Before Coleridge left for Malta Davy wrote to him:
Twelve o’clock, Monday (probably March 1804).
My dear Coleridge,—My mind is disturbed and my body harassed by many labours, yet I cannot suffer you to depart without endeavouring to express to you some of the unbroken higher feelings of my spirit, which have you at once as their cause and object.
Years have passed away since we first met, and your presence, and recollections with regard to you have afforded me continued sources of enjoyment.
Some of the better feelings of my nature have been elevated by your converse, and thoughts which you have nursed have been to me an eternal source of consolation.
In whatever part of the world you are you will often live with me, not as a fleeting idea, but as a recollection possessed of creative energy, as an imagination winged with fire, inspiring and rejoicing.
You must not live much longer without giving to all men the proof of power which those who know you feel in admiration. Perhaps, at a distance from the applauding and censuring murmurs of the world, you will be best able to execute those great works which are justly expected from you; you are to be the historian of the philosophy of feeling. Do not in any way dissipate your noble nature. Do not give up your birthright. May you soon recover perfect health, the health of strength and happiness! may you soon return to us confirmed in all the powers essential to the exertion of genius! You were born for your country, and your native land must be the scene of your activity. I shall expect the time when your spirit, bursting through the clouds of ill-health, will appear to all men, not as an uncertain and brilliant flame, but as a fair and permanent light, fixed, though constantly in motion, as a sun which gives its fire not only to its attendant planets, but which sends beams from all its parts into all worlds.
May blessings attend you, my dear friend! Do not forget me; we live for different ends and with different habits and pursuits, but our feelings with regard to each other have, I believe, never altered. They must continue; they can have no natural death. I trust they can never be destroyed by fortune, chance, or accident.
H. Davy.
In October Davy thus wrote to a friend on the death of Gregory Watt, the son of James Watt:
We are deceived, my dear Clayfield, if we suppose that the human being who has formed himself for action, but who has been unable to act, is lost in the mass of being. There is some arrangement of things which we can never comprehend, but in which his faculties will be applied.
The caterpillar, in being converted into an inert scaly mass, does not appear to be fitting itself for an inhabitant of the air, and can have no consciousness of the brilliancy of its future being. We are masters of the earth, but perhaps we are the slaves of some great but unknown beings. The fly that we crush with our finger or feed with our viands, has no knowledge of man and no consciousness of his superiority. We suppose that we are acquainted with matter and with all its elements, and yet we cannot even guess at the cause of electricity or explain the laws of the formation of the stones which fall from meteors.
There may be beings—thinking beings—near us, surrounding us, which we do not perceive, which we can never imagine. We know very little, but, in my opinion, we know enough to hope for the immortality—the individual immortality—of the better part of man.
I have been led into all this speculation, which you may well think wild, in reflecting upon the fate of Gregory; my feeling has given erring wings to my mind. He was a noble fellow and would have been a great man.
His letters to me only three or four months ago were full of spirit, and spoke not of any infirmity of body, but of an increasing strength of mind. Why is this in the order of nature, that there is such a difference in the duration and destruction of her works? If the mere stone decays, it is to produce a soil which is capable of nourishing the moss and the lichen; when the moss and the lichen die and decompose, they produce a mould which becomes the bed of life to grass and to a more exalted species of vegetables. Vegetables are the food of animals, the less perfect animals of the more perfect, but in man the faculties and intellect are perfected; he rises, exists for a little while in disease and misery, and then would seem to disappear without an end and without producing any effect.
Another mention of Coleridge occurs in February, when Davy wrote to Mr. Poole:
There has been no news lately from Coleridge; the last accounts state that he was well in the autumn and in Sicily. On that poetic ground we may hope and trust that his genius will call forth some new creations, and that he may bring back to us some garlands of never-dying verse. I have written to urge him strongly to give a course of lectures on Poetry at the Royal Institution, where his feeling would strongly impress and his eloquence greatly delight.
In January 1805 Davy presented his collection of minerals to the Royal Institution. They were valued at one hundred guineas.
On February 4, as Director of the Laboratory, he received an addition of 100l. to his salary.
He had two papers read at the Royal Society, one on a ‘New Mineral, consisting of Alumine and Water,’ and the other on a ‘New Mode of Analysing Minerals containing Fixed Alkali by Boracic Acid,’ and for these and his other papers he received the Copley medal.