologies for me to Mr. T. Methuen,[137] the _man wise of heart_!

But an apology already exists for me in his own mind.

I remain, dear sir, respectfully your obliged

S. T. COLERIDGE.

Wednesday, Calne.

P. S. I have opened this letter to add, that the greater number, if not

the whole, of the arguments used apply only to the ministers, not to the

members of the Established Church. Some one of our eminent divines refused

even to take the pastoral office, I believe, on account of the Funeral

Service and the Absolution of the Sick; but still it remains to justify

schism from _Church-Membership_.

To the Rev. W. MONEY, Whetham.

CHAPTER XIII

NEW LIFE AND NEW FRIENDS

1816-1821

CHAPTER XIII

NEW LIFE AND NEW FRIENDS

1816-1821

With Coleridge’s name and memory must ever be associated the names of

James and Anne Gillman. It was beneath the shelter of their friendly roof

that he spent the last eighteen years of his life, and it was to their

wise and loving care that the comparative fruitfulness and well-being of

those years were due. They thought themselves honoured by his presence,

and he repaid their devotion with unbounded love and gratitude. Friendship

and loving-kindness followed Coleridge all the days of his life. What did

he not owe to Poole, to Southey for his noble protection of his family, to

the Morgans for their long-tried faithfulness and devotion to himself? But

to the Gillmans he owed the “crown of his cup and garnish of his dish,” a

welcome which lasted till the day of his death. Doubtless there were

chords in his nature which were struck for the first time by these good

people, and in their presence and by their help he was a new man. But, for

all that, their patience must have been inexhaustible, their loyalty

unimpeachable, their love indestructible. Such friendship is rare and

beautiful, and merits a most honourable remembrance.

CCVIII. TO JAMES GILLMAN.

42, Norfolk Street, Strand,

Saturday noon, [April 13, 1816.]

MY DEAR SIR,--The very first half hour I was with you convinced me that I

should owe my reception into your family exclusively to motives not less

flattering to me than honourable to yourself. I trust we shall ever in

matters of intellect be reciprocally serviceable to each other. Men of

sense generally come to the same conclusion; but they are likely to

contribute to each other’s exchangement of view, in proportion to the

distance or even opposition of the points from which they set out. Travel

and the strange variety of situations and employments on which chance has

thrown me, in the course of my life, might have made me a mere man of

_observation_, if pain and sorrow and self-miscomplacence had not forced

my mind in on itself, and so formed habits of _meditation_. It is now as

much my nature to evolve the fact from the law, as that of a practical man

to deduce the law from the fact.

With respect to pecuniary remuneration,[138] allow me to say, I must not

at least be suffered to make any addition to your family expenses--though

I cannot offer anything that would be in any way adequate to my sense of

the service; for that, indeed, there could not be a compensation, as it

must be returned in kind, by esteem and grateful affection.

And now of myself. My ever wakeful reason, and the keenness of my moral

feelings, will secure you from all unpleasant circumstances connected with

me, save only one, viz., the evasion of a specific madness. You will

never _hear_ anything but truth from me:--prior habits render it out of my

power to tell an untruth, but unless carefully observed, I dare not

promise that I should not, with regard to this detested poison, be capable

of acting one. No sixty hours have yet passed without my having taken

laudanum, though for the last week [in] comparatively trifling doses. I

have full belief that your anxiety need not be extended beyond the first

week, and for the first week I shall not, I must not, be permitted to

leave your house, unless with you. Delicately or indelicately, this must

be done, and both the servants and the assistant must receive absolute

commands from you. The stimulus of conversation suspends the terror that

haunts my mind; but when I am alone, the horrors I have suffered from

laudanum, the degradation, the blighted utility, almost overwhelm me. If

(as I feel for the _first time_ a soothing confidence it will prove) I

should leave you restored to my moral and bodily health, it is not myself

only that will love and honour you; every friend I have (and thank God! in

spite of this wretched vice, I have many and warm ones, who were friends

of my youth and have never deserted me) will thank you with reverence. I

have taken no notice of your kind apologies. If I could not be comfortable

in your house, and with your family, I should deserve to be miserable. If

you could make it convenient I should wish to be with you by Monday

evening, as it would prevent the necessity of taking fresh lodgings in

town.

With respectful compliments to Mrs. Gillman and her sister, I remain, dear

sir, your much obliged

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CCIX. TO DANIEL STUART.

James Gillman’s, Esq., Surgeon, Highgate,

Wednesday, May 8, 1816.

MY DEAR STUART,--Since you left me I have been reflecting a good deal on

the subject of the Catholic Question, and somewhat on the “Courier” in

general. With all my weight of faults (and no one is less likely to

underrate them than myself) a tendency to be influenced by selfish motives

in my friendships, or even in the cultivation of my acquaintances, will

not, I am sure, be _by you_ placed among them. When we first knew each

other, it was perhaps the most interesting period of both our lives, at

the very turn of the flood; and I can never cease to reflect with

affectionate delight on the steadiness and independence of your conduct

and principles; and how, for so many years, with little assistance from

others, and with one main guide, a sympathising tact for the real sense,

feeling, and impulses of the _respectable_ part of the English nation, you

went on so auspiciously, and likewise so _effectively_. It is far, very

far, from being a hyperbole to affirm, that you did more against the

French scheme of Continental domination, than the Duke of Wellington has

done; or rather Wellington could neither have been supplied by the

Ministers, nor the Ministers supported by the Nation, but for the tone

first given, and then constantly kept up, by the plain, unministerial,

anti-opposition, anti-jacobin, anti-gallican, anti-Napoleonic spirit of

your writings, aided by the colloquial style, and evident good sense, in

which as acting on an immense mass of knowledge of existing men and

existing circumstances, you are superior to any man I ever met with in my

lifetime. Indeed you are the only human being of whom I can say, with

severe truth, that I never conversed with you for an hour, without

rememberable instruction. And with the same simplicity I dare affirm my

belief, that my greater knowledge of _man_ has been useful to you; though

from the nature of things, not so useful, as your knowledge of _men_ has

been to me. Now with such convictions, my dear Stuart, how is it possible

that I can look back on the conduct of the “Courier,” from the period of

the Duke of York’s restoration, without some pain? You cannot be seriously

offended or affronted with me, if in this deep confidence, and in a letter

which, or its contents, can meet no eye but your own, I venture to declare

that, though since then much has been done, very much of high utility to

the country by and under Mr. Street, yet the “Courier” itself has

gradually lost that sanctifying spirit which was the life of its life, and

without which even the best and soundest principles lose half their effect

on the human mind. I mean, the _faith_ in the _faith_ of the person or

paper which brings them forward. They are attributed to the _accident_ of

their happening to be _for_ such a side or such a party. In short there is

no longer any _root_ in the paper, out of which all the various branches

and fruits and even fluttering leaves are seen or believed to grow. But it

is the old tree barked round above the root, though the circular

decortication is so small, and so neatly filled up and coloured as to be

scarcely visible but in its total effects. Excellent fruits still at times

hang on the boughs, but they are tied on by threads and hairs.

In all this I am well aware that you are no otherwise to blame, than in

permitting what, without disturbance to your health and tranquillity, you

could not perhaps have prevented, or effectively modified. But the whole

plan of Street’s seems to me to have been motiveless from the beginning,

or at least affected by the grossest miscalculations in respect even of

pecuniary interest. For had the paper maintained and asserted not only its

independence but its _appearance_ of it, it is true that Mr. Street might

not have had Mr. Croker to dine with him, or received as many nods or

shakes of the hand from Lord this, or that, but it is at least equally

true, that the Ministry would have been far more effectually served, and

that (I speak _now_ from facts) both paper and its conductor would have

been held by the adherents of Ministers in far higher respect. And after

all, Ministers do not _love_ newspapers in their hearts; not even those

that support them. Indeed it seems epidemic among Parliament men in

general, to affect to look down upon and to despise newspapers to which

they owe 999/1000 their influence and character--and at least three fifths

of their knowledge and phraseology. Enough! Burn this letter and forgive

the writer for the purity and affectionateness of his motive.

With regard to the Catholic Question, if I write I must be allowed to

express the truth and the whole truth concerning the imprudent avowal of

Lord Castlereagh that it was not to be a _government question_. On this

condition I will write immediately a tract on the question which to the

best of my knowledge will be about from 120 to 140 octavo pages; but so

contrived that Mr. Street may find no difficulty in dividing it into ten

or twenty essays, or leading paragraphs. In my scheme I have carefully

excluded every approximation to metaphysical reasoning; and set aside

every thought which cannot be brought under one or the other of three

heads--1. Plain evident sense. 2. Historical documental facts. 3. Existing

circumstances, character, etc., of Ireland in relation to Great Britain,

and to its own interests, and those of its various classes of proprietors.

I shall not deliver it till it is wholly finished, and if you and Mr.

Street think that such a work delivered entire will be worth fifty pounds

to the paper, I will begin it immediately. Let me either see or hear from

you as soon as possible. Cannot Mr. Street send me some one or other of

the daily papers, without expense to you, after he has done with them?

Kind respects to Mrs. Stuart.

Your affectionate and obliged friend,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CCX. TO THE SAME.

Monday, May 13, 1816.

DEAR STUART,--It is among the feeblenesses of our nature, that we are

often, to a certain degree, acted on by stories, gravely asserted, of

which we yet do most religiously disbelieve every syllable, nay, which

perhaps we know to be false. The truth is that images and thoughts possess

a power in, and of themselves, independent of that act of the judgment or

understanding by which we affirm or deny the existence of a reality

correspondent to them. Such is the ordinary state of the mind in dreams.

It is not strictly accurate to say that we believe our dreams to be actual

while we are dreaming. We neither believe it, nor disbelieve it. With the

will the comparing power is suspended, and without the comparing power,

any act of judgment, whether affirmation or denial, is impossible. The

forms and thoughts act merely by their own inherent power, and the strong

feelings at times apparently connected with them are, in point of fact,

bodily sensations which are the causes or occasions of the images; not (as

when we are awake) the effects of them. Add to this a voluntary lending of

the will to this suspension of one of its own operations (that is, that of

comparison and consequent decision concerning the reality of any sensuous

impression) and you have the true theory of stage illusion, equally

distant from the absurd notion of the French critics, who ground their

principles on the presumption of an absolute _de_lusion, and of Dr.

Johnson who would persuade us that our judgments are as broad awake during

the most masterly representation of the deepest scenes of Othello, as a

philosopher would be during the exhibition of a magic lanthorn with Punch

and Joan and Pull Devil, Pull Baker, etc., on its painted slides. Now as

extremes always meet, this dogma of our dramatic critic and soporific

irenist would lead, by inevitable consequences, to that very doctrine of

the unities maintained by the French Belle Lettrists, which it was the

object of his strangely overrated, contradictory, and most illogical

preface to Shakespeare to overthrow.

Thus, instead of troubling you with the idle assertions that have been

most authoritatively uttered, concerning your being under bond and seal to

the present Ministry, which I know to be (monosyllabically speaking) A

LIE, and which formed, I guess, part of the impulse which occasioned my

last letter, I have given you a theory which, as far as I know, is new,

and which I am quite sure is most important as the ground and fundamental

principle of all philosophic and of all common-sense criticisms concerning

the drama and the theatre.

To put off, however, the Jack-the-Giant-Killer-seven-leagued boots, with

which I am apt to run away from the main purpose of what I had to write, I

owe it to myself and the truth to observe, that there was as much at least

of partiality as of grief and inculpation in my remarks on the spirit of

the “Courier;” and that with all its faults, I prefer it greatly to any

other paper, even without reference to its being the best and most

effective vehicle of what I deem most necessary and urgent truths. Be

assured there was no occasion to let me know, that with regard to the

proposed disquisition you were interested as a patriot and a protestant,

not as a proprietor of the particular paper. Such too, Heaven knows, is my

sole object! for as to the money that it may be thought worth according to

the number and value of the essays, I regard it merely as enabling me to

devote a given portion of time and effort to this subject, rather than to

any one of the many others by which I might procure the same remuneration.

From this hour I sit down to it tooth and nail, and shall not turn to the

left or right till I have finished it. When I have reached the half-way

house I will transmit the MSS. to you, that I may, without the necessity

of dis- or re-arranging the work, be able to adopt any suggestions of

yours, whether they should be additive, alterative, or emendative. One

question only I have to consult you concerning--viz., the _form_ which

would be the most attractive of notice; simply essays? or letters

addressed to Lord Liverpool for instance, on the supposition that he

remains firm to the Perceval principle on this blind, blundering, and

feverous scheme?

Mr. and Mrs. Gillman will be most happy to see you to share in a family

dinner, and spend the evening with us; and if you will come early, I can

show you some most delicious walks. You will like Mr. Gillman. He is a man

of strong, fervid, and agile intellect, with such a master passion for

truth, that his most abstracted verities assume a character of veracity.

And his wife, it will be impossible not to respect, if a balance and

harmony of powers and qualities, unified and spiritualized by a native

feminine fineness of character, render womanhood amiable and respectable.

In serious truth I have much reason to be most grateful for the choice and

chance which has placed me under their hospitable roof. I have no doubt

that Mr. Gillman as friend and as physician will succeed in restoring me

to my natural self.

My kind respects to Mrs. Stuart. I long to see the little one.

Your obliged and sincere friend,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CCXI. TO JOHN MURRAY.

HIGHGATE, February 27, 1817.

MY DEAR SIR,--I had a visit from Mr. Morgan yester-afternoon, and trouble

you with these lines in consequence of his communications. When I stated

to you the circumstances respecting the volumes of mine that have been so

long printed, and the embarrassment into which the blunder of the printer

had entangled me, with the sinking down of my health that made it so

perplexing for me to remedy it, I did it under the belief that you were

yourself very little disposed to the publication of the “Zapolya”[139] as

a separate work--unless it had, in some shape or other, been brought out

at the Theatre. Of this I seemed to have less and less chance. What had

been declared an indispensable part, and of all the play, the most

theatrical as well as dramatic, by Lord Byron, was ridiculed and thrown

out of all question by Mr. Douglas Kinnaird, with no other explanation

vouchsafed but that Lord Byron knew nothing about the matter--and, besides

that, was in the habit of overrating my performances. These were not the

words, but these words contain the purport of what he said. Meantime what

Mr. D. Kinnaird most warmly approved, Mr. Harris had previously declared

would convulse a house with laughter, and damn the piece beyond any

possibility of a further hearing. Still I was disposed in my distressed

circumstances of means, health, and spirits, to have tried the plan

suggested by Mr. D. Kinnaird of turning the “Zapolya” into a melodrama by

the omission of the first act. But Mr. K. was, with Lord Byron, dropped

from the sub-committee, and I knew no one to whom I could apply. Mr.

Dibdin, who had promised to befriend me, was likewise removed from the

stage-managership. Mr. Rae did indeed promise to give me a few hours of

his time repeatedly, and from my former acquaintance with him, as the

Ordonio of the “Remorse,” I had some reason to be wounded by his neglect.

Indeed, at Drury Lane, no one knows to whom any effective application is

to be made. Mr. Kinnaird had engaged to look over the “Zapolya” with me,

and appointed the time. I went accordingly and passed the whole of the

fore-dinner day with him--in what? In hearing an opera of his own, and

returned as wise as I came. Much is talked of the advantages of a

managership of noblemen, but as far as I have seen and experienced, an

author has no cause to congratulate himself on the change, either in the

taste, courtesy, or reliability of his judges. Desponding concerning this

(and finding that every publication with my name would be persecuted by

pre-determination by the one guiding party, that I had no support to

expect from the other, and that the thicker and closer the cloud of

misfortunes gathered round me, the more actively and remorselessly were

the poisoned arrows of wanton enmity shot through it), I sincerely

believed that it would be neither to your advantage or mine that the

“Zapolya” should be published singly. It appeared, at that time, that the

annexing to it a collection of all my poems would enable the work to be

brought out without delay,--and I therefore applied to you, offering

either to repay the money received for it, or to work it out by furnishing

you with miscellaneous matter for the “Quarterly,” or by sitting down to

the “Rabbinical Tales”[140] as soon as ever the works now in the press

were put out of my hand, that is, as far as the copy was concerned. Your

answer impressed me with your full assent to the plan. Nay, however

mortifying it might in ordinary circumstances have been to an author’s

vanity, it was not so to me, that the “Zapolya” was a work of which you

had no objection to be rid. But, if I misunderstood you, let me now be

better informed, and whatever you wish shall be done. I have never

knowingly or intentionally been guilty of a dishonourable transaction, but

have in all things that respect my neighbour been more sinned against than

sinning. Much less would I hazard the appearance of an equivocal conduct

at present when I feel that I am sinking into the grave, with fainter and

fainter hopes of achieving that which, God knows my inmost heart! is the

sole motive for the wish to live--namely, that of preparing for the press

the results of twenty-five years hard study and almost constant

meditation. Reputation has no charm for me, except as a preventive of

starving. Abuse and ridicule are all which I could expect for myself, if

the six volumes were published which would comprise the sum total of my

convictions; but, most thoroughly satisfied both of their truth and of the

vital importance of these truths, convinced that of all systems that have

ever been prescribed, this has the least of _mysticism_, the very object

throughout from the first page to the last being to reconcile the dictates

of common sense with the conclusions of scientific reasoning--it would

assuredly be like a sudden gleam of sunshine falling on the face of a

dying man, if I left the world with a knowledge that the work would have a

chance of being read in better times. But of all men in the way of

business, my dear sir! I should be most reluctant to give you any just

cause of reproaching my integrity; because I know and feel, and have at

all times and to all persons who had any literary concerns with me,

_acknowledged_ that you have acted with a friendly kindness towards

me,--and if Mr. Gifford have taken a prejudice against me or my writings,

I never imputed it as blame to you. Let me then know what you wish me to

do, and I will do it. I ought to add, that in yielding to the proposal of

annexing the “Zapolya” to the volume of poetry, provided I could procure

your assent, I expressly stipulated that if, in any shape or modification,

it should be represented on the stage, the copyright of it in that form

would be reserved for your refusal or acceptance, and, in like manner the

“Christabel” when completed, and the “Rabbinical Tales.” The second “Lay

Sermon” (a most unfortunate name) will appear, I trust, next week.

I remain, my dear sir, with respect and regard, your obliged

S. T. COLERIDGE.

P. S. I have not seen either the “Edinburgh”[141] or the “Quarterly” last

Reviews. The article against me in the former was, I am assured, written

by Hazlitt. Now what can I think of Mr. Jeffrey, who knows nothing

personally of me but my hospitable attentions to him, and from whom I

heard nothing but very high seasoned compliments, and who yet can avail

himself of _such_ an instrument of his most unprovoked malignity towards

me, an inoffensive man in distress and sickness? As soon as I have read

the article (and the loan of the book is promised me), I shall make up my

mind whether or not to address a letter, publicly to Mr. Jeffrey, or, in

the form of an appeal, to the public, concerning his proved predetermined

malice.

MR. MURRAY, Bookseller, Albemarle Street, Piccadilly.

CCXII. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

[May, 1817.]

DEAR SOUTHEY,--Mr. Ludwig Tieck[142] has continued to express so anxious a

wish to see you, as one man of genius sees another, that he will not lose

even the slight chance of possibility that you may not have quitted Paris

when he arrives there. I have only therefore (should this letter be

delivered to you by Mr. Tieck) to tell you--first, that Mr. Tieck is the

gentleman who was so kind to me at Rome; secondly, that he is a _good_

man, emphatically, without taint of moral or religious infidelity;

thirdly, that as a poet, critic, and moralist, he stands (in

_reputation_) next to Goethe (and I believe that this reputation will be

_fame_); lastly, it will interest you with Bristol, Keswick, and Grasmere

associations, that Mr. Tieck has had to run, and has run, as nearly the

same career in Germany as yourself and Wordsworth and (by the spray of

being known to be intimate with you)

Yours sincerely,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

P. S. Should this meet you, _for God’s sake_, do let me know of your

arrival in London; it is so very important that I should see you.

R. SOUTHEY, Esq.

Honoured by Mr. LUDWIG TIECK.

CCXIII. to H. C. Robinson.[143]

June, 1817.

MY DEAR ROBINSON,--I shall never forgive you if you do not try to make

some arrangement to bring Mr. L. Tieck and yourself up to Highgate very

soon. The day, the dinner-hour, you may appoint yourself; but what I most

wish would be, either that Mr. Tieck would come in the first stage, so as

either to walk or to be driven in Mr. Gillman’s gig to Caen Wood, and its

delicious groves and alleys (the finest in England, a grand cathedral

aisle of _giant_ lime-trees, Pope’s favourite composition walk when with

the old Earl, a brother-rogue of yours in the law line), or else to come

up to dinner, sleep here, and return (if then return he must) in the

afternoon four o’clock stage the day after. I should be most happy to make

him and that admirable man, Mr. Frere,[144] acquainted--their pursuits

have been so similar--and to convince Mr. Tieck that he is _the_ man among

us in whom taste at its maximum has vitalized itself into productive

power. [For] genius, you need only show him the incomparable translation

annexed to Southey’s “Cid” (which, by the bye, would perhaps give Mr.

Tieck the most favourable impression of Southey’s own powers); and I would

finish the work off by Mr. Frere’s “Aristophanes.” In _such_ GOODNESS,

too, as both _my_ Mr. Frere (the Right Hon. J. H. Frere), and his brother

George (the lawyer in Brunswick Square), live, move, and have their being,

there is _genius_.

I have read two pages of “Lalla Rookh,” or whatever it is called. Merciful

Heaven! I dare read no more, that I may be able to answer at once to any

questions, “I have but just looked at the work.” O Robinson! if I could,

or if I dared, act and feel as Moore and his set do, what havoc could I

not make amongst their crockery-ware! Why, there are not three lines

together without some adulteration of common English, and the

ever-recurring blunder of using the possessive case, “_compassion’s_

tears,” etc., for the preposition “of”--a blunder of which I have found no

instances earlier than Dryden’s slovenly verses written for the trade. The

rule is, that the case _’s_ is always _personal_; either it marks a

person, or a personification, or the relique of some proverbial

personification, as “Who for their belly’s sake,” in “Lycidas.” But for A

to weep the tears of B puts me in mind of the exquisite passage in

Rabelais where Pantagruel gives the page his cup, and begs him to go down

into the courtyard, and curse and swear for him about half an hour or so.

God bless you!

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CCXIV. TO THOMAS POOLE.

[July 22, 1817.]

MY DEAR POOLE,--It was a great comfort to me to meet and part from you as

I did at Mr. Purkis’s:[145] for, methinks, every true friendship that does

not go with us to heaven, must needs be an obstacle to our own going

thither,--to one of the parties, at all events.

I entreat your acceptance of a corrected copy of my “Sibylline Leaves” and

“Literary Life;” and so wildly have they been printed, that a corrected

copy is of some value to those to whom the works themselves are of any. I

would that the misprinting had been the worst of the delusions and

ill-usage, to which my credulity exposed me, from the said printer. After

repeated promises that he took the printing, etc., merely to serve me as

an old schoolfellow, and that he should charge “one sixpence profit,” he

charged paper, which I myself ordered for him at the paper-mill, at

twenty-five to twenty-six shillings per ream, at thirty-five shillings,

and, exclusive of this, his bill was £80 beyond the sum assigned by two

eminent London printers as the price at which they would be willing to

print the same quantity. And yet even this is among the minima of his

Bristol honesty.

Fenner,[146] or rather his religious factotum, the Rev. T. Curtis,

ci-devant bookseller, and whose affected retirement from business is a

humbug, having got out of me a scheme for an Encyclopædia, which is the

admiration of all the Trade, flatter themselves that they can carry it on

by themselves. They refused to realise their promise to advance me £300 on

the pledge of my works (a proposal of their own) unless I would leave

Highgate and live at Camberwell. I took the advice of such friends as I

had the opportunity of consulting immediately, and after taking into

consideration the engagement into which I had entered, it was their

unanimous opinion that their breach of their promise was a very fortunate

circumstance, that it could not have been kept without the entire

sacrifice of all my powers, and, above all, of my health--in short, that I

could not in all human probability survive the first year. Mr. Frere

yesterday advised me strenuously to finish the “Christabel,” to keep the

third volume of “The Friend” within a certain fathom of metaphysical

depth, but within that to make it as elevated as the subjects required,

and finally to devote myself industriously to the Works I had planned,

alternating a poem with a prose volume, and, unterrified by reviews on the

immediate sale, to remain confident that I should in some way or other be

enabled to live in comfort, above all, not to write any more in any

newspaper. He told me both Mr. Canning and Lord Liverpool had spoken in

very high terms of me, and advised me to send a copy of all my works with

a letter of some weight and length to the Marquis of Wellesley. He

offered me all his interest with regard to Derwent,[147] if he was sent to

Cambridge. “It is a point” (these were his words) “on which I should feel

myself authorised not merely to ask but to require and importune.”

Hartley has been with me for the last month. He is very much improved;

and, if I could see him more systematic in his studies and in the

employment of his time, I should have little to complain of in him or to

wish for. He is very desirous to visit the place of his infancy, poor

fellow! And I am very desirous, if it were practicable, that he should be

in the neighbourhood, as it were, of his uncles, so that there might be a

probability of one or the other inviting him to spend a few weeks of his

vacation at Ottery. His cousins[148] (the sons of my brothers James and

George) are very good and affectionate to him; and it is a great comfort

to me to see the chasm of the first generation closing and healing up in

the second. From the state of your sister-in-law’s health, when I last saw

you, and the probable results of it, I cannot tell how your household is

situated. Otherwise, I should venture to entreat of you, that you would

give poor Hartley an invitation to pass a fortnight or three weeks with

you this vacation.[149]

The object of the third volume of my “Friend,” which will be wholly fresh

matter, is briefly this,--that morality without religion is as senseless a

scheme as religion without morality; that religion not revealed is a

contradiction in terms, and an historical nonentity; that religion is not

revealed unless the sacred books containing it are interpreted in the

obvious and literal sense of the word, and that, thus interpreted, the

doctrines of the Bible are in strict harmony with the Liturgy and Articles

of our Established Church.

May God Almighty bless you, my dear Friend! and your obliged and

affectionately grateful

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CCXV. TO H. F. CARY.[150]

LITTLE HAMPTON, October [29], 1817.

I regret, dear sir! that a slave to the worst of tyrants (outward tyrants,

at least), the booksellers, I have not been able to read more than two

books and passages here and there of the other, of your translation of

Dante. You will not suspect me of the worthlessness of exceeding my real

opinion, but like a good Christian will make even modesty give way to

charity, though I say, that in the severity and _learned simplicity_ of

the diction, and in the peculiar character of the Blank Verse, it has

transcended what I should have thought possible without the Terza Rima.

In itself, the metre is, compared with any English poem of one quarter the

length, the most varied and harmonious to my ear of any since Milton, and

yet the effect is so Dantesque that to those who should compare it only

with other English poems, it would, I doubt not, have the same effect as

the Terza Rima has compared with other Italian metres. I would that my

literary influence were enough to secure the knowledge of the work for the

true lovers of poetry in general.[151] But how came it that you had it

published in so _too_ unostentatious a form? For a second or third

edition, the form has its conveniences; but for the first, in the present

state of English society, _quod non arrogas tibi, non habes_. If you have

any other works, poems, or poemata, by you, printed or MSS., you would

gratify me by sending them to me. In the mean time, accept in the spirit

in which it is offered, this trifling testimonial of my respect from, dear

sir,

Yours truly,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CCXVI. TO THE SAME.

LITTLE HAMPTON, SUSSEX, November 6, 1817.

MY DEAR SIR,--I thank you for your kind and valued present, and equally

for the kind letter that accompanied it. What I expressed concerning your

translation, I did not say lightly or without examination: and I know

enough of myself to be confident that any feeling of personal partiality

would rather lead me to doubts and dissatisfactions respecting a

particular work in proportion as it might possibly occasion me to overrate

the man. For example, if, indeed, I do estimate too highly what I deem

the characteristic excellencies of Wordsworth’s poems, it results from a

congeniality of taste without a congeniality in the productive power; but

to the faults and defects I have been far more alive than his detractors,

even from the first publication of the “Lyrical Ballads,” though for a

long course of years my opinions were sacred to his own ear. Since my

last, I have read over your translation, and have carefully compared it

with my distinctest recollections of every specimen of blank verse I am

familiar with that can be called epic, narrative, or descriptive,

excluding only the dramatic, declamatory, and lyrical--with Cowper,

Armstrong, Southey, Wordsworth, Landor (the author of “Gebir”), and with

all of my own that fell within comparisons as above defined, especially

the passage from 287 to 292, “Sibylline Leaves,”[152]--and I find no other

alteration in my judgement but an additional confidence in it. I still

affirm that, to my ear and to my judgement, both your metre and your

rhythm have in a far greater degree than I know any instance of, the

variety of Milton without any mere Miltonisms, that (wherein I in the

passage referred to have chiefly failed) the verse has this variety

without any loss of _continuity_, and that this is the _excellence_ of the

work considered as a translation of Dante--that it gives the reader a

similar feeling of wandering and wandering, onward and onward. Of the

diction, I can only say that it is Dantesque even in that in which the

Florentine must be preferred to our English giant--namely, that it is not

only pure _language_, but pure _English_. The language differs from that

of a mother or a well-bred lady who had read little but her Bible, and a

few good books, only as far as the thoughts and things to be expressed

require learned words from a learned poet! Perhaps I may be thought to

appreciate this merit too highly; but you have seen what I have said in

defence of this in the “Literary Life.” By the bye, there is no

_Publisher’s_ name mentioned in the title-page. Should I place any number

of copies for you with Gale and Curtis, or at Murray’s?

Believe me, that it will be both a pleasure and a relief to my mind should

you bring with you any MSS. that you can yourself make it so as to read

them to me.

Mrs. Gillman hopes, that, if choice or chance should lead you and yours

near Highgate, you will not deprive us of the opportunity of introducing

you to my excellent friend Mr. Gillman, and of shewing by our gladness how

much we are, my dear sir, yours and Mrs. Cary’s sincere respecters, and I

beg you will accept an expression of particular esteem from your old

lecturer,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

P. S. I return the “Prometheus” and the “Persæ” with thanks. I hope the

Cambridge Professor will go through the remaining plays of Æschylus. They

_are_ delightful editions.

CCXVII. TO J. H. GREEN.[153]

HIGHGATE, Friday morning, November 14, 1817.

DEAR SIR,--I arrived at Highgate from Little Hampton yester-night: and the

most interesting tidings I heard, were of your return and of your great

kindness ... I can only say that I will call in Lincoln’s Inn Fields the

first day I am able to come to town--but should your occupation suffer you

to take me in any of your rides for exercise or relaxation, need I say

with what gladness I should welcome you? Our dinner-hour is four: but

alterable without inconvenience to earlier or later. As soon as I have

finished my present slave-work I shall write at large to Mr. Tieck. Be

pleased to present my respectful regards to Mrs. Green, and believe me,

dear sir, with marked esteem,

Your obliged

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CCXVIII. TO THE SAME.

[December 13, 1817.]

MY DEAR SIR,--I thank you for the transcript. The lecture[154] went off

beyond my expectations; and in several parts, where the thoughts were the

same, more happily expressed extempore than in the Essay on the Science

of Method[155] for the “Encyclopædia Metropolitana.” However, you shall

receive the first correct copy of the latter that I can procure. I would

that I could present it to _you_, as it was written; though I am not

inclined to quarrel with the judgment and prudence of omission, as far as

the public are concerned. Be assured, I shall not fail to avail myself of

your kind invitation, and that time passes happily with me under your

roof, receiving and returning. Be pleased to make my best respects to Mrs.

Green, and I beg her acceptance of the “Hebrew Dirge” with my free

translation,[156] of which I will, as soon as it is printed, send her the

music, viz. the original melody, and Bishop’s additional music. Of this I

am convinced, that a dozen of such “very _pretty_,” and “so _sweet_,” and

“how smooth,” “well, that is charming” compositions would gain me more

admiration with the English public than twice the number of poems twice as

good as the “Ancient Mariner,” the “Christabel,” the “Destiny of Nations,”

or the “Ode to the Departing Year.”

My own opinion of the German philosophers does not greatly differ from

yours; much in several of them is unintelligible to me, and more

unsatisfactory. But I make a division. I reject Kant’s _stoic_ principle,

as false, unnatural, and even immoral, where in his “Kritik der

praktischen Vernunft,”[157] he treats the affections as indifferent

(ἀδιάφορα) in ethics, and would persuade us that a man who disliking, and

without any feeling of love for virtue, yet acted virtuously, because and

only because his _duty_, is more worthy of our esteem, than the man whose

_affections_ were aidant to and congruous with his conscience. For it

would imply little less than that things not the objects of the moral will

or under its control were yet indispensable to its due practical

direction. In other words, it would subvert his own system. Likewise, his

remarks on prayer in his “Religion innerhalb der reinen Vernunft,” are

crass, nay vulgar and as superficial even in psychology as they are low in

taste. But with these exceptions, I reverence Immanuel Kant with my whole

heart and soul, and believe him to be the only philosopher, for _all men_

who have the power of thinking. I cannot conceive the liberal pursuit or

profession, in which the service derived from a patient study of his works

would not be incalculably great, both as cathartic, tonic, and directly

nutritious.

Fichte in his moral system is but a caricature of Kant’s, or rather, he is

a Zeno, with the cowl, rope, and sackcloth of a Carthusian monk. His

metaphysics have gone by; but he hath merit of having prepared the ground

for, and laid the first stone of, the _dynamic_ philosophy by the

substitution of Act for Thing, _Der einführen Actionen statt der Dinge an

sich_. Of the _Natur-philosophen_, as far as physical dynamics are

concerned and as opposed to the mechanic corpuscular system, I think very

highly of _some_ parts of their system, as being _sound_ and

_scientific_--metaphysics of Quality, not less evident to _my_ reason than

the metaphysics of Quantity, that is, Geometry, etc.; of the rest and

larger part, as tentative, experimental, and highly useful to a chemist,

zoologist, and physiologist, as unfettering the mind, exciting its

inventive powers. But I must be understood as confining these

observations to the works of Schelling and H. Steffens. Of Schelling’s

Theology and Theanthroposophy, the telescopic stars and nebulæ are too

many for my “_grasp of eye_.” (N. B. The _catachresis_ is _Dryden’s, not

mine_.) In short, I am half inclined to believe that both he and his

friend Francis Baader are but half in earnest, and paint the veil to hide

not the _face_ but the want of one.[158] Schelling is too ambitious, too

eager to be the Grand Seignior of the _allein-selig Philosophie_ to be

altogether a trustworthy philosopher. But he is a man of great genius;

and, however unsatisfied with his conclusions, one cannot read him without

being either _whetted_ or improved. Of the others, saving Jacobi, who is a

rhapsodist, excellent in sentences all in _small capitals_, I know either

nothing, or too little to form a judgement. As my opinions were formed

before I was acquainted with the schools of Fichte and Schelling, so do

they remain independent of them, though I con- and pro-fess great

obligations to them in the development of my thoughts, and yet seem to

feel that I should have been more _useful_ had I been left to evolve them

myself without knowledge of their coincidence. I do not _very much_ like

the Sternbald[159] of our friend; it is too like an imitation of Heinse’s

“Ardinghello,”[160] and if the scene in the Painter’s Garden at Rome is

less licentious than the correspondent abomination in the former work, it

is likewise duller.

I have but merely looked into Jean Paul’s “Vorschule der Aisthetik,”[161]

but I found one sentence almost word for word the same as one written by

myself in a fragment of an Essay on the Supernatural[162] many years ago,

viz. that the _presence_ of a ghost is the terror, not what he _does_, a

principle which Southey, too, overlooks in his “Thalaba” and “Kehama.”

But I must conclude. Believe me, dear sir, with unfeigned regard and

esteem, your obliged

S. T. COLERIDGE.

I expect my eldest son, Hartley Coleridge, to-day from Oxford.

CCXIX. TO CHARLES AUGUSTUS TULK.[163]

HIGHGATE, Thursday evening, 1818.

DEAR SIR,--As an innocent female often blushes not at any image which had

risen in her own mind, but from a confused apprehension of some _x y z_

that might be attributed to her by others, so did I feel uncomfortable at

the odd coincidence of my commending to you the late Swedenborgian

advertisement. But when I came home I simply asked Mrs. G. if she

remembered my having read to her such an address. She instantly replied

not only in the affirmative, but mentioned the circumstance of my having

expressed a sort of half-inclination, half-intention of addressing a

letter to the chairman mentioning my receipt of a book of which I highly

approved, and requesting him to transmit my acknowledgments, if, as was

probable, the author was known to him or any of the gentlemen with him. I

asked her then if she had herself read the advertisement? “Yes, and I

carried it to Mr. Gillman, saying how much you had been pleased with the

style and the freedom from the sectarian spirit.” “And do you recollect

the name of the Chairman?” “No! why, bless me! could it be Mr. Tulk?” Very

nearly the same conversation took place with Mr. Gillman afterwards. I can

readily account for the fact in myself; for first I never recollect any

persons by their names, and have fallen into some laughable perplexities

by this specific catalepsy of memory, such as accepting an invitation in

the streets from a face perfectly familiar to me, and being afterwards

unable to attach the name and habitat thereto; and secondly, that the

impression made by a conversation that appeared to me altogether

accidental and by your voice and person had been completed before I heard

your name; and lastly, the more habitual thinking is to any one, the

larger share has the relation of cause and effect in producing

recognition. But it is strange that neither Mrs. or Mr. Gillman should

have recollected the name, though probably the accidentality of having

made your acquaintance, and its being at Little Hampton, and associated

with our having at the same time and by a similar accidental rencontre

become acquainted with the Rev. Mr. Cary and his family, overlaid any

former relique of a man’s name in Mrs. G. as well as myself.

I return you Blake’s poesies,[164] metrical and graphic, with thanks.

With this and the book, I have sent a rude scrawl as to the order in which

I was pleased by the several poems.

With respectful compliments to Mrs. Tulk, I remain, dear sir, your obliged

S. T. COLERIDGE.

Thursday evening, Highgate.

BLAKE’S POEMS.--I begin with my dyspathies that I may forget them, and

have uninterrupted space for loves and sympathies. Title-page and the

following emblem contain all the faults of the drawings with as few

beauties as could be in the compositions of a man who was capable of such

faults and such beauties. The faulty despotism in symbols amounting in the

title-page to the μισητὸν, and occasionally, irregular unmodified lines of

the inanimate, sometimes as the effect of rigidity and sometimes of

exossation like a wet tendon. So likewise the ambiguity of the drapery. Is

it a garment or the body incised and scored out? The lumpness (the effect

of vinegar on an egg) in the upper one of the two prostrate figures in the

title-page, and the straight line down the waistcoat of pinky goldbeaters’

skin in the next drawing, with the I don’t-know-whatness of the

countenance, as if the mouth had been formed by the habit of placing the

tongue not contemptuously, but stupidly, between the lower gums and the

lower jaw--these are the only _repulsive_ faults I have noticed. The

figure, however, of the second leaf, abstracted from the _expression_ of

the countenance given it by something about the mouth, and the interspace

from the lower lip to the chin, is such as only a master learned in his

art could produce.

_N. B._ I signifies “It gave me great pleasure.” Ɨ, “Still greater.” ƗƗ,

“And greater still,” Θ, “In the highest degree.” O, “In the lowest.”

Shepherd, I; Spring, I (last stanza, Ɨ); Holy Thursday, ƗƗ; Laughing Song,

Ɨ; Nurse’s Song, I; The Divine Image, Θ; The Lamb, Ɨ; The little black

Boy, Θ yea Θ+Θ; Infant Joy, ƗƗ (N. B. For the three last lines I should

write, “When wilt thou smile,” or “O smile, O smile! I’ll sing the while.”

For a babe two days old does not, cannot smile, and innocence and the very

truth of Nature must go together. Infancy is too holy a thing to be

ornamented). “The Echoing Green,” I, (the figures Ɨ, and of the second

leaf, ƗƗ); “The Cradle Song,” I; “The School Boy,” ƗƗ; Night, Θ; “On

another’s Sorrow,” I; “A Dream,” ?; “The little boy lost,” I (the drawing,

Ɨ); “The little boy found,” I; “The Blossom,” O; “The Chimney Sweeper,” O;

“The Voice of the Ancient Bard,” O.

Introduction, Ɨ; Earth’s Answer, Ɨ; Infant Sorrow, I; “The Clod and the

Pebble,” I; “The Garden of Love,” Ɨ; “The Fly,” I; “The Tyger,” Ɨ; “A

little boy lost,” Ɨ; “Holy Thursday,” I; [p. 13, O; “Nurse’s Song,” O?];

“The little girl lost and found” (the ornaments most exquisite! the poem,

I); “Chimney Sweeper in the Snow,” O; “To Tirzah, and the Poison Tree,”

I--and yet O; “A little Girl lost,” O. (I would have had it omitted, not

for the want of innocence in the poem, but from the too probable want of

it in many readers.) “London,” I; “The Sick Rose,” I; “The little

Vagabond,” =O=. Though I cannot approve altogether of this last poem, and

have been inclined to think that the error which is most likely to beset

the scholars of Emanuel Swedenborg is that of utterly demerging the

tremendous incompatibilities with an evil will that arise out of the

essential Holiness of the abysmal A-seity[165] in the love of the Eternal

_Person_, and thus giving temptation to weak minds to sink this love

itself into _Good Nature_, yet still I disapprove the mood of mind in this

wild poem so much less than I do the servile blind-worm, wrap-rascal

scurf-coat of _fear_ of the _modern_ Saint (whose whole being is a lie, to

themselves as well as to their brethren), that I should laugh with good

conscience in watching a Saint of the new stamp, one of the first stars of

our eleemosynary advertisements, groaning in wind-pipe! and with the

whites of his eyes upraised at the _audacity_ of this poem! Anything

rather than this degradation =I= of Humanity, and therein of the Incarnate

Divinity!

S. T. C.

=O= means that I am perplexed and have no opinion.

=I=, with which how can we utter “Our Father”?

CCXX. TO J. H. GREEN.

Spring Garden Coffee House, [May 2, 1818.]

MY DEAR SIR,--Having been detained here till the present hour, and under

requisition for Monday morning early, I have decided on not returning to

Highgate in the interim. I propose, therefore, to have the pleasure of

passing the fore-dinner hours, from eleven o’clock to-morrow morning, with

you in Lincoln’s Inn Square, unless I should hear from you to the

contrary.

The Cotton-children Bill[166] (an odd irony to children _bred up in

cotton_!) which has passed the House of Commons, would not, I suspect,

have been discussed at all in the House of Lords, but have been quietly

assented to, had it not afforded that _Scotch_ coxcomb, the plebeian Earl

of Lauderdale,[167] too tempting an occasion for displaying his muddy

three inch depths in the gutter (? Guttur) of his Political Economy.

Whether some half-score of rich capitalists are to be prevented from

suborning suicide and perpetuating infanticide and soul-murder is,

forsooth, the most perplexing question which has ever called forth his

_determining_ faculties, accustomed as they are _well known_ to have been,

to grappling with difficulties. In short, he wants to make a speech almost

as much as I do to have a release signed by conscience from the duty of

making or anticipating answers to such speeches.

O when the heart is deaf and blind, how blear

The lynx’s eye! how dull the mould-warp’s ear!

Verily the _World_ is mighty! and for all but the few the orb of Truth

labours under eclipse from the shadow of the world!

With kind respects to Mrs. Green, believe me, my dear sir, with sincere

and affectionate esteem,

Yours,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CCXXI. TO MRS. GILLMAN.

J. Green’s, Esq., St. Lawrence, nr. Maldon,

Wednesday, July 19, 1818.

MY VERY DEAR SISTER AND FRIEND,--The distance from the post and the

extraordinary thinness of population in this district (especially of men

and women of letters) which affords only two days in the seven for sending

to or receiving from Maldon, are the sole causes of your not hearing

oftener from me. The cross roads from Margretting Street to the very house

are excellent, and through the first gate we drove up between two large

gardens, that on the right a flower and fruit garden not without

kitchenery, and that on the left, a kitchen garden not without fruits and

flowers, and both in a perfect _blaze_ of roses. Yet so capricious is our,

at least my, nature, that I feel I do not receive the fifth part of the

delight from this miscellany of Flora, flowers at every step, as from the

economized glasses and flower-pots at Highgate so tended and worshipped by

me, and each the gift of some kind friend or courteous neighbour. I

actually make up a flower-pot every night, in order to imitate my Highgate

pleasures. The country road is very beautiful. About a quarter of a mile

from the garden, all the way through beautiful fields in blossom, we come

to a wood, full of birds and not uncharmed by the nightingales, and which

the old workman, to please his mistress, has _romanticised_ with, I dare

say, fifty seats and honeysuckle bowers and green arches made by twisting

the branches of the trees across the paths. The view from the hilly field

above the wood commanding the arm of the sea, and ending in the open sea,

reminded me very much of the prospects from Stowey and Alfoxden, in

Somersetshire. The cottagers seem to be and are in possession of plenty of

comfort. Poverty I have seen no marks of, nor of the least servility,

though they are courteous and respectful. We have _abundance of cream_.

The Farm must, I should think, be a valuable estate; and the parents are

anxious to leave it as complete as possible for Joseph, their only child

(for it is Mrs. J. Green’s sisters that we have seen--G. himself has no

sister). There is no society hereabouts. I like it the better there_fore_.

The clergyman, a young man, is lost in a gloomy vulgar Calvinism, will

read no book but the Bible, converse on nothing but the state of the soul,

or rather he will not converse at all, but visit each house once in two

months, when he prays and admonishes, and gives a lecture every evening at

his own rooms. On being invited to dine with us, the sad and modest youth

returned for answer, that if Mr. Green and I should be here when he

visited the house, he should have no objection to enter into the state of

our souls with us, and if in the mean time we desired any _instruction_

from him, we might attend at his daily evening lecture! Election,

Reprobation, Children of the Devil, and all such flowers of rhetoric, and

flour of brimstone, form his discourses both in church and parlour. But my

folly in not filling the snuff canister is a subject of far more serious

and awful regret with me, than the not being in the way of being thus led

by the nose of this Pseudo-Evangelist. Nothing but Scotch; and that five

miles off. O Anne! it was cruel in you not to have calculated the

monstrous disproportion between the huge necessities of my nostrils, or

rather of my thumb and forefinger, and that vile little vial three fourths

empty of snuff! The flat of my thumb, yea, the nail of my forefinger is

not only clean; it is white! white as the pale flag of famine![168]

Now for my health.... Ludicrous as it may seem, yet it is no joke for me,

that from the marshiness of these sea marshes, and the number of

unnecessary fish ponds and other stagnancies immediately around the house,

the gnats are a very plague of Egypt, and suspicious, with good reason, of

an erysipelatous tendency, I am anxious concerning the effects of the

irritation produced by these canorous visitants. While awake (and two

thirds of last night I was kept awake by their bites and trumpetings) I

can so far command myself as to check the intolerable itching by a weak

mixture of goulard and rosewater; but in my sleep I scratch myself as if

old Scratch had lent me his best set of claws. This is the only drawback

from my comforts here, for nothing can be kinder or more cordial than my

treatment. I _like_ Mrs. J. Green better and better; but feel that in

twenty years it would never be above or beyond _liking_. She is

good-natured, lively, innocent, but without a _soothingness_, or something

I do not know what that is tender. As to my return, I do not think it will

be possible, without great unkindness, to be with you before Tuesday

evening or Wednesday, calculating _wholly_ by the progress of the

manuscript; and we have been hard at it. Do not take it as words, of

course, when I say and solemnly assure you, that if I followed my own

_wishes_, I should leave this place on Saturday morning: for I feel more

and more that I can be well off nowhere away from you and Gillman. May God

bless him! For a dear friend he is and has been to be. Remember me

affectionately to the Milnes and Betsy, if they are at Highgate. Love to

James. Kisses for the Fish of Five Waters,[169] none of which are

stagnant, and I hope that Mary, Dinah, and Lucy are well, and that Mary is

quite recovered. Again and again and again, God bless you, my most dear

friends; for I am, and ever trust to remain, more than can be expressed,

my dear Anne! your affectionate, obliged, and grateful

S. T. COLERIDGE.

P. S. _Not_ to put Essex after Maldon.

CCXXII. TO W. COLLINS, ESQ., A. R. A.

HIGHGATE, December, 1818.

MY DEAR SIR,--I at once comply with, and thank you for, your request to

have some prospectuses. God knows I have so few friends, that it would be

unpardonable in me not to feel proportionably grateful towards those few

who think the time not wasted in which they interest themselves in my

behalf. There is an old Latin adage, _Vis videri pauper, et pauper es_!

Poor you profess yourself to be, and poor therefore you are, and will

remain. The prosperous feel only with the prosperous, and if you subtract

from the whole sum of their feeling for all the gratifications of vanity,

and all their calculations of _lending to the Lord_, both of which are

best answered by confessing the superfluity of their superfluities on

advertised and advertisable distress, or on such cases as are known to be

in all respects their inferior, you will have, I fear, but a scanty

remainder. All this is too true; but then, what is that man to do whom no

distress can bribe to swindle or deceive? who cannot reply as Theophilus

Cibber did to his father, Colley Cibber, who, seeing him in a rich suit of

clothes whispered to him as he passed, “The! The! I pity thee!” “Pity me!

pity my tailor!”

Spite of the decided approbation which my plan of delivering lectures has

received from several judicious and highly respectable individuals, it is

still too histrionic, too much like a retail dealer in instruction and

pastime, not to be depressing. If the duty of living were not far more

awful to my conscience than life itself is agreeable to my feelings, I

should sink under it. But, getting nothing by my publications, which I

have not the power of making estimable by the public without loss of

self-estimation, what can I do? The few who have won the present age,

while they have secured the praise of posterity, as Sir Walter Scott, Mr.

Southey, Lord Byron, etc., have been in happier circumstances. And

lecturing is the only means by which I can enable myself to go on at all

with the great philosophical work to which the best and most genial hours

of the last twenty years of my life have been devoted. Poetry is out of

the question. The attempt would only hurry me into that sphere of acute

feelings from which abstruse research, the mother of self-oblivion,

presents an asylum. Yet sometimes, spite of myself, I cannot help bursting

out into the affecting exclamation of our Spenser (his “wine” and “ivy

garland” interpreted as competence and joyous circumstances):--

“Thou kenn’st not, Percy, how the rhyme should cage!

Oh, if my temples were bedewed with wine,

And girt with garlands of wild ivy-twine,

How I could rear the Muse on stately stage!

And teach her tread aloft in buskin fine,

With queen’d Bellona in her equipage!

But ah, my courage cools ere it be warm!”[170]

But God’s will be done. To feel the full force of the Christian religion

it is, perhaps, necessary for many tempers that they should first be made

to feel, experimentally, the hollowness of human friendship, the

presumptuous emptiness of human hopes. I find more substantial comfort now

in pious George Herbert’s “Temple,” which I used to read to amuse myself

with his quaintness, in short, only to laugh at, than in all the poetry

since the poems of Milton. If you have not read Herbert, I can recommend

the book to you confidently. The poem entitled “The Flower” is especially

affecting; and, to me, such a phrase as “and relish versing” expresses a

sincerity, a reality, which I would unwillingly exchange for the more

dignified “and once more love the Muse,” etc. And so, with many other of

Herbert’s homely phrases.

We are all anxious to hear from, and of, our excellent transatlantic

friend.[171] I need not repeat that your company, with or without our

friend Leslie,[172] will gratify

Your sincere

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CCXXIII. TO THOMAS ALLSOP.

The origin of Coleridge’s friendship with Thomas Allsop, a young city

merchant, dates from the first lecture which he delivered at Flower de

Luce Court, January 27, 1818. A letter from Allsop containing a “judicious

suggestion” with regard to the subject advertised, “The Dark Ages of

Europe,” was handed to the lecturer, who could not avail himself of the

hint on this occasion, but promised to do so before the close of the

series. Personal intercourse does not seem to have taken place till a year

later, but from 1819 to 1826 Coleridge and Allsop were close and intimate

friends. In 1825 the correspondence seems to have dropped, but I am not

aware that then or afterwards there was any breach of friendship. In 1836

Allsop published the letters which he had received from Coleridge. Partly

on account of the personal allusions which some of the letters contain,

and partly because it would seem that Coleridge expressed himself to his

young disciple with some freedom on matters of religious opinion, the

publication of these letters was regarded by Coleridge’s friends as an act

of _mala fides_. Allsop was kindness itself to Coleridge, but, no doubt,

the allusions to friends and children, which were of a painful and private

nature, ought, during their lifetime at least, to have been omitted. The

originals of many of these letters were presented by the Allsop family to

the late Emperor of Brazil, an enthusiastic student and admirer of

Coleridge.[173]

December 2, 1818.

MY DEAR SIR,--I cannot express how kind I felt your letter. Would to

Heaven I had had many with feelings like yours, “accustomed to express

themselves warmly and (as far as the word is applicable to you, even)

enthusiastically.” But, alas! during the prime manhood of my intellect I

had nothing but cold water thrown on my efforts. I speak not now of my

systematic and most unprovoked maligners. On _them_ I have retorted only

by pity and by prayer. These may have, and doubtless _have_, joined with

the frivolity of “the reading public” in checking and almost in preventing

the sale of my works; and so far have done injury to my _purse_. _Me_ they

have not injured. But I have loved with enthusiastic self-oblivion those

who have been so well pleased that I should, year after year, flow with a

hundred nameless rills into _their_ main stream, that they could find

nothing but cold praise and effective discouragement of every attempt of

mine to roll onward in a distinct current of my own; who _admitted_ that

the “Ancient Mariner,” the “Christabel,” the “Remorse,” and some pages of

“The Friend” were not without merit, but were abundantly anxious to

acquit their judgements of any blindness to the very numerous defects. Yet

they _knew_ that to _praise_, as mere praise, I was characteristically,

almost constitutionally, indifferent. In sympathy alone I found at once

nourishment and stimulus; and for sympathy _alone_ did my heart crave.

They knew, too, how long and faithfully I had acted on the maxim, never to

admit the _faults_ of a work of genius to those who denied or were

incapable of feeling and understanding the _beauties_; not from wilful

partiality, but as well knowing that in _saying_ truth I should, to such

critics, convey falsehood. If, in one instance, in my literary life, I

have appeared to deviate from this rule, first, it was not till the fame

of the writer (which I had been for fourteen years successively toiling

like a second Ali to build up) had been established; and, secondly and

chiefly, with the purpose and, I may safely add, with the _effect_ of

rescuing the necessary task from malignant defamers, and in order to set

forth the excellences and the trifling proportion which the defects bore

to the excellences. But this, my dear sir, is a mistake to which

affectionate natures are liable, though I do not remember to have ever

seen it noticed, the mistaking those who are desirous and well-pleased to

be loved _by_ you, for those who love you. Add, as a mere general cause,

the fact that I neither am nor ever have been of any party. What wonder,

then, if I am left to decide which has been my worse enemy,--the broad,

predetermined abuse of the “Edinburgh Review,” etc., or the cold and brief

compliments, with the warm _regrets_ of the “Quarterly”? After all,

however, I have now but one sorrow relative to the ill success of my

literary toils (and toils they have been, _though not undelightful

toils_), and this arises wholly from the almost insurmountable

difficulties which the anxieties of to-day oppose to my completion of the

great work, the form and materials of which it has been the employment of

the best and most genial hours of the last twenty years to mature and

collect.

If I could but have a tolerably numerous audience to my first, or first

and second Lectures on the History of Philosophy,[174] I should entertain

a strong hope of success, because I know that these lectures will be found

by far the most interesting and _entertaining_ of any that I have yet

delivered, independent of the more permanent interests of rememberable

instruction. Few and unimportant would the errors of men be, if they did

but know, first, _what they themselves meant_; and, secondly, what the

_words_ mean by which they attempt to convey their meaning; and I can

conceive no subject so well fitted to exemplify the mode and the

importance of these two points as the History of Philosophy, treated as in

the scheme of these lectures. Trusting that I shall shortly have the

pleasure of seeing you here,

I remain, my dear sir, yours most sincerely,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CCXXIV. TO J. H. GREEN.

[Postmark, January 16, 1819.]

MY DEAR GREEN,--I forgot both at the Lecture Room and at Mr. Phillips’s to

beg you to leave out for me Goethe’s “Zur Farbenlehre.” It is for a

passage in the preface in which he compares Plato with Aristotle, etc., as

far as I recollect, in a spirited manner. The books are at your service

again, after the lecture. Either Mr. Cary or some messenger will call for

them to-morrow! I piously resolve on Tuesday to put my books in some

order, but at all events to select yours and send all of them that I do

not want (and I do not recollect any that I do, unless perhaps the little

volume edited by Tieck of his friend’s composition), back to you. I am

more and more delighted with Chantrey. The little of his conversation

which I enjoyed _ex pede Herculem_, left me no doubt of the power of his

insight. Light, manlihood, simplicity, wholeness. These are the

_entelechy_ of Phidian Genius; and who but must see these in Chantrey’s

solar face, and in all his manners? Item: I am bewitched with your wife’s

portrait. So _very_ like and yet so ideal a portrait I never remember to

have seen. But as Mr. Phillips[175] said: “Why, sir! she was a sweet

subject, sir! That’s a _great_ thing.”

As to my own, I can form no judgment. In its present state, the eyes

appear too large, too globose, and their colour must be made lighter, and

I thought that the face, exclusive of the forehead, was stronger, more

energetic than mine seems to be when I catch it in the glass, and

therefore the forehead and brow less so--not in themselves, but in

consequence of the proportion. But of course I can form no notion of what

my face and look may be when I am animated in friendly conversation. My

kind and respectful remembrances to your Mother, and believe me, most

affectionately,

Your obliged friend,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CCXXV. TO JAMES GILLMAN.

[Ramsgate, Postmark, August 20, 1819.]

MY DEAR FRIEND,--Whether from the mere intensity of the heat, and the

restless, almost sleepless, nights in consequence, or from incautious

exposure to draughts; or whether simply the change of air and the sea bath

was repairing the intestinal canal (and bad indeed must the road be which

is not better than a _road a-mending_, a _hint which our revolutionary

reformers_ would do well to attend to) or from whatever cause, I have been

miserably unwell for the last three days--but last night passed a

tolerably good night, and, finding myself convalescent this morning, I

bathed, and now am still better, having had a glorious tumble in the

waves, though the water is still not cold enough for my liking. The

weather, however, is evidently on the change, and we have now a succession

of flying April showers, and needle rains. My bath is about a mile and a

quarter from the Lime Grove, a wearisome travail by the deep crumbly

sands, but a very pleasant breezy walk along the top of the cliff, from

which you descend through a deep steep lane cut through the chalk rocks.

The tide comes up to the end of the lane, and washes the cliff, but a

little before or a little after high-tide there are nice clean seats of

rock with foot-baths, and then an expanse of sand, greater than I need;

and exactly a hundred of my strides from the end of the lane there is a

good, roomy, arched cavern, with an oven or cupboard in it, where one’s

clothes may be put free from the sand.... I find that I can write no more

if I am to send this by the to-day’s post. Pray, _if_ you can with _any

sort_ of propriety, do come down to me--to us, I suppose I ought to say.

We are all as should be Βυτ μονστρουσλι φορμαλ....

God bless you and

S. T. C.

CCXXVI. TO MRS. ADERS. [?][176]

[HIGHGATE, October 28, 1819.]

DEAR MADAM,--I wish from my very heart that you could teach me to express

my obligations to you with half the grace and delicacy with which you

confer them! But not to the Giver does the evening cloud indicate the rich

lights, which it has received and transmits and yet retains. For _other_

eyes it must glow: and what it cannot _return_ it will strive to

_represent_, the poor proxy of the gracious orb which is departing. I

would that the simile were less accurate throughout, and with those of

Homer’s lost its likeness as it approached to its conclusion! This, I

fear, is somewhat too selfish; but we cannot have attachment without fear

or grief.

“We cannot choose--

But weep to have what we so dread to lose,”

says Nature’s child, our best Shakespeare; and that Humanity cannot grieve

without a portion of selfishness, Nature herself says. To take up my

allegoric strain with a slight variation, even in the fairest shews and

liveliest demonstrations of grateful and affectionate leave-taking from a

generous friend or disinterested patron or benefactor, we are like

evening rainbows, that at once shine and weep, things made up of reflected

splendour and our own tears.[177]

To meet, to know, t’ esteem--and then to part,

Forms the sad tale of many a genial heart.[178]

The storm[179] now louring and muttering in our political atmosphere might

of itself almost forbid me to regret your leaving England. For I have no

apprehension of any serious or extensive danger to property or to the

_coercive_ powers of the Law. Both reason and history preclude the fear of

any _revolution_, where none of the constituent _states_ of a nation are

arrayed against the others. The risk is still less in Great Britain where

property is so widely diffused and so closely interlinked and

co-organized. But I dare not promise as much for _personal_ safety. The

struggle may be short, the event certain; yet the mischief in the interim

_appalling_!

May my Fears,

My filial fears, be vain! and may the vaunts

And menace of the vengeful enemy

Pass like the gust, that roared and died away

In the distant tree: which heard, and only heard

In this low dell, bow’d not the delicate grass.[180]

I confess that I read the poem from which these lines are extracted

(“Fears in Solitude”) and now cite them with far other than an _author’s_

feelings; those, I _trust_, of a patriot, I am _sure_, those of a

Christian.

You will not, I know, fail to assure Miss Harding[181] of the kind

feelings and wishes with which I accompany her; but my sense of the last

boon, which I owe to her, I shall convey, my dear madam! by hands less

likely to make extenuating comments on my words than _your_ tongue or

hand. Before I subscribe my name, I must tell you that had my wish been

the chooser and had taken a month to deliberate on the choice, I could not

have received a keepsake so in all respects gratifying to me, as the

_exquisite_ impressions of cameo’s and intaglio’s.[182] First, it enables

me to entertain and gratify so many friends, my own and Mr. and Mrs.

Gillman’s; secondly, every little gem is associated with my recollections,

or more or less recalls the images and persons seen and met with during my

own stay in the Mediterranean and Italy; thirdly, they stand in the same

connection with the places of _your_ past and future sojourn, and

therefore, lastly, supply me with the means and the occasion of expressing

to others more strongly, perhaps, but not more warmly or sincerely than I

now do to yourself, with how much respect and regard I remain, dear madam,

Your obliged friend and servant,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

Saturday, 28th Octr. 1819. On the 20th of this month completed my 49th

year.

CCXXVII. TO J. H. GREEN.

January 14, 1820.

MY DEAR GREEN,--Charles Lamb has just written to inform me that he and his

sister will pay me their _New Year’s_ visit on Sunday next, and may

perhaps bring a friend to see _me_, though certainly not to dine, and

hopes I may not be engaged. I must therefore defer our _philosophical_

intercommune till the Sunday after; but if you have no more pleasant way

of passing the ante-prandial or, still better, the day including prandial

and post-prandial, I trust that it will be no anti-philosophical

expenditure of time, and I need not say an addition to the pleasure of all

this household. I should like, too, to arrange some plan of going with you

to Covent Garden Theatre, to see Miss Wensley, the new actress, whose

father (a merchant of Bristol, at whose house I had once been, but whom

the capricious Nymph of Trade has unhorsed from his seat) has called on

me, a compound of the Oratorical, the Histrionic, and the Exquisite! All

the dull colours in the colour-shop at the sign of the Bluecoat Boy would

not suffice to neutralize the glare of his _Colorit_ into any tolerably

fair likeness that would not be scouted as Caricature! Gillman will give

you a slight sketch of him. Since I saw you, we have dined and spent the

night (for it was near one when we broke up) at Mathews’, and heard and

saw his forthcoming “At Home.” There were present, besides G. and myself,

Mrs. and young Mathews, and Mr. and Mrs. Chisholm, James Smith of Rej.

Add. notoriety, and the author of (all the trash of) Mathews’

Entertainment, for the good parts are his own, (What a pity that you dare

not offer a word of friendly sensible advice to such men as M., but you

may be certain that it will be useless to them and attributed to envy or

some vile selfish object in the adviser!) Mr. Dubois,[183] the author

of “Vaurien,” “Old Nic,” “My Pocket Book,” and a notable share of the

theatrical puffs and slanders of the periodical press; and, lastly, Mr.

Thomas Hill,[184] quondam drysalter of Thames Street, whom I remember

twenty-five years ago with exactly the same look, person, and manners as

now. Mathews calls him the Immutable. He is a seemingly always

good-natured fellow who knows nothing and about everything, no person, and

about and all about everybody--a complete parasite, in the old sense of a

dinner-hunter, at the tables of all who entertain public men, authors,

players, fiddlers, booksellers, etc., for more than thirty years. It was a

pleasant evening, however.

[Illustration]

Be so good as to remember the drawing from the Alchemy Book.

Mrs. Gillman desires her love to Mrs. Green; and we hope that the twin

obstacles, ague and the boreal weather, to our seeing her here, will

vanish at the same time. Mrs. G. bids me tell her that she grumbles at the

doctors, her husband included, and is confident that _her_ husband would

have made a cure long ago. A faithful wife is a common blessing, I trust:

but what a treasure to have a wife _full_ of _faith_! By the bye, I have

lit on some (ὡς ἔμοιγε δοκεῖ _analogous_) cases in which the nauseating

plan, even for a short time, appears to have had a wonderful effect in

breaking the chain of a morbid tendency; and the almost infallible

specific of seasickness in curing an old ague is surely a confirmation as

far as it goes.

Yours most affectionately,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CCXXVIII. TO THE SAME.

[May 25, 1820.]

MY DEAR GREEN,--I was greatly affected in finding how ill you had been,

and long ere this should have let you know it, but that I have myself been

in no usual degree unwell. I wish I could with truth underline the words

_have been_, and in the hope of being able to do so it was that I delayed

answering your note. Unless a speedy change for the better takes place, I

should culpably deceive myself if I did not interpret my present state as

a _summons_. God’s will be done! I cannot pretend that I have not received

countless warnings; and for my neglect and for the habits, and all the

feebleness and wastings of the moral will which unfit the soul for

spiritual ascent, and must sink it, of moral necessity, lower and lower,

if it be essentially imperishable, my only ray of hope is this, that in my

inmost heart, as far as my consciousness can sound its depths, I plead

nothing but my utter and sinful helplessness and worthlessness on one

side, and the infinite mercy and divine Humanity of our Creator and

Redeemer crucified from the beginning of the world, on the other! I use no

comparatives, nor indeed could I ever charitably interpret the penitential

phrases (“I am the vilest of sinners, worse than the wickedest of my

fellow-men,” etc.) otherwise than as figures of speech, the whole purport

of which is, “In relation to God I appear to myself the same as the very

worst man, if such there be, would appear to an earthly tribunal.” I mean

no comparatives; for what have a man’s permanent concerns to do with

comparison? What avails it to a bird shattered and irremediably

disorganized in one wing, that another bird is similarly conditioned in

both wings? Or to a man in the last stage of ulcerated lungs, that his

neighbour is liver-rotten as well as consumptive? Both find their

equation, the birds as to flight, the men as to life. In o o o’s there is

no comparison.

My nephew, the Revd. W. Hart Coleridge, came and stayed here from Monday

afternoon to Tuesday noon, in order to make Derwent’s acquaintance, and

brought with him by accident Marsh’s Divinity Lecture, No 3rd, on the

authenticity and credibility of the Books collected in the New Testament.

As I could not sit with the party after tea, I took the pamphlet with me

into my bedroom, and gave it an attentive perusal, knowing the Bishop’s

intimate acquaintance with the investigations of Eichhorn, Paulus, and

their numerous scarcely less celebrated scholars, and myself familiar with

the works of the Göttingen Professor (Eichhorn), the founder and head of

the daring school. I saw or seemed to see more _management_ in the Lecture

than proof of thorough conviction. I supplied, however, from my own

reasonings enough of what appeared wanting or doubtful in the Bishop’s to

justify the conclusion that the Gospel _History_ beginning with the

Baptism of John, and the Doctrines contained in the fourth Gospel, and in

the Epistles, truly represent the assertions of the Apostles and the faith

of the Christian Church during the first century; that there exists no

tenable or even tolerable ground for doubting the _authenticity_ of the

Books ascribed to John the Evangelist, to Mark, to Luke, and to Paul; nor

the _authority_ of Matthew and the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews;

and lastly, that a man need only have common sense and a good heart to be

assured that these Apostles and Apostolic men wrote nothing but what they

themselves _believed_. And yet I have no hesitation in avowing that many

an argument derived from the nature of man, nay, that many a strong though

only _speculative_ probability, pierces deeper, pushes more home, and

clings more pressingly to my mind than the whole sum of merely _external_

evidence, the _fact_ of Christianity itself alone excepted. Nay, I feel

that the external evidence derives a great and lively accession of force,

for my mind, from my previous speculative convictions or presumptions; but

that I cannot find that the latter are at all strengthened or made more or

less probable to me by the former. Besides, as to the external evidence I

make up my mind _once for all_, and merely _as_ evidence think no more

about it; but those facts or reflections thereon which tend to change

belief into insight, can never lose their effect, any more than the

distinctive _sensations_ of disease, compared with a more _perceived_

correspondence of symptoms with the diagnostics of a medical book.

I was led to this remark by reflecting on the awful importance of the

physiological question (so generally decided one way by the late most

popular writers on insanity), Does the efficient cause of disease and

disordered action, and, collectively, of pain and perishing, lie entirely

in the organs, and then, reawakening the active principle in me,

depart--that all pain and disease would be removed, and I should stand in

the same state as I stood in previous to all sickness, etc., to the

admission of any disturbing forces into my nature? Or, on the contrary,

would such a repaired Organismus be no fit organ for my life, as if, for

instance, a _worn_ lock with an equally worn key--[the key] might no

longer fit the lock. The repaired organs might from intimate

in-correspondence be the causes of torture and madness. A system of

materialism, in which organisation stands first, whether compared by

Nature, or God and Life, etc., as its _results_ (even as the sound is the

result of a bell), such a system would, doubtless, remove great part of

the terrors which the soul makes out of itself; but then it removes the

soul too, or rather precludes it. And a supposition of coexistence,

without any _wechselwirkung_, it is not in our power to adopt in good

earnest; or, if we did, it would answer no purpose. For which of the two,

soul or body, am I to call “I”? Again, a soul separate from the body, and

yet _entirely passive_ to it, would be so like a drum playing a tattoo on

the drummer, that one cannot build any _hope_ on it. If then the

organisation be primarily the _result_, and only by reaction a _cause_, it

would be well to consider what the cases are in this life, in which the

restoration of the organisation removes disease. Is the organisation ever

restored, except as continually reproduced? And in the remaining number

are they not cases into which the soul never entered as a _conscious_ or

rather a moral _conscionable_ agent? The regular reproduction of scars,

marks, etc., the increased susceptibility of disease in an organ, after a

perfect apparent restoration to healthy structure in action; the

insusceptibility in other cases, as in the variolous--these and many

others are fruitful subjects, and even imperfect as the induction may be,

and must be in our present degree of knowledge, we might yet deduce that a

suicide, under the domination of disorderly passions and erroneous

principles, plays a desperately hazardous game, and that the chance is, he

may re-house himself in a worse hogshead, with the nails and spikes driven

inward--or, sinking below the organising power, be employed fruitlessly in

a horrid _appetite_ of re-skinning himself, after he had succeeded in

_fleaing_ his life and leaving all its sensibilities bare to the incursive

powers without even the cortex of a nerve to shield them? Would it not

follow, too, from these considerations, that a redemptive power must be

necessary if immortality be true, and man be a disordered being? And that

no power can be redemptive which does not at the same time act in the

ground of the life as one with the ground, that is, must act in my will

and not merely _on_ my will; and yet extrinsically, as an outward power,

that is, as that which _outward_ Nature is to the organisation, viz. the

_causa correspondens et conditio perpetua ab extra_? Under these views, I

cannot read the Sixth Chapter of St. John without great emotion. The

Redeemer cannot be _merely_ God, unless we adopt Pantheism, that is, deny

the existence of a God; and yet God he must be, for whatever is less than

God, may act _on_, but cannot act in, the will of another. Christ must

become man, but he cannot become _us_, except as far as we become _him_,

and this we cannot do but by _assimilation_; and assimilation is a _vital

real_ act, not a notional or merely intellective one. There are phenomena,

which are phenomena relatively to our present five senses, and these

Christ forbids us to understand as his meaning, and, collectively, they

are entitled the Flesh that perishes. But does it follow that there are no

other phenomena? or that these media of manifestation might not stand to a

spiritual world and to our enduring life in the same relation as our

visible mass of body stands to the world of the senses, and to the

sensations correspondent to, and excited by, the stimulants of that world.

Lastly, would not the sum of the latter phenomena (the spiritual) be

appropriately named, the Flesh and Blood of the divine Humanity? If faith

be a mere apperception, _eine blösse Wahrnehmung_, this, I grant, is

senseless. For it is evident, that the assimilation in question is to be

carried on by faith. But if faith be an energy, a positive act, and that

too an _act_ of intensest power, why should it necessarily differ _in toto

genere_ from any other _act_, _ex. gr._ from that of the animal life in

the stomach? It will be found easier to laugh or stare at the question

than to prove its irrationability. Enough for the present. I had been told

that Dr. Leach[185] was a Lawrencian, a materialist, and I know not what.

I met him at Mr. Abernethy’s, and with sincere delight I found him the

very contrary in every respect. Except yourself, I have never met so

enlarged or so bold a love of truth in an English physiologist. The few

minutes of conversation that I had the power of enjoying have left a

strong wish in my mind to see more of him.

Give my kind love to Mrs. Green. Mr. and Mrs. Gillman are anxious to see

you. I assure you they were very much affected by the account of your

health. Young Allsop behaves more like a dutiful and anxious son than an

acquaintance. He came up yester-night at ten o’clock, and left the house

at eight this morning, in order to urge me to go to some sea-bathing

place, if it was thought at all advisable.

Derwent goes on in every respect to my satisfaction and comfort.

Again and again, God bless you and your sincerely affectionate friend,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CCXXIX. TO CHARLES AUGUSTUS TULK.

February 12, 1821.

MY DEAR SIR,--“They say, Coleridge! that you are a Swedenborgian!” “Would

to God,” I replied fervently, “that _they_ were _anything_.” I was writing

a brief essay on the prospects of a country where it has become the _mind_

of the nation to appreciate the evil of public acts and measures by their

next consequences or immediate occasions, while the _principle_ violated,

or that _a_ principle is thereby violated, is either wholly dropped out of

the consideration, or is introduced but as a garnish or ornamental

commonplace in the peroration of a speech! The deep interest was present

to my thoughts of that distinction between the _Reason_, as the source of

principles, the true celestial influx and _porta Dei in hominem æternum_,

and the _Understanding_; with the clearness of the proof, by which this

distinction is evinced, viz. that vital or zoo-organic power, instinct,

and understanding fall all three under the same definition _in genere_,

and the very additions by which the definition is applied from the first

to the second, and from the second to the third, are themselves expressive

of degrees only, and in degree only deniable of the preceding. (_Ex. gr._

1. Reflect on the _selective_ power exercised by the stomach of the

caterpillar on the undigested miscellany of food, and, 2, the same power

exercised by the caterpillar on the outward plants, and you will see the

order of the conceptions.) 1. Vital Power = the power by which _means are

adapted_ to proximate ends. 2. Instinct = the power _which adapts_ means

to proximate ends. 3. Understanding = the power which adapts means to

proximate ends according _to varying circumstances_. May I not safely

challenge any man to peruse Huber’s “Treatise on Ants,” and yet deny their

claim to be included in the last definition. But try to apply the same

definition, with any extension of degree, to the reason, the absurdity

will flash upon the conviction. First, in reason there is and can be no

_degree_. _Deus introit aut non introit._ Secondly, in reason there are no

_means_ nor ends, reason itself being one with the ultimate end, of which

it is _the_ manifestation. Thirdly, reason has no concern with _things_

(that is, the impermanent flux of particulars), but with the permanent

_Relations_; and is to be defined even in its lowest or theoretical

attribute, as the power which enables man to draw _necessary_ and

_universal_ conclusions from particular facts or forms, _ex. gr._ from any

three-cornered thing, that the two sides of a triangle are and must be

greater than the third. From the understanding to the reason, there is no

continuous _ascent_ possible; it is a metabasis εἰς ἄλλο γένος even as

from the air to the light. The true essential peculiarity of the human

understanding consists in its capability of being irradiated by the

reason, in its recipiency; and even this is _given_ to it by the presence

of a higher power than itself. What then must be the fate of a nation that

substitutes Locke for logic, and Paley for morality, and one or the other

for polity and theology, according to the predominance of Whig or Tory

predilection. Slavery, or a commotion is at hand! But if the gentry and

_clerisy_ (including all the learned and educated) do this, then the

nation does it, _or_ a commotion is at hand. _Acephalum_ enim, aurâ

quamvis et calore vitali potiatur, morientem rectius dicimus, quam quod

vivit. With these thoughts was I occupied when I received your very kind

and most acceptable present, and the results I must defer to the next

post. With best regards to Mrs. Tulk,

Believe me, in the brief interval, your obliged and grateful

S. T. COLERIDGE.

C. A. TULK, Esq., M. P., Regency Park.

CHAPTER XIV

THE PHILOSOPHER AND DIVINE

1822-1832

CHAPTER XIV

THE PHILOSOPHER AND DIVINE

1822-1832

CCXXX. TO JOHN MURRAY.

HIGHGATE, January 18, 1822.

DEAR SIR,--If not with the works, you are doubtless familiar with the name

of that “wonderful man” (for such, says Doddridge, I must deliberately

call him), Archbishop Leighton. It would not be easy to point out another

name, which the eminent of all parties, Catholic and Protestant, Episcopal

and Presbyterian, Whigs and Tories, have been so unanimous in extolling.

“There is a spirit in Archbishop Leighton I never met with in any human

writings; nor can I read many lines in them without impressions which I

could wish always to retain,” observes a dignitary of our Establishment

and F. R. S. eminent in his day both as a philosopher and a divine. In

fact, it would make no small addition to the size of the volume, if, as

was the fashion in editing the classics, we should collect the eulogies on

his writings passed by bishops only and church divines, from Burnet to

Porteus. That this confluence of favourable opinions is not without good

cause, my own experience convinces me. For at a time when I had read but a

small portion of the Archbishop’s principal work, when I was altogether

ignorant of its celebrity, much more of the peculiar character attributed

to his writings (that of making and leaving a deep impression on readers

of all classes), I remember saying to Mr. Southey[186] “that in the

Apostolic Epistles I heard the last hour of Inspiration striking, and in

Arch. Leighton’s commentary the lingering _vibration_ of the sound.”

Perspicuous, I had almost said transparent, his style is _elegant_ by the

mere compulsion of the thoughts and feelings, and in despite, as it were,

of the writer’s wish to the contrary. Profound as his conceptions often

are, and numerous as the passages are, where the most _athletic_ thinker

will find himself tracing a rich vein from the surface downward, and leave

off with an unknown depth for to-morrow’s delving--yet there is this

quality peculiar to Leighton, unless we add Shakespeare--that there is

always a scum on the very surface which the simplest may understand, if

they have head and heart to understand anything. The same or nearly the

same excellence characterizes his eloquence. Leighton had by nature a

quick and pregnant fancy, and the august objects of his habitual

contemplation, and their remoteness from the outward senses, his constant

endeavour to see or to bring all things under some point of unity, but,

above all, the rare and vital union of head and heart, of light and love,

in his own character,--all these working conjointly could not fail to form

and nourish in him the higher power, and more akin to reason, the power, I

mean, of imagination. And yet in his freest and most figurative passages

there is a _subdued_ness, a self-checking timidity in his colouring, a

sobering silver-grey tone over all; and an experienced eye may easily see

where and in how many instances Leighton has substituted neutral tints for

a strong light or a bold relief--by this sacrifice, however, of particular

effects, giving an increased permanence to the impression of the whole,

and wonderfully facilitating its soft and quiet _illapse_ into the very

recesses of our convictions. Leighton’s happiest ornaments of style are

made to appear as efforts on the part of the author to express himself

_less_ ornamentally, more plainly.

Since the late alarm respecting Church Calvinism and Calvinistic Methodism

(a cry of Fire! Fire! in consequence of a red glare on one or two of the

windows, from a bonfire of straw and stubble in the church-yard, while the

dry rot of virtual Socinianism is snugly at work in the beams and joists

of the venerable edifice) I have heard of certain gentle doubts and

questions as to the Archbishop’s _perfect_ orthodoxy--some small speck in

the diamond which had escaped the quick eye of all former theological

jewellers from Bishop Burnet to the outrageously anti-Methodistic

Warburton. But on what grounds I cannot even conjecture, unless it be,

that the Christianity which Leighton teaches contains the doctrines

peculiar to the Gospel as well as the truths common to it with the

(so-called) light of nature or natural religion, that he dissuades

students and the generality of Christians from all attempts at explaining

the mysteries of faith by _notional_ and metaphysical speculations, and

rather by a heavenly life and temper to obtain a closer view of these

truths, the _full_ light and knowledge of which it is in Heaven only that

we shall possess. He further advises them in speaking of these truths to

proper scripture language; but since something more than this had been

made necessary by the restless spirit of dispute, to take this “something

more” in the sound precise terms of the Liturgy and Articles of the

Established Church. Enthusiasm? Fanaticism? Had I to recommend an

antidote, I declare on my conscience that above all others it should be

Leighton. And as to Calvinism, L.’s exposition of the scriptural sense of

election ought to have prevented the very [suspicion of its presence]. You

will long ago, I fear, have [been asking yourself], To what does all this

tend? Briefly then, I feel strongly persuaded, perhaps because I strongly

wish it, that the Beauties of Archbishop Leighton, selected and

methodized, with a (better) Life of the Author, that is, a biographical

and critical introduction as Preface, and Notes, would make not only a

useful but an interesting POCKET VOLUME. “Beauties” in general are

objectionable works--injurious to the original author, as disorganizing

his productions, pulling to pieces the well-wrought _crown_ of his glory

to pick out the shining stones, and injurious to the reader, by indulging

the taste for unconnected, and for that reason unretained single thoughts,

till it fares with him as with the old gentleman at Edinburgh, who eat six

kittywakes by way of _whetting_ his appetite--“whereas” (said he) “it

proved quite the contrary: I never sat down to a dinner with so little.”

But Leighton’s principal work, that which fills two volumes and a half of

the four, being a commentary on St. Peter’s Epistles, verse by verse, and

varying, of course, in subject, etc., with almost every paragraph, the

volume, I propose, would not only bring together his finest passages, but

these being afterwards arranged on a principle wholly independent of the

accidental place of each in the original volumes, and guided by their

relative bearings, it would give a connection or at least a propriety of

_sequency_, that was before of necessity wanting. It may be worth

noticing, that the editions, both the one in three, and the other in four

volumes, are most grievously misprinted and otherwise disfigured. Should

you be disposed to think this worthy your attention, I would even send you

the proof _transcribed_, sheet by sheet, as it should be printed, though

doubtless by sacrificing one copy of Leighton’s works, it might be

effected by references to volume, page, and line, I having first carefully

corrected the copy. Or, should you think another more likely to execute

the plan better, or that another name would better promote its sale, I

should by no means resent the preference, nor feel any mortification for

which, the having occasioned the existence of such a work, tastefully

selected and judiciously arranged, would not be sufficient compensation

for,

Dear sir, your obliged

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CCXXXI. TO JAMES GILLMAN.

October 28, 1822.

DEAR FRIEND,--Words, I know, are not wanted between you and me. But there

are occasions so awful, there may be instances and manifestations so

affecting, and drawing up with them so long a train from behind, so many

folds of recollection, as they come onward on one’s mind, that it seems

but a mere act of justice to one’s self, a debt we owe to the dignity of

our moral nature, to give them some record--a relief, which the spirit of

man asks and demands to contemplate in some outward symbol of what it is

inwardly solemnizing. I am still too much under the cloud of past

misgivings;[187] too much of the stun and stupor from the recent peals and

thunder-crash still remains to permit me to anticipate other than by

wishes and prayers what the effect of your unweariable kindness may be on

poor Hartley’s mind and conduct. I pray fervently, and I feel a cheerful

trust that I do not pray in vain, that on my own mind and spring of action

it will be proved not to have been wasted. I do inwardly believe that I

shall yet do something to thank you, my dear Gillman, in the way in which

you would wish to be thanked, by doing myself honour.

Mrs. Gillman has been determined by your letter, and the heavenly weather,

and moral certainty of the continuance of _bathing_-weather at least, to

accept her sister’s offer of coming into Ramsgate and to take a house, for

a fortnight certain, at a guinea a week, in the buildings next to

Wellington Crescent, and having a certain modicum and segment of sea-peep.

You remember the house (the end one) with a balcony at the window, almost

in a line with the Duke of W. ... in wood, _lignum vitæ_, like as life. I

had thought of keeping my present bedroom at 10s. 6d. a week, but on

consulting Mrs. Rogers, she did not think that this would satisfy the

etiquette of the world, though the two houses are on different cliffs; and

I felt so confident of the effect of the bathing and Ramsgate transparent

water, the sands, the pier, etc., that as there was no alternative but of

giving up the bathing (for Mrs. G. would not stay by herself, partly, if

not chiefly, because she feared I might add more to your anxiety than your

comfort in your bachelor state and with only Bessy of Beccles) or having

Jane, I voted for the latter, and will do my very best to keep her in good

humour and good spirits.

Dear Friend, and Brother of my Soul, God only knows how truly and in the

depth you are loved and prized by your affectionate friend,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CCXXXII. TO MISS BRENT.[188]

July 7, 1823.

MY DEAR CHARLOTTE,--I have been many times in town within the last three

or four weeks; but with one exception, when I was driven in and back by

Mr. Gillman to hear the present idol of the world of fashion, the Revd.

Mr. Irving, the super-Ciceronian, ultra-Demosthenic pulpiteer of the

Scotch Chapel in Cross Street, Hatton Garden, I have been always at the

West End of the town, and mostly dancing attendance on a proud bookseller,

and I fear to little purpose--weary enough of my existence, God knows! and

yet not a tittle the more disposed to better it at the price of apostacy

or suppression of the truth. If I could but once get off the two works, on

which I rely for the proof that I have not lived in vain, and had those

off my mind, I could then maintain myself well enough by writing for the

purpose of what I got by it; but it is an anguish I cannot look in the

face, to abandon just as it is completed the work of such intense and

long-continued labour; and if I cannot make an agreement with Murray, I

must try Colbourn, and if with neither, owing to the loud calumny of the

“Edinburgh,” and the silent but more injurious detraction of the

“Quarterly Review,” I must try to get them published by subscription. But

of this when we meet. I write at present and to you as the less busy

sister, to beg you will be so good as to send me the volume of Southey’s

“Brazil,” which I am now in particular want of, by the Highgate Stage that

sets off just before Middle Row. “Mr. Coleridge, or J. Gillman, Esq.

(either will do), Highgate.”

My kind love to Mary. I have little doubt that I shall see you in the

course of next week.

Do you think of taking rooms out of the smoke during this summer for any

time?

God bless you, my dear Charlotte, and your affectionate

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CCXXXIII. TO THE REV. EDWARD COLERIDGE.[189]

HIGHGATE, July 23, 1823.

MY DEAR EDWARD,--From Carlisle to Keswick there are several routes

possible, and neither of these without some attraction. The choice,

however, lies between two; which to prefer, I find it hard to decide, and

if, as on the whole I am disposed to do, I advise the former, it is not

from thinking the other of inferior interest. On the contrary, if your

_laking_ were comprised between Carlisle and Keswick, I should not

hesitate to recommend the latter in preference, but because the first will

bring you soonest to Keswick, where Mr. Southey still is, having, as your

cousin Sara writes me, deferred his journey to town, on account of his

book on “The Church,” which has outgrown its intended dimensions; and

because the _sort_ of “scenery” (to use that slang word best confined to

the creeking Daubenies of the Theatre) on the latter route, is what you

will have abundant opportunities of seeing with the one leg of your

compass fixed at Keswick.

First then, you may go from Carlisle to Rose Castle, and spend an hour in

seeing that and its circumferency; and from thence to _Caldbeck_, its

waterfalls and faery caldrons, with the Pulpit and Clerk’s Desk Rocks,

over which the Cata-, or rather Kitten-ract, flings itself, and the cavern

to the right of the fall, as you front it; and from Caldbeck to the foot

of Bassenthwaite, when you are in the vale of Keswick and not many miles

from Greta Hall. The second route is from Carlisle to Penrith (a road of

little or no interest), but from Carlisle you would go to Lowther (Earl of

Lonsdale’s seat and magnificent grounds), the village of Lowther, Hawes

Water, and from Hawes Water you might pass over the mountains into

Ulleswater, and when there, you might go round the head of the lake (that

is, Patterdale), and, if on foot and strong enough and the weather is

fine, pass over Helvellyn, and so get into the high road between Grasmere

and Keswick, or, passing lower down on the lake, cross over by Graystock,

or with a guide or manual instructions, over the fells so as to come out

at or not far from Threlkeld, which is but three or four miles from

Keswick. At least in good weather there is, I believe, a tolerably

_equitible_ (that is, horse or pony-tolerating) track. But at Patterdale

you would receive the best direction. There is an inn at Patterdale where

you might sleep, so as to make one day of it from Penrith to the Lake

Head, _viâ_ Lowther and Hawes Water; and thence to Keswick would take good

part of a second. There is one consideration in favour of this plan, that

from Carlisle to Penrith, or even to Lowther, you might go by the coach,

and I question whether you could reach Greta Hall by the Caldbeck Route in

one day when at Keswick. When at Keswick, I would advise you to go to

Wastdale through Borrowdale, and if you could return by Crummock and

through the vale of Newlands, the inverted arch of which (on the ͜A͜B (A

B) of which I once saw the two legs of a rich rainbow so as to form with

the arch a perfect circle) _faces_ Greta Hall, you will have seen the very

pith and marrow of the Lakes, especially as your route to Chester or

Liverpool will take you that heavenly road through Thirlmere, Grasmere,

Rydal (where you will, of course, pay your respects to Mr. Wordsworth),

Ambleside, and the _striking_ half of Windermere.

God bless you! Pray take care of yourself, were it only that you know how

fearful and anxious your father and Fanny[190] are respecting your chest

and lungs, in case of cold or over-exertion.

I have heard from Sara and from Mr. Watson (a friend of mine who has just

come from the North) a very comfortable account of Hartley.

Believe me, dear Edward, with every kind wish, your affectionate uncle and

sincere friend,

[S. T. COLERIDGE.]

P. S. Your query respecting the poem I can only answer by a _Nescio_.

Irving (the Scotch preacher, so blackguarded in the “John Bull” of last

Sunday), certainly the greatest _orator_ I ever heard (N. B. I make and

mean the same distinction between oratory and eloquence as between the

mouth + the windpipe and the brain + heart), is, however, a man of great

simplicity, of overflowing affections, and enthusiastically in earnest;

and I have reason to believe, deeply regrets his conjunction of Southey

with Byron, as far as the _men_ (and not the poems) are in question.

CCXXXIV. TO J. H. GREEN.

GROVE, HIGHGATE, February 15, 1824.

I mentioned to you, I believe, Basil Montagu’s kind endeavour to have an

associateship of the Royal Society of Literature (a yearly £100 versus a

yearly essay) conferred on me. I knew nothing of the particulars till this

morning, or rather till within this hour, when I received a list of names

(electors) from Mr. Montagu, with advice to write to such and such and

such--while he, and he, and he had promised “_for us_”--in short, a

regular _canvass_, or rather sackcloth with the ashes on it pulled out of

the dust holes, moistened with cabbage-water, and other culinary

excretions of the same kidney. Of course, I _jibbed_ and with proper (if

not equa; yet) mulanimity returned for answer--that what a man’s friends

did _sub rosâ_, and what one friend might say to another in favour of an

individual, was one thing--what a man did in his own name and person was

another--and that I would not, _could_ not, _solicit_ a single vote. I

should think it an affrontive interference with a decision, in which there

ought to be neither ground or motive, but the elector’s own judgement, and

conscience, and all for what? It is hard if, in the same time as I could

produce an essay of the sort required, I could not get the same sum by

compiling a school-book.

However, I fear, that having allowed my name, at Montagu’s instance, to be

proposed, which it was by a Mr. Jerdan (N. B. Neither the one _sub

cubili_, nor that in Palestine; but the Jerdan of Michael’s Grove,

Brompton, No. 1), I cannot now withdraw my name without appearing to

_trifle_ with my friends, and without hurting Montagu--so I must submit to

the probability of being black-balled as the penalty of having given my

assent before I had ascertained the conditions. So I have decided to let

the thing take its own course. But as Montagu wishes to have Mr.

Chantrey’s vote _for us_, if you see and _feel_ no objection (an

objectiuncula will be quite sufficient), you will perhaps write him a line

to state the circumstances. It comes on on Thursday next.

I look forward with a _feel_ of regeneration to the Sundays.

My best and most affectionate respects to Mrs. J. Green, and to your dear

and excellent mother if she be with you.

And till we meet, may God bless you and your obliged and sincere friend,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CCXXXV. TO THE SAME.

ÆDES NEMOROSÆ, APUD PORT{M} ALTAM,

May 19, 1824.

Mr. S. T. Coleridge, F. R. S. L., R. A., H. M., P. S. B., etc., etc., has

the honour of avowing the high gratification he will receive should any

answer from him be thought “to oblige Lincoln’s Inn Fields.” When he

reflects indeed on their many and cogent claims on his admiration and

gratitude, what a _Fund_ of _Literature_ they contain, what a Royal

Society, what Royal Associates--not to speak of those as yet in the egg of

futurity, the unhatched Decemvirate and Spes Altera Phœbi! What a royal

College, where philosophy and eloquence unite to display their fresh and

vernal green! what a conjunction of the Fine Arts with the Sciences, Law

and Physique, Glossurgery and Chirurgery! when he remembers that if the

Titanic Roc should take up the Great Pyramid in his beak, and drop the

same with due skill, the L. I. F. would fit as cup to ball, bone to bone;

though if S. T. C. might dare advise so great and rare a bird, the

precious transport should be let fall point downwards, and thus prevent

the adulteration of their intellectual splendours with “the light of

common day,” while a duplicate of the Elysium below might be reared on its

ample base in mid air--(ah! if a duplicate of No. 22 could be

found)!--when S. T. C. ponders on these proud merits, what is there he

would not do to “oblige Lincoln’s Inn Fields”? In vain does Gillman talk

of a _stop_ being put thereto! Between _oblige_ and Lincoln’s Inn Fields

continuity alone can intervene for the heart’s eye of their obliged and

counter-obliging

S. T. COLERIDGE,

who, with his friends Mr. and Mrs. G., will, etc., on June 3rd.

J. H. GREEN, Esq., 22, Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

CCXXXVI. TO JAMES GILLMAN.

RAMSGATE, November 2, 1824.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--That so much longer an interval has passed between this

and my last letter you will not, I am sure, attribute to any correspondent

interval of oblivion. I do not, indeed, think that any two hours of any

one day, taken at sixteen, have elapsed in which you, past or future, or

myself in connection with you, were not for a longer or shorter space my

uppermost thought. But the two days following James’s safe arrival by the

coach I was so depressively unwell, so unremittingly restless, etc., and

so exhausted by a teasing cough, and by two of these bad nights that make

me moan out, “O for a sleep for sleep itself to rest in!” that I was quite

disqualified for writing. And since then, I have been waiting for the

Murrays to take a parcel with them, who were to have gone on Monday

morning. But again not hearing from them, and remembering your injunction

not to mind postage, I have resolved that no more time shall pass on and

should have written to-day, even though Mrs. Gillman had not been dreaming

about you last night, and about some letter, etc. Upon my seriousness, I

do declare that I cannot make out certain dream-devils or damned souls

that play pranks with me, whenever by the operation of a cathartic pill or

from the want of one, a ci-devant dinner in its metempsychosis is

struggling in the lower intestines. I cannot comprehend how any thoughts,

the offspring or product of my own reflection, conscience, or fancy, could

be translated into such images, and agents and actions, and am

half-tempted (N. B. between sleeping and waking) to regard with some

favour Swedenborg’s assertion that certain foul spirits of the lowest

order are attracted by the precious ex-viands, whose conversation the soul

half appropriates to itself, and which they contrive to whisper into the

sensorium. The Honourable Emanuel has repeatedly caught them in the fact,

in that part of the spiritual world corresponding to the guts in the world

of bodies, and driven them away. I do not pass this Gospel; but upon my

honour it is no bad apocrypha. I am at present in my best sort and state

of health, bathed yesterday, and again this morning in spite of the rain,

and in so deep a bath, that having thrown myself forward from the first

step of the machine ladder, and only taken two strokes after my

re-immersion, I had at least ten strokes to take before I got into my

depth again, so that it is no false alarm when those who cannot swim are

warned that a person may be drowned a very few yards from the machine. I

returned to _fetch out_ our ladies to see the huge lengthy Columbus, with

the two steam vessels,[191] before and behind, the former to tow, and the

latter to, God knows what. By aid of a good glass, we saw it “_quite

stink_,” as the poor woman said, the people on board, etc. It is 310 feet

long, and 50 wide, and looks exactly like a _Brobdingnag punt_, and on our

return we had (from Mrs. Jones) the “Morning Herald,” with Fauntleroy’s

trial, which (if he be not a treble-damned liar) completely bears out my

assertion that nothing short of a miracle could acquit the partners of

_virtual_ accompliceship; this on my old principle, that the absence of

what ought to have been present is all but equivalent to the presence of

what ought to have been absent. Qui non prohibet quod prohibere potest et

debet, _facit_.

Sir Alexander Johnston[192] has payed me great attention. There is a Lady

Johnston not unlike Miss Sara Hutchinson in face and mouth, only that she

is taller. Sir A. himself is a fine gentlemanly man, young-looking for his

age, and with exception of one not easily describable motion of his head

that makes him look as if he had been accustomed to have a _pen_ behind

his ear, a sort of “Torney’s” clerk look, he might remind you of J.

Hookham Frere. He is a sensible well-informed man, _specious_ in no bad

sense of the word, but (I guess) not much depth. In all probability, you

will see him. We have talked a good deal together about you and me, and me

and you, in consequence of _occasion_ given. Sir A. is one of the leading

men in _our_ Royal Society of Literature, and beyond doubt, a man of

_influence_ in town. I am apt to forget superfluities, but a voice from

above asks, “if I have said that we begin to be anxious to hear from you.”

But probably before you can sit down to answer this, you will have

received another, and, I flatter myself, more amusing, at least

pleasure-giving Scripture from me. (N. B. “Coleridge’s Scriptures”--a new

title.)

[No signature.]

CCXXXVII. TO THE REV. H. F. CARY.

HIGHGATE, Monday, December 14, 1824.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--The gentleman, Mr. Gabriel Rossetti,[193] whose letter to

you I enclose, is a friend of my friend, Mr. J. H. Frere, with whom he

lived in habits of intimacy at Malta and Naples. He seems to me what from

Mr. Frere’s high opinion of him I should have confidently anticipated, a

gentleman, a scholar, and a man of talents. The nature of his request you

will learn from the letter, namely, a perusal of his Manuscript on the

spirit of Dante and the mechanism and interpretation of the “Divina

Commedia,” of which he believes himself to have the filum Ariadneum in his

hand, and a frank opinion of the merits of his labours. My dear friend! I

know by experience _what_ is asked in this twofold request, and that the

weight increases in proportion to the kindness and sensibility and the

shrinking from the infliction of pain of the person on whom it is

enjoined. The name of Mr. John Hookham Frere would alone have sufficed to

make _me_ undertake this office, had the request been directed to myself.

It would have been my duty. But I would not, knowing your temper and

habits and avocations, have sought to engage you, or even have put you to

the discomfort of excusing yourself had I not been strongly impressed by

Mr. Rossetti’s manners and conversation with the belief that the interests

of literature are concerned, and that Mr. Rossetti has a claim on all the

services which the sons of the Muses, and more particularly the

cultivators of ancient Italian Literature, and most particularly Dante’s

“English Duplicate and Re-incarnation” can render him. If your health and

other duties allow your accession to this request (for the recommendation

of the work to the booksellers is quite a secondary consideration, of

minor importance in Mr. Rossetti’s estimation, and I have, besides,

explained to him how very limited _our_ influence is), you will be so good

as to let me hear from you, and where and when Mr. Rossetti might wait on

you. He will be happy to attend you at Chiswick. He _understands_ English,

and, he speaking Italian and I our own language, we had no difficulty in

keeping up an animated conversation.

Make mine and all our cordial remembrances to Mrs. Cary, and believe me,

dear friend, with perfect esteem and most affectionate regard, yours,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

P. S. Both Mrs. G. and myself have returned much benefited by our

sea-sojourn. Mr. Rossetti has, I find, an additional merit in good men’s

thoughts. He is a poet who has been driven into exile for the high morale

of his writings. For even general sentiments breathing the spirit of

nobler times are treasons in the present Neapolitan and Holy Alliance

Codes! Wretches!! I dare even _pray_ against them, even with Davidian

bitterness. Do not forget to let me have an answer to this, if possible,

by next day’s post.

CCXXXVIII. TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

Monday Night, ? 1824 ? 1829.

DEAR WORDSWORTH,--Three whole days the going through the first book cost

me, though only to find fault. But I cannot find fault, in pen and ink,

without thinking over and over again, and without some sort of an attempt

to suggest the alteration; and, in so doing, how soon an hour is gone! so

many half seconds up to half minutes are lost in leaning back in one’s

chair, and looking up, in the bodily act of contracting the muscles of the

brow and forehead, and unconsciously attending to the sensation. Had I the

MS. with me for five or six months, so as to amuse myself off and on,

without any solicitude as to a given day, and, could I be persuaded that

if as well done as the nature of the thing (viz., _a translation of

Virgil_,[194] in English) renders possible, it would not raise but simply

sustain your well-merited fame for pure diction, where what is not idiom

is never other than logically correct, I doubt not that the irregularities

could be removed. But I am haunted by the apprehension that I am not

feeling or thinking in the same spirit with you, at one time, and at

another _too much_ in the spirit of your writings. Since Milton, I know of

no poet with so many _felicities_ and unforgettable lines and stanzas as

you. And to read, therefore, page after page without a single _brilliant_

note, depresses me, and I grow peevish with you for having wasted your

time on a work _so_ much below you, that you cannot _stoop_ and _take_.

Finally, my conviction is, that you undertake an _impossibility_, and that

there is no medium between a prose version and one on the avowed principle

of _compensation_ in the widest sense, that is, manner, genius, total

effect. I confine myself to _Virgil_ when I say this.

I must now set to work with _all_ my powers and thoughts to my

Leighton,[195] and then to my logic, and then to my _opus maximum_! if

indeed it shall please God to spare me so long, which I have had too many

warnings of late (more than my nearest friends know of) not to doubt. My

kind love to Dorothy.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CCXXXIX. TO JOHN TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

GROVE, HIGHGATE, Friday, April 8, 1825.