CV. TO THE SAME.
Saturday, January 25, 1800.
My dear Southey,—No day passes in which I do not as it were yearn after you, but in truth my occupations have lately swoln above smothering point. I am over mouth and nostrils. I have inclosed a poem which Mrs. Robinson gave me for your “Anthology.” She is a woman of undoubted genius. There was a poem of hers in this morning’s paper which both in metre and matter pleased me much. She overloads everything; but I never knew a human being with so full a mind—bad, good, and indifferent, I grant you, but full and overflowing. This poem I asked for you, because I thought the metre stimulating and some of the stanzas really good. The first line of the twelfth would of itself redeem a worse poem.[225] I think you will agree with me, but should you not, yet still put it in, my dear fellow! for my sake, and out of respect to a woman-poet’s feelings. Miss Hayes I have seen. Charles Lloyd’s conduct has been atrocious beyond what you stated. Lamb himself confessed to me that during the time in which he kept up his ranting, sentimental correspondence with Miss Hayes, he frequently read her letters in company, as a subject for laughter, and then sate down and answered them quite à la Rousseau! Poor Lloyd! Every hour new-creates him; he is his own posterity in a perpetually flowing series, and his body unfortunately retaining an external identity, their mutual contradictions and disagreeings are united under one name, and of course are called lies, treachery, and rascality! I would not give him up, but that the same circumstances which have wrenched his morals prevent in him any salutary exercise of genius. And therefore he is not worth to the world that I should embroil and embrangle myself in his interests.
Of Miss Hayes’ intellect I do not think so highly as you, or rather, to speak sincerely, I think not contemptuously but certainly despectively thereof. Yet I think you likely in this case to have judged better than I; for to hear a thing, ugly and petticoated, ex-syllogize a God with cold-blooded precision, and attempt to run religion through the body with an icicle, an icicle from a Scotch Hog-trough! I do not endure it; my eye beholds phantoms, and “nothing is, but what is not.”
By your last I could not find whether or no you still are willing to execute the “History of the Levelling Principle.” Let me hear. Tom Wedgwood is going to the Isle of St. Nevis. As to myself, Lessing out of the question; I must stay in England.... Dear Hartley is well, and in high force; he sported of his own accord a theologico-astronomical hypothesis. Having so perpetually heard of good boys being put up into the sky when they are dead, and being now beyond measure enamoured of the lamps in the streets, he said one night coming through the streets, “Stars are dead lamps, they be’nt naughty, they are put up in the sky.” Two or three weeks ago he was talking to himself while I was writing, and I took down his soliloquy. It would make a most original poem.
You say, I illuminize. I think that property will some time or other be modified by the predominance of intellect, even as rank and superstition are now modified by and subordinated to property, that much is to be hoped of the future; but first those particular modes of property which more particularly stop the diffusion must be done away, as injurious to property itself; these are priesthood and the too great patronage of Government. Therefore, if to act on the belief that all things are the process, and that inapplicable truths are moral falsehoods, be to illuminize, why then I illuminize! I know that I have been obliged to illuminize so late at night, or rather mornings, that eyes have smarted as if I had allum in eyes! I believe I have misspelt the word, and ought to have written Alum; that aside, ’tis a humorous pun!
Tell Davy that I will soon write. God love him! You and I, Southey! know a good and great man or two in this world of ours.
God love you, my dear Southey, and your affectionate
S. T. Coleridge.
My kind love to Edith. Let me hear from you, and do not be angry with me that I don’t answer your letters regularly.