CXCVI. TO DANIEL STUART.
September 25, 1813.
Dear Stuart,—I forgot to ask you by what address a letter would best reach you! Whether Kilburn House, Kilburn? I shall therefore send it, or leave it at the “Courier” office. I found Southey so chevaux-de-frized and pallisadoed by preëngagements that I could not reach at him till Sunday sennight, that is, Sunday, October 3, when, if convenient, we should be happy to wait on you. Southey will be in town till Monday evening, and you have his brother’s address, should you wish to write to him (Dr. Southey,[105] 28, Little Queen Anne Street, Cavendish Square).
A curious paragraph in the “Morning Chronicle” of this morning, asserting with its usual comfortable anti-patriotism the determination of the Emperor of Austria to persevere in the terms[106] offered to his son-in-law, in his frenzy of power, even though he should be beaten to the dust. Methinks there ought to be good authority before a journalist dares prophesy folly and knavery in union of our Imperial Ally. An excellent article ought to be written on this subject. In the same paper there is what I should have called a masterly essay on the causes of the downfall of the Comic Drama, if I was not perplexed by the distinct recollection of having conversed the greater part of it at Lamb’s. I wish you would read it, and tell me what you think; for I seem to remember a conversation with you in which you asserted the very contrary; that comic genius was the thing wanting, and not comic subjects—that the watering places, or rather the characters presented at them, had never been adequately managed, etc.
Might I request you to present my best respects to Mrs. Stuart as those of an old acquaintance of yours, and, as far as I am myself conscious of, at all times with hearty affection, your sincere friend,
S. T. Coleridge.
P. S. There are some half dozen more books of mine left at the “Courier” office, Ben Jonson and sundry German volumes. As I am compelled to sell my library,[107] you would oblige me by ordering the porter to take them to 19, London Street, Fitzroy Square; whom I will remunerate for his trouble. I should not take this liberty, but that I had in vain written to Mr. Street, requesting the same favour, which in his hurry of business I do not wonder that he forgot.
CXCVII. TO JOSEPH COTTLE.[108]
April 26, 1814.
You have poured oil in the raw and festering wound of an old friend’s conscience, Cottle! but it is oil of vitriol! I but barely glanced at the middle of the first page of your letter, and have seen no more of it—not from resentment (God forbid!), but from the state of my bodily and mental sufferings, that scarcely permitted human fortitude to let in a new visitor of affliction.
The object of my present reply is to state the case just as it is. First, that for ten years the anguish of my spirit has been indescribable, the sense of my danger staring, but the consciousness of my GUILT worse, far worse than all. I have prayed, with drops of agony on my brow, trembling not only before the justice of my Maker, but even before the mercy of my Redeemer. “I gave thee so many talents, what hast thou done with them?” Secondly, overwhelmed as I am with a sense of my direful infirmity, I have never attempted to disguise or conceal the cause. On the contrary, not only to friends have I stated the whole case with tears and the very bitterness of shame, but in two instances I have warned young men, mere acquaintances, who had spoken of having taken laudanum, of the direful consequences, by an awful exposition of the tremendous effects on myself.
Thirdly, though before God I cannot lift up my eyelids, and only do not despair of His mercy, because to despair would be adding crime to crime, yet to my fellow-men I may say that I was seduced into the ACCURSED habit ignorantly. I had been almost bed-ridden for many months with swellings in my knees. In a medical journal, I unhappily met with an account of a cure performed in a similar case (or what appeared to me so), by rubbing in of laudanum, at the same time taking a given dose internally. It acted like a charm, like a miracle! I recovered the use of my limbs, of my appetite, of my spirits, and this continued for near a fortnight. At length the unusual stimulus subsided, the complaint returned, the supposed remedy was recurred to—but I cannot go through the dreary history.
Suffice it to say, that effects were produced which acted on me by terror and cowardice, of pain and sudden death, not (so help me God!) by any temptation of pleasure, or expectation, or desire of exciting pleasurable sensations. On the very contrary, Mrs. Morgan and her sister will bear witness, so far as to say, that the longer I abstained the higher my spirits were, the keener my enjoyment—till the moment, the direful moment, arrived when my pulse began to fluctuate, my heart to palpitate, and such a dreadful falling abroad, as it were, of my whole frame, such intolerable restlessness, and incipient bewilderment, that in the last of my several attempts to abandon the dire poison, I exclaimed in agony, which I now repeat in seriousness and solemnity, “I am too poor to hazard this.” Had I but a few hundred pounds, but £200—half to send to Mrs. Coleridge, and half to place myself in a private madhouse, where I could procure nothing but what a physician thought proper, and where a medical attendant could be constantly with me for two or three months (in less than that time life or death would be determined), then there might be hope. Now there is none!! O God! how willingly would I place myself under Dr. Fox, in his establishment; for my case is a species of madness, only that it is a derangement, an utter impotence of the volition, and not of the intellectual faculties. You bid me rouse myself: go bid a man paralytic in both arms, to rub them briskly together, and that will cure him. “Alas!” he would reply, “that I cannot move my arms is my complaint and my misery.”
May God bless you, and your affectionate, but most afflicted,
S. T. Coleridge.