The dedication to the Wedgwoods, which you recommend, would be indelicate and unmeaning. If, after four or five years, I shall have finished some work of importance, which could not have been written, but in an unanxious seclusion, to them I will dedicate it; for the public will have owed the work to them who gave me the power of that unanxious seclusion.
As to anonymous publications, depend on it, you are deceived. Wordsworth's name is nothing to a large number of persons; mine stinks. The "Essay on Man", the "Botanic Garden", the "Pleasures of Memory", and many other most popular works, were published anonymously. However, I waive all reasoning, and simply state it as an unaltered opinion, that you should proceed as before, with the "Ancient Mariner".
The picture shall be sent.[1] For your love gifts and bookloans accept our hearty love. The "Joan of Arc" is a divine book; it opens lovelily. I hope that you will take off some half dozen of our "Poems" on great paper, even as the "Joan of Arc".
Cottle, my dear Cottle, I meant to have written you an Essay on the Metaphysics of Typography, but I have not time. Take a few hints, without the abstruse reasons for them, with which I mean to favour you. 18 lines in a page, the line closely printed, certainly more closely printed than those of the "Joan";[2] ("Oh, by all means, closer, "W. Wordsworth"") equal ink, and large margins; that is beauty; it may even, under your immediate care, mingle the sublime! And now, my dear Cottle, may God love you and me, who am, with most unauthorish feelings,
Your true friend,
S. T. COLERIDGE.
P.S.—I walked to Linton the day after you left us, and returned on
Saturday. I walked in one day, and returned in one.[3]
[Footnote 1: A portrait of Mr. Wordsworth, correctly and beautifully executed, by an artist then at Stowey; now in my possession. [Cottle's note.]
[Footnote 2: "Joan of Arc", 4to first edition, had twenty lines in a page. [Cottle.]
[Footnote 3: Letters LXXXVI-XCII follow 81.]