LV. TO THOMAS POOLE.
March 30, 1796.
My dear Poole,—For the neglect in the transmission of “The Watchman,” you must blame George Burnett, who undertook the business. I however will myself see it sent this week with the preceding numbers. I am greatly obliged to you for your communication (on the Slave Trade in No. V.); it appears in this number, and I am anxious to receive more from you, and likewise to know what you dislike in “The Watchman,” and what you like; but particularly the former. You have not given me your opinion of “The Plot Discovered.”[108]
Since last you saw me I have been well nigh distracted. The repeated and most injurious blunders of my printer out-of-doors, and Mrs. Coleridge’s increasing danger at home, added to the gloomy prospect of so many mouths to open and shut like puppets, as I move the string in the eating and drinking way—but why complain to you? Misery is an article with which every market is so glutted, that it can answer no one’s purpose to export it. Alas! Alas! oh! ah! oh! oh! etc.
I have received many abusive letters, post-paid, thanks to the friendly malignants! But I am perfectly callous to disapprobation, except when it tends to lessen profit. There, indeed, I am all one tremble of sensibility, marriage having taught me the wonderful uses of that vulgar commodity, yclept bread. “The Watchman” succeeds so as to yield a bread-and-cheesish profit. Mrs. Coleridge is recovering apace, and deeply regrets that she was deprived of seeing [you]. We are in our new house, where there is a bed at your service whenever you will please to delight us with a visit. Surely in spring you might force a few days into a sojourning with me.
Dear Poole, you have borne yourself towards me most kindly with respect to my epistolary ingratitude. But I know that you forbade yourself to feel resentment towards me because you had previously made my neglect ingratitude. A generous temper endures a great deal from one whom it has obliged deeply.
My poems are finished. I will send you two copies the moment they are published. In the third number of “The Watchman” there are a few lines entitled “The Hour when we shall meet again,” “Dim hour that sleeps on pillowy clouds afar,” which I think you will like. I have received two or three letters from different anonymi, requesting me to give more poetry. One of them writes:—
“Sir! I detest your principles; your prose I think very so-so; but your poetry is so exquisitely beautiful, so gorgeously sublime, that I take in your ‘Watchman’ solely on account of it. In justice therefore to me and some others of my stamp, I intreat you to give us more verse and less democratic scurrility. Your admirer,—not esteemer.”
Have you read over Dr. Lardner on the Logos? It is, I think, scarcely possible to read it and not be convinced.
I find that “The Watchman” comes more easy to me, so that I shall begin about my Christian Lectures. I will immediately order for you, unless you immediately countermand it, Count Rumford’s Essays; in No. V. of “The Watchman” you will see why. I have enclosed Dr. Beddoes’s late pamphlets, neither of them as yet published. The doctor sent them to me. I can get no one but the doctor to agree with me in my opinion that Burke’s “Letter to a Noble Lord”[109] is as contemptible in style as in matter—it is sad stuff.
My dutiful love to your excellent mother, whom, believe me, I think of frequently and with a pang of affection. God bless you. I’ll try and venture to scribble a line and a half every time the man goes with “The Watchman” to you.
N. B. The “Essay on Fasting”[110] I am ashamed of; but it is one of my misfortunes that I am obliged to publish extempore as well as compose. God bless you,
and S. T. Coleridge.