"S. T. COLERIDGE."
Whether Coleridge had given Southey the opportunity to try his skill at the drama or not does not appear; but the following letter to Cottle shows that he had addressed himself to the task of composing a tragedy, evidently "Osorio".
LETTER 56. TO COTTLE
Stowey, May, 1797.
My dearest Cottle,
I love and respect you as a brother, and my memory deceives me woefully, if I have not evidenced, by the animated tone of my conversation when we have been tete-a-tete, how much your conversation interested me. But when last in Bristol, the day I meant to devote to you, was such a day of sadness, I could do nothing. On the Saturday, the Sunday, and ten days after my arrival at Stowey, I felt a depression too dreadful to be described.
So much I felt my genial spirits droop,
My hopes all flat; Nature within me seemed
In all her functions, weary of herself,
Wordsworth's [1] conversation aroused me somewhat, but even now I am not the man I have been, and I think I never shall. A sort of calm hopelessness diffuses itself over my heart. Indeed every mode of life which has promised me bread and cheese, has been, one after another, torn away from me, but God remains. I have no immediate pecuniary distress, having received ten pounds from Lloyd. I employ myself now on a book of morals in answer to Godwin, and on my tragedy…
There are some poets who write too much at their ease, from the facility with which they please themselves. They do not often enough
Feel their burdened breast
Heaving beneath incumbent Deity.