In a day or two, Mr. De Quincey enclosed me the three hundred pounds, when I received from Mr. Coleridge, the following receipt, which I still retain.
"November 12, 1807. Received from Mr. Joseph Cottle, the sum of three hundred pounds, presented to me, through him, by an unknown friend.
Bristol.
S. T. Coleridge."
I have been thus particular in detailing the whole of this affair, so honourable to Mr. De Quincey; and, as I was the communicating agent, I thought it right, on this occasion, to give publicity to the transaction, on the principle of doing justice to all. Notwithstanding the prohibition, some indirect notices from myself, could have left no doubt with Mr. C. of the source of this handsome gift.
It is singular, that a little before this time, (1807) Mr. Coleridge had written to his friend Mr. Wade a melancholy letter, detailing his embarrassed circumstances; so that Mr. De Quincey's £300 must have been received at an acceptable time!
* * * * *
No date determines when the following letter was written: supposed, 1807.
"My dear Cottle,
… The common end of all narrative, nay, of all poems is, to convert a series into a whole, to make those events, which, in real or imagined history, move on in a straight line, assume to our understandings a circular motion—the snake with its tail in its mouth. Hence, indeed, the almost flattering and yet appropriate term, Poesy, i. e. Poieses—making. Doubtless, to His eye, which alone comprehends all past and all future, in one eternal, what to our short sight appears straight, is but a part of the great cycle, just as the calm sea to us appears level, though it be indeed only a part of the globe. Now what the globe is in geography, miniaturing in order to manifest the truth, such is a poem to that image of God, which we were created into, and which still seeking that unity, or revelation of the one, in and by the many, which reminds it, that though in order to be an individual being, it must go farther from God; yet as the receding from him, is to proceed toward nothingness and privation, it must still at every step turn back toward him, in order to be at all. A straight line continually retracted, forms of necessity a circular orbit. Now God's will and word CANNOT be frustrated. His fiat was, with ineffable awfulness, applied to man, when all things, and all living things, and man himself, (as a mere animal) included, were called forth by the Universal, 'Let there be,' and then the breath of the Eternal superadded, to make an immortal spirit—immortality being, as the author of the 'Wisdom of Soloman' profoundly expresses it, 'the only possible reflex, or image of eternity.' The immortal finite is the contracted shadow of the eternal Infinite. Therefore nothingness, or death, to which we move, as we recede from God and from the Word, cannot be nothing; but that tremendous medium between nothing and true being, which Scripture and inmost reason present as most, most horrible!