I shall be alone on Sunday, and shall be happy to spend it with you. Ever since the disappearance of a most unsightly eruption on my Face I have been, with but short intermission, annoyed with the noise as of a distant Forge hammer incessantly sounding, so that for some time I actually supposed it to be an outward sound. To me, who never before knew by any sensation that I had a head upon my shoulders, this you may suppose is extremely harassing to the spirits and distractive of my attention. Mrs. Gillman, on stepping from my attic, slipt on the first step of a steep flight of nine high stairs, precipitated herself and fell head foremost on the fifth stair; and when at the piercing scream I rushed out, I found her lying on the landing place, her head at the wall. Even now the Image, and the Terror of the Image, blends with the recollection of the Past a strange expectancy, a fearful sense of a something still to come; and breaks in, and makes stoppages, as it were, in my Thanks to God for her providential escape. For an escape we all must think it, though the small bone of her left arm was broken, and her wrist sprained. She went without a light, though (Oh! the vanity of Prophecies, the truth of which can be established only by the proof of their uselessness) two nights before I had expostulated with her on this account with some warmth, having previously more than once remonstrated against it, on stairs not familiar and without carpeting.
As I shall rely on your spending Sunday here, and with me alone, I shall defer to that time all but my tenderest regards to Mrs. Allsop, and the superfluous assurance that I am evermore, my dearest Allsop,
Your most cordial, attached, and
Affectionate friend,
S. T. Coleridge.
T. Allsop, Esq.
P.S.—You will be delighted with my new room.
Letter 209. To Allsop
Dec. 24th, 1823.
My dearest Allsop,