CCLI. TO J. H. GREEN.
December 15, 1831.
My dear Friend,—It is at least a fair moiety of the gratification I feel, that it will give you so much pleasure to hear from me, that I tacked about on Monday, continued in smooth water during the whole day, and with exceptions of about an hour’s muttering, as if a storm was coming, had a comfortable night. I was still better on Tuesday, and had no relapse yesterday. I have so repeatedly given and suffered disappointment, that I cannot even communicate this gleam of convalescence without a little fluttering distinctly felt at my heart, and a sort of cloud-shadow of dejection flitting over me. God knows with what aims, motives, and aspirations I pray for an interval of ease and competent strength! One of my present wishes is to form a better nomenclature or terminology. I have long felt the exceeding inconvenience of the many different meanings of the term objective,—sometimes equivalent to apparent or sensible, sometimes in opposition to it,—ex. gr. “The objectivity is the rain drops and the reflected light, the iris, is but an appearance.” Thus, sometimes it means real and sometimes unreal, and the worst is, that it forms an obstacle to the fixation of the great truth, that the perfect reality is predicable only where actual and real are terms of identity, that is, where there is no potential being, and that this alone is absolute reality; and further, of that most fundamental truth, that the ground of all reality, the objective no less than of the subjective, is the Absolute Subject. How to get out of the difficulty I do not know, save that some other term must be used as the antithet to phenomenal, perhaps noumenal.
James Gillman has passed an unusually strict and long examination for ordination with great credit, and was selected by the bishop to read the lessons in the service. The parents are, of course, delighted, and now, my dear friend, with affectionate remembrances to Mrs. Green, may God bless you and
S. T. Coleridge.
CCLII. TO HENRY NELSON COLERIDGE.[209]
The Grove, February 24, 1832.
My dear Nephew, and by a higher tie, Son, I thank God I have this day been favoured with such a mitigation of the disease as amounts to a reprieve, and have had ease enough of sensation to be able to think of what you said to me from Lockhart, and the result is a wish that you should—that is, if it appears right to you, and you have no objection of feeling—write for me to Professor Wilson, offering the Essays, and the motives for the wish to have them republished, with the authority (if there be no breach of confidence) of Mr. Lockhart. I cannot with propriety offer them to Fraser, having for a series of years received “Blackwood’s Magazine” as a free gift to me, until I have made the offer to Blackwood. Of course, my whole and only object is the desire to see them put into the possibility of becoming useful. But, oh! this is a faint desire, my dear Henry, compared with that of seeing a fair abstract of the principles I have advanced respecting the National Church and its revenue, and the National Clerisy as a coördinate of the State, in the minor and antithetic sense of the term State!
I almost despair of the Conservative Party, too truly, I fear, and most ominously, self-designated Tories, and of course half-truthmen! One main omission both of senators and writers has been, ὡς ἔμοιγε δοκεῖ, that they have forgotten to level the axe of their argument at the root, the true root, yea, trunk of the delusion, by pointing out the true nature and operation and modus operandi of the taxes in the first instance, and then and not till then the utter groundlessness, the absurdity of the presumption that any House of Commons formed otherwise, and consisting of other men of other ranks, other views or with other interests, than the present has been for the last twenty years at least, would or could (from any imaginable cause) have a deeper interest or a stronger desire to diminish the taxes, as far as the abolition of this or that tax would increase the ability to pay the remainder. For what are taxes but one of the forms of circulation? Some a nation must have, or it is no nation. But he that takes ninepence from me instead of a shilling, but at the same time and by this very act prevents sixpence from coming into my pocket,—am I to thank him? Yet such are the only thanks that Mr. Hume and the Country Squires, his cowardly back-clapping flatterers, can fairly claim. In my opinion, Hume is an incomparably more mischievous being than O’Connell and the gang of agitators. They are mere symptomatic and significative effects, the roars of the inwardly agitated mass of the popular sea. But Hume is a fermenting virus. But I must end my scrawl. God bless my dear Sara. Give my love to Mrs. C. and kiss the baby for
S. T. Coleridge.
H. N. Coleridge, Esq., 1, New Court, Lincoln’s Inn.
CCLIII. TO MISS LAWRENCE.[210]
March 22, 1832.
My dear Miss Lawrence,—You and dear, dear Mrs. Crompton are among the few sunshiny images that endear my past life to me, and I never think of you without heartfelt esteem, without affection, and a yearning of my better being toward you. I have for more than eighteen months been on the brink of the grave, the object of my wishes, and only not of my prayers, because I commit myself, poor dark creature, to an Omniscient and All-merciful, in whom are the issues of life and death,—content, yea, most thankful, if only His Grace will preserve within me the blessed faith that He is and is a God that heareth prayers, abundant in forgiveness, and therefore to be feared, no fate, no God as imagined by the Unitarians, a sort of, I know not what law-giving Law of Gravitation, to whom prayer would be as idle as to the law of gravity, if an undermined wall were falling upon me; but “a God that made the eye, and therefore shall He not see? who made the ear, and shall He not hear?” who made the heart of man to love Him, and shall He not love the creature whose ultimate end is to love Him?—a God who seeketh that which was lost, who calleth back that which had gone astray; who calleth through His own Name; Word, Son, from everlasting the Way and the Truth; and who became man that for poor fallen mankind he might be (not merely announced but be) the Resurrection and the Life,—“Come unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest!” Oh, my dear Miss Lawrence! prize above all earthly things the faith. I trust that no sophistry of shallow infra-socinians has quenched it within you,—that God is a God that heareth prayers. If varied learning, if the assiduous cultivation of the reasoning powers, if an accurate and minute acquaintance with all the arguments of controversial writers; if an intimacy with the doctrines of the Unitarians, which can only be obtained by one who for a year or two in his early life had been a convert to them, yea, a zealous and by themselves deemed powerful supporter of their opinions; lastly, if the utter absence of any imaginable worldly interest that could sway or warp the mind and affections,—if all these combined can give any weight or authority to the opinion of a fellow-creature, they will give weight to my adjuration, sent from my sickbed to you in kind love. O trust, O trust, in your Redeemer! in the coeternal Word, the Only-begotten, the living Name of the Eternal I AM, Jehovah, Jesus!
I shall endeavour to see Mr. Hamilton.[211] I doubt not his scientific attainments. I have had proofs of his taste and feeling as a poet, but believe me, my dear Miss Lawrence! that, should the cloud of distemper pass from over me, there needs no other passport to a cordial welcome from me than a line from you importing that he or she possesses your esteem and regard, and that you wish I should shew attention to them. I cannot make out your address, which I read “The Grange;” but where that is I know not, and fear that the Post Office may be as ignorant as myself. I must therefore delay the direction of my letter till I see Mr. Hamilton; but in all places, and independent of place, I am, my dear Miss Lawrence, with most affectionate recollections,
Your friend,
S. T. Coleridge.
Miss S. Lawrence, The Grange, nr. Liverpool.