I have written plainly and decisively, my dear Sir! I wish to avoid not only evil, but the 'appearances' of evil. This is a world of calumnies! Yea! there is an imposthume in the large tongue of this world ever ready to break, and it is well to prevent the contents from being sputtered into one's face. My Wife thanks you for your kind inquiries respecting her. She and our Infant are well—only the latter has met with a little accident—a burn, which is doing well.
To Mrs. Lloyd and all your children present my remembrances, and believe me in all esteem and friendliness, Yours sincerely, S. T. COLERIDGE. [1] Sunday, December 4, 1796.
[Footnote 1: To this letter Mr. Lloyd seems to have returned the question, How could Coleridge live without companions? The answer came quickly, as we learn from a letter from Coleridge to Poole {'Letters', I, p. 186}, in which he mentions Mr. Lloyd's query and quotes his own characteristic reply: "I shall have six companions: My Sara, my babe, my own shaping and disquisitive mind, my books, my beloved friend Thomas Poole, and lastly, Nature looking at me with a thousand looks of beauty, and speaking to me in a thousand melodies of love. If I were capable of being tired with all these, I should then detect a vice in my nature, and would fly to habitual solitude to eradicate it." Coleridge's letter to Mr. Lloyd, containing this passage, seems to have been lost. Note by E. V. Lucas.]
The 'Ode to the Departing Year,' Coleridge tells us, was written on 24th, 25th, and 26th December, 1796. It was first printed in the 'Cambridge Intelligencer' of 31st December, and then republished, along with the 'Lines to a Young Man who abandoned himself to a Causeless Melancholy' (probably Charles Lloyd), in quarto form of 16 pages. It was then prefaced by the following letter:
LETTER 47. TO THOMAS POOLE, OF STOWEY. DEDICATION TO THE "ODE TO THE DEPARTING YEAR."
My dear Friend,
Soon after the commencement of this month, the editor of the 'Cambridge Intelligencer' (a newspaper conducted with so much ability, and such unmixed and fearless zeal for the interests of piety and freedom, that I cannot but think my poetry honoured by being permitted to appear in it) requested me, by letter, to furnish him with some lines for the last day of this year. I promised him that I would make the attempt; but almost immediately after, a rheumatic complaint seized on my head, and continued to prevent the possibility of poetic composition till within the last three days. So in the course of the last three days the following Ode was produced. In general, when an author informs the public that his production was struck off in a great hurry, he offers an insult, not an excuse. But I trust that the present case is an exception, and that the peculiar circumstances which obliged me to write with such unusual rapidity give a propriety to my professions of it: "nec nunc eam apud te jacto, sed et ceteris indico; ne quis asperiore limae carmen examinet, et a confuso scriptum et quod frigidum erat ni statim traderem." (I avail myself of the words of Statius, and hope that I shall likewise be able to say of any weightier publication, what 'he' has declared of his Thebaid, that it had been tortured with a laborious polish.)
For me to discuss the 'literary' merits of this hasty composition were idle and presumptuous. If it be found to possess that impetuosity of transition, and that precipitation of fancy and feeling, which are the 'essential' excellencies of the sublimer Ode, its deficiency in less important respects will be easily pardoned by those from whom alone praise could give me pleasure: and whose minuter criticisms will be disarmed by the reflection, that these lines were conceived "not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of Academic Groves, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow."[1] I am more anxious lest the 'moral' spirit of the Ode should be mistaken. You, I am sure, will not fail to recollect that among the ancients, the Bard and the Prophet were one and the same character; and you 'know' that although I prophesy curses, I pray fervently for blessings. Farewell, Brother of my Soul!
—O ever found the same
And trusted and beloved!
Never without an emotion of honest pride do I subscribe myself