but last night I had not only a calmer night, without roaming in my dreams through any of Swedenborg’s Hells modéré; but arose this morning lighter and with a sense of relief.
I scarce know whether the enclosed Detenu[125] is worth enclosing or reading. I fancy that I send it because I cannot write at any length that which is even tolerably adequate to what I wish to say. Mrs. Gillman returned from town—very much pleased with her reception by Mrs. Allsop, and with the impression that it would be her husband’s fault if she did not make him a happy home.
I shall make you smile, as I did dear Mary Lamb, when I say that you sometimes mistake my position. As individual to individual, from my childhood, I do not remember feeling myself either superior or inferior to any human being; except by an act of my own will in cases of real or imagined moral or intellectual superiority. In regard to worldly rank, from eight years old to nineteen, I was habituated, nay, naturalized, to look up to men circumstanced as you are, as my superiors—a large number of our governors, and almost all of those whom we regarded as greater men still, and whom we saw most of, viz. our committee governors, were such—and as neither awake nor asleep have I any other feelings than what I had at Christ’s Hospital, I distinctly remember that I felt a little flush of pride and consequence—just like what we used to feel at school when the boys came running to us—“Coleridge! here’s your friends want you—they are quite grand,” or “It is quite a lady”—when I first heard who you were, and laughed at myself for it with that pleasurable sensation that, spite of my sufferings at that school, still accompanies any sudden re-awakening of our school-boy feelings and notions. And oh, from sixteen to nineteen what hours of Paradise had Allen and I in escorting the Miss Evanses home on a Saturday, who were then at a milliner’s whom we used to think, and who I believe really was, such a nice lady;—and we used to carry thither, of a summer morning, the pillage of the flower gardens within six miles of town, with Sonnet or Love Rhyme wrapped round the nose-gay. To be feminine, kind, and genteelly (what I should now call neatly) dressed, these were the only things to which my head, heart, or imagination had any polarity, and what I was then, I still am.
God bless you and yours,
S. T. Coleridge.
T. Allsop, Esq.
Letter 201. To Allsop
March 22nd, 1822.
My dear Friend,
Mr. Watson is but now returned. I was about to set off to your house and take turns with Mrs. Allsop in watching you. It is a comfort to hear from Watson that he thinks you look not only better than when he saw you before, but more promisingly.