CXLII. TO THE SAME.
Edinburgh, Tuesday morning, September 13, 1803.
My dear Southey,—I wrote you a strange letter, I fear. But, in truth, yours affected my wretched stomach, and my head, in such a way that I wrote mechanically in the wake of the first vivid idea. No conveyance left or leaves this place for Carlisle earlier than to-morrow morning, for which I have taken my place. If the coachman do not turn Panaceist, and cure all my ills by breaking my neck, I shall be at Carlisle on Wednesday, midnight, and whether I shall go on in the coach to Penrith, and walk from thence, or walk off from Carlisle at once, depends on two circumstances, first, whether the coach goes on with no other than a common bait to Penrith, and secondly, whether, if it should not do so, I can trust my clothes, etc., to the coachman safely, to be left at Penrith. There is but eight miles difference in the walk, and eight or nine shillings difference in the expense. At all events, I trust that I shall be with you on Thursday by dinner time, if you dine at half-past two or three o’clock. God bless you! I will go and call on Elmsley.[285] What a wonderful city Edinburgh[286] is! What alternation of height and depth! A city looked at in the polish’d back of a Brobdingnag spoon held lengthways, so enormously stretched-up are the houses! When I first looked down on it, as the coach drove up on the higher street, I cannot express what I felt—such a section of wasps’ nests striking you with a sort of bastard sublimity from the enormity and infinity of its littleness—the infinity swelling out the mind, the enormity striking it with wonder. I think I have seen an old plate of Montserrat that struck me with the same feeling, and I am sure I have seen huge quarries of lime and free stone in which the shafts or strata stood perpendicularly instead of horizontally with the same high thin slices and corresponding interstices. I climbed last night to the crags just below Arthur’s Seat—itself a rude triangle-shaped-base cliff, and looked down on the whole city and firth—the sun then setting behind the magnificent rock, crested by the castle. The firth was full of ships, and I counted fifty-four heads of mountains, of which at least forty-four were cones or pyramids. The smoke was rising from ten thousand houses, each smoke from some one family. It was an affecting sight to me! I stood gazing at the setting sun, so tranquil to a passing look, and so restless and vibrating to one who looked stedfast; and then, all at once, turning my eyes down upon the city, it and all its smokes and figures became all at once dipped in the brightest blue-purple: such a sight that I almost grieved when my eyes recovered their natural tone! Meantime, Arthur’s Crag, close behind me, was in dark blood-like crimson, and the sharpshooters were behind exercising minutely, and had chosen that place on account of the fine thunder echo which, indeed, it would be scarcely possible for the ear to distinguish from thunder. The passing a day or two, quite unknown, in a strange city, does a man’s heart good. He rises “a sadder and a wiser man.”
I had not read that part in your second requesting me to call on Elmsley, else perhaps I should have been talking instead of learning and feeling.
Walter Scott is at Lasswade, five or six miles from Edinburgh. His house in Edinburgh is divinely situated. It looks up a street, a new magnificent street, full upon the rock and the castle, with its zigzag walls like painters’ lightning—the other way down upon cultivated fields, a fine expanse of water, either a lake or not to be distinguished from one, and low pleasing hills beyond—the country well wooded and cheerful. “I’ faith,” I exclaimed, “the monks formerly, but the poets now, know where to fix their habitations.” There are about four things worth going into Scotland for,[287] to one who has been in Cumberland and Westmoreland: First, the views of all the islands at the foot of Loch Lomond from the top of the highest island called Inch devanna (sic); secondly, the Trossachs at the foot of Loch Katrine; third, the chamber and ante-chamber of the Falls of Foyers (the fall itself is very fine, and so, after rain, is White-Water Dash, seven miles below Keswick and very like it); and how little difference a height makes, you know as well as I. No fall of itself, perhaps, can be worth giving a long journey to see, to him who has seen any fall of water, but the pool and whole rent of the mountain is truly magnificent. Fourthly and lastly, the City of Edinburgh. Perhaps I might add Glencoe. It is at all events a good make-weight and very well worth going to see, if a man be a Tory and hate the memory of William the Third, which I am very willing to do; for the more of these fellows dead and living one hates, the less spleen and gall there remains for those with whom one is likely to have anything to do in real life....
I am tolerably well, meaning the day. My last night was not such a noisy night of horrors as three nights out of four are with me.[288] O God! when a man blesses the loud screams of agony that awake him night after night, night after night, and when a man’s repeated night screams have made him a nuisance in his own house, it is better to die than to live. I have a joy in life that passeth all understanding; but it is not in its present Epiphany and Incarnation. Bodily torture! All who have been with me can bear witness that I can bear it like an Indian. It is constitutional with me to sit still, and look earnestly upon it and ask it what it is? Yea, often and often, the seeds of Rabelaisism germinating in me, I have laughed aloud at my own poor metaphysical soul. But these burrs by day of the will and the reason, these total eclipses by night! Oh, it is hard to bear them. I am complaining bitterly to others, I should be administrating comfort; but even this is one way of comfort. There are states of mind in which even distraction is still a diversion; we must none of us brood; we are not made to be brooders.
God bless you, dear friend, and
S. T. Coleridge.
Mrs. C. will get clean flannels ready for me.
CXLIII. TO MATTHEW COATES.[289]
Greta Hall, Keswick, December 5, 1803.
Dear Sir,—After a time of sufferings, great as mere bodily sufferings can well be conceived to be, and which the horrors of my sleep and night screams (so loud and so frequent as to make me almost a nuisance in my own house) seemed to carry beyond mere body, counterfeiting as it were the tortures of guilt, and what we are told of the punishment of a spiritual world, I am at length a convalescent, but dreading such another bout as much as I dare dread a thing which has no immediate connection with my conscience. My left hand is swollen and inflamed, and the least attempt to bend the fingers very painful, though not half as much so as I could wish; for if I could but fix this Jack-o’-lanthorn of a disease in my hand or foot, I should expect complete recovery in a year or two! But though I have no hope of this, I have a persuasion strong as fate, that from twelve to eighteen months’ residence in a genial climate would send me back to dear old England a sample of the first resurrection. Mr. Wordsworth, who has seen me in all my illnesses for nearly four years, and noticed this strange dependence on the state of my moral feelings and the state of the atmosphere conjointly, is decidedly of the same opinion. Accordingly, after many sore struggles of mind from reluctance to quit my children for so long a time, I have arranged my affairs fully and finally, and hope to set sail for Madeira in the first vessel that clears out from Liverpool for that place. Robert Southey, who lives with us, informed me that Mrs. Matthew Coates had a near relative (a brother, I believe) in that island, the Dr. Adams[290] who wrote a very nice little pamphlet on Madeira, relative to the different sorts of consumption, and which I have now on my desk. I need not say that it would be a great comfort to me to be introduced to him by a letter from you or Mrs. Coates, entreating him to put me in a way of living as cheaply as possible. I have no appetites, passions, or vanities which lead to expense; it is now absolute habit to me, indeed, to consider my eating and drinking as a course of medicine. In books only am I intemperate—they have been both bane and blessing to me. For the last three years I have not read less than eight hours a day whenever I have been well enough to be out of bed, or even to sit up in it. Quiet, therefore, a comfortable bed and bedroom, and still better than that, the comfort of kind faces, English tongues, and English hearts now and then,—this is the sum total of my wants, as it is a thing which I need. I am far too contented with solitude. The same fullness of mind, the same crowding of thoughts and constitutional vivacity of feeling which makes me sometimes the first fiddle, and too often a watchman’s rattle in society, renders me likewise independent of its excitements. However, I am wondrously calmed down since you saw me—perhaps through this unremitting disease, affliction, and self-discipline.
Mrs. Coleridge desires me to remember her with respectful regards to Mrs. Coates, and to enquire into the history of your little family. I have three children, Hartley, seven years old, Derwent, three years, and Sara, one year on the 23d of this month. Hartley is considered a genius by Wordsworth and Southey; indeed by every one who has seen much of him. But what is of much more consequence and much less doubtful, he has the sweetest temper and most awakened moral feelings of any child I ever saw. He is very backward in his book-learning, cannot write at all, and a very lame reader. We have never been anxious about it, taking it for granted that loving me, and seeing how I love books, he would come to it of his own accord, and so it has proved, for in the last month he has made more progress than in all his former life. Having learnt everything almost from the mouths of people whom he loves, he has connected with his words and notions a passion and a feeling which would appear strange to those who had seen no children but such as had been taught almost everything in books. Derwent is a large, fat, beautiful child, quite the pride of the village, as Hartley is the darling. Southey says wickedly that “all Hartley’s guts are in his brains, and all Derwent’s brains are in his guts.” Verily the constitutional differences in the children are great indeed. From earliest infancy Hartley was absent, a mere dreamer at his meals, put the food into his mouth by one effort, and made a second effort to remember it was there and swallow it. With little Derwent it is a time of rapture and jubilee, and any story that has not pie or cake in it comes very flat to him. Yet he is but a baby. Our girl is a darling little thing, with large blue eyes, a quiet creature that, as I have often said, seems to bask in a sunshine as mild as moonlight, of her own happiness. Oh! bless them! Next to the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton, they are the three books from which I have learned the most, and the most important and with the greatest delight.
I have been thus prolix about me and mine purposely, to induce you to tell me something of yourself and yours.
Believe me, I have never ceased to think of you with respect and a sort of yearning. You were the first man from whom I heard that article of my faith enunciated which is the nearest to my heart,—the pure fountain of all my moral and religious feelings and comforts,—I mean the absolute Impersonality of the Deity.
I remain, my dear sir, with unfeigned esteem and with good wishes, ever yours,
S. T. Coleridge.