No individual ever effected great good in the moral world, who had not been subjected to a long preliminary discipline; and he who knows what is in man; who often educes good from evil, can best apportion the exact kind and degree, indispensable to each separate heart. Mr. Coleridge, after this time, lived twenty years. A merciful providence, though with many mementos of decay, preserved his body, and in all its vigor sustained his mind. Power was given him, it is presumed, and fervently hoped, to subdue his former pernicious practices. The season of solemn reflection it is hoped arrived, that his ten talents were no longer partially buried, but that the lengthened space extended to him, was consecrated by deep reflection, and consequent qualification, to elucidate and establish the everlasting principles of Christian truth.
Under such advantages, we are authorized in forming the highest expectations from his Great Posthumous Work. Nothing which I have narrated of Mr. Coleridge, will in the least subtract from the merit, or the impression of that production, effected in his mature manhood, when his renovated faculties sent forth new corruscations, and concentrated the results of all his profound meditations. The very process to which he had been exposed, so unpropitious as it appeared, may have been the most favourable for giving consistency to his intellectual researches. He may have thought in channels the more refined, varied, and luminous, from the ample experience he had acquired, that the only real evil in this world, was the frown of the Almighty, and His favor the only real good; so that the grand work, about to appear, may add strength to the strong, and give endurance to the finished pediment of his usefulness and his fame.
But although all these cheering anticipations should be fully realized, regrets will still exist. It will ever be deplored, that Mr. Coleridge's system of Christian Ethics, had not yet been deliberately recorded by himself. This feeling, however natural, is still considerably moderated, by reflecting on the ample competence of the individual on whom the distinction of preparing this system has devolved; a security that it will be both well and faithfully executed, and which, in the same proportion that it reflects credit on the editor, will embalm with additional honours, the memory of SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE; a genius, who in the opulence of his imagination, and his rich and inexhaustible capabilities, as a poet, a logician, and a metaphysician, has not perhaps been surpassed since the days of Milton.
The following letter of Mr. Coleridge, was written a short time before his death, to a young friend. This deliberate exposition of his faith, and at such a season, cancels every random word or sentence, Mr. C. may ever have expressed or written, of an opposing tendency. In thoughtless moments Mr. C. may sometimes have expressed himself unguardedly, attended, on reflection, no doubt with self-accusation, but here in the full prospect of dissolution, he pours forth the genuine and ulterior feelings of his soul.
"To Adam Steinmetz Kinnaird,
My dear godchild,—I offer up the same fervent prayer for you now, as I did kneeling before the altar, when you were baptized into Christ, and solemnly received as a living member of his spiritual body, the church. Years must, pass before you will be able to read with an understanding heart what I now write. But I trust that the all-gracious God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, who, by his only-begotten Son, (all mercies in one sovereign mercy!) has redeemed you from evil ground, and willed you to be born out of darkness, but into light; out of death, but into life; out of sin, but into righteousness; even into 'the Lord our righteousness;' I trust that he will graciously hear the prayers of your dear parents, and be with you as the spirit of health and growth, in body and in mind. My dear godchild, you received from Christ's minister, at the baptismal font, as your Christian name, the name of a most dear friend of your father's, and who was to me even as a son, the late Adam Steinmetz, whose fervent aspirations, and paramount aim, even from early youth, was to be a Christian in thought, word, and deed; in will, mind, and affections. I too, your godfather, have known what the enjoyment and advantages of this life are, and what the more refined pleasures which learning and intellectual power can give; I now, on the eve of my departure, declare to you, and earnestly pray that you may hereafter live and act on the conviction, that health is a great blessing; competence, obtained by honourable industry, a great blessing; and a great blessing it is, to have kind, faithful, and loving friends and relatives; but that the greatest of all blessings, as it is the most ennobling of all privileges, is to be indeed a Christian. But I have been likewise, through a large portion of my later life, a sufferer, sorely affected with bodily pains, languor, and manifold infirmities, and for the last three or four years have, with few and brief intervals, been confined to a sick room, and at this moment, in great weakness and heaviness, write from a sick bed, hopeless of recovery, yet without prospect of a speedy removal. And I thus, on the brink of the grave, solemnly bear witness to you, that the Almighty Redeemer, most gracious in his promises to them that truly seek him, is faithful to perform what he has promised; and has reserved, under all pains and infirmities, the peace that passeth all understanding, with the supporting assurance of a reconciled God, who will not withdraw his spirit from me in the conflict, and in his own time will deliver me from the evil one. O my dear godchild! eminently blessed are they who begin early to seek, fear, and love, their God, trusting wholly in the righteousness and mediation of their Lord, Redeemer, Saviour, and everlasting High Priest, Jesus Christ. Oh, preserve this as a legacy and bequest from your unseen godfather and friend,
S. T. Coleridge.
July 13th, 1834, Grove, Highgate."
Is the writer of this epistle the man, who twenty years before, even coveted annihilation! Is this the man, who so long preferred, to all things else, the "Circean chalice!" Is this he, who at one time, learned to his unutterable dismay, what a sin was, "against an imperishable being, such as is the soul of man." Is this he, whose will was once extinguished by an unhallowed passion, and he himself borne along toward perdition by a flood of intemperance! Is this the man who resisted the light, till darkness entered his mind, and with it a "glimpse of outer darkness!" Is this he, who feared that his own inveterate and aggravated crimes would exclude him, from that heaven, the road to which he was tracing out for others! Is this he, that through successive years, contended with the severest mental and bodily afflictions; who knew the cause, but rejected the remedy?—who, in 1807, declared himself "rolling rudderless," "the wreck of what he once was," "with an unceasing overwhelming sensation of wretchedness?" and in 1814, who still pronounced himself the endurer of all that was "wretched, helpless, and hopeless?" Samuel Taylor Coleridge is the man on whom all these charges and fearful anticipations once rested: but he it is fervently hoped, was changed; that he was renovated; that, when refuge failed, an unseen power subdued the rebellious, and softened the hard; and that he approached the verge of life in the serenity of faith and hope.
Before the effect of this letter, the eccentricities of S. T. Coleridge—his indiscretions, his frailties, vanish away. There is in it a mellowed character, accordant with a proximity to the eternal state, when alone the objects of time assume their true dimensions; when, earth receding; eternity opening; the spirit, called to launch its untried bark on the dark and stormy waters that separate both worlds, descries light afar, and leans, as its only solace, on the hope of the christian.