I have been thus particular in detailing the whole of this affair, so
honourable to Mr. De Quincey; and, as I was the communicating agent, I
thought it right, on this occasion, to give publicity to the transaction,
on the principle of doing justice to all. Notwithstanding the
prohibition, some indirect notices from myself, could have left no doubt
with Mr. C. of the source of this handsome gift.
It is singular, that a little before this time, (1807) Mr. Coleridge had
written to his friend Mr. Wade a melancholy letter, detailing his
embarrassed circumstances; so that Mr. De Quincey's £300 must have been
received at an acceptable time!
* * * * *
No date determines when the following letter was written: supposed, 1807.
"My dear Cottle,
... The common end of all narrative, nay, of all poems is, to convert a
series into a whole, to make those events, which, in real or imagined
history, move on in a straight line, assume to our understandings a
circular motion--the snake with its tail in its mouth. Hence, indeed, the
almost flattering and yet appropriate term, Poesy, i. e.
Poieses--_making_. Doubtless, to His eye, which alone comprehends all
past and all future, in one eternal, what to our short sight appears
straight, is but a part of the great cycle, just as the calm sea to us
appears level, though it be indeed only a part of the globe. Now what the
globe is in geography, miniaturing in order to manifest the truth, such
is a poem to that image of God, which we were created into, and which
still seeking that unity, or revelation of the one, in and by the many,
which reminds it, that though in order to be an individual being, it must
go farther from God; yet as the receding from him, is to proceed toward
nothingness and privation, it must still at every step turn back toward
him, in order to be at all. A straight line continually retracted, forms
of necessity a circular orbit. Now God's will and word CANNOT be
frustrated. His fiat was, with ineffable awfulness, applied to man, when
all things, and all living things, and man himself, (as a mere animal)
included, were called forth by the Universal, 'Let there be,' and then
the breath of the Eternal superadded, to make an immortal
spirit--immortality being, as the author of the 'Wisdom of Soloman'
profoundly expresses it, 'the only possible reflex, or image of
eternity.' The immortal finite is the contracted shadow of the eternal
Infinite. Therefore nothingness, or death, to which we move, as we recede
from God and from the Word, cannot be nothing; but that tremendous medium
between nothing and true being, which Scripture and inmost reason present
as most, most horrible!
Affectionately,