Letter 163. To Wade
Bristol, June 26th, 1814.
Dear sir,
For I am unworthy to call any good man friend—much less you, whose hospitality and love I have abused; accept, however, my intreaties for your forgiveness, and for your prayers.
Conceive a poor miserable wretch, who for many years has been attempting to beat off pain, by a constant recurrence to the vice that reproduces it. Conceive a spirit in hell, employed in tracing out for others the road to that heaven, from which his crimes exclude him! In short, conceive whatever is most wretched, helpless, and hopeless, and you will form as tolerable a notion of my state, as it is possible for a good man to have.
I used to think the text in St. James that “he who offended in one point, offends in all,” very harsh: but I now feel the awful, the tremendous truth of it. In the one crime of opium, what crime have I not made myself guilty of!—Ingratitude to my Maker! and to my benefactors—injustice! and unnatural cruelty to my poor children!—self-contempt for my repeated promise—breach, nay, too often, actual falsehood!
After my death, I earnestly entreat, that a full and unqualified narration of my wretchedness, and of its guilty cause, may be made public, that at least, some little good may be effected by the direful example.
May God Almighty bless you, and have mercy on your still affectionate, and in his heart, grateful—
S. T. Coleridge.[88]
Meantime, during all this strange transaction with Cottle and Wade, Coleridge during the year 1814, was never more brilliant in his intellectual output, whether as lecturer, letter-writer, or political writer. His letters at this date to Charles Mathews (Letters, 621), to Sir George Beaumont (Col. Mem.) of 9th June; to John Murray (Letters, 624), about a projected translation of Faust; to Daniel Stuart, of 12th September and 30th October; and to John Kenyon, of 3rd November 1814 (Letters, 627–64), his Essays on the Fine Arts to Felix Fairley’s Bristol Journal (August, 1814, see Bohn Lib. Misc. Works, 4–52), and his six political letters to the Editor of The Courier from 20th September to 10th December 1814, show no diminution of intellectual power, but rather sustained mental vigour. C. R. Leslie’s account of Coleridge at this date, too, leaves us to imagine a very different Coleridge from the one depicted in the Reminiscences of this period. Leslie was accompanying the Allstons from London to Bristol. Mr. Allston fell ill at Salt Hill, and Coleridge was sent for from town. Coleridge came to Salt Hill the same afternoon, accompanied by his friend, Dr. Tathill. He stayed and nursed Allston. “We were kept up late,” says Leslie, “in consequence of the critical condition of Allston, and when he retired, Coleridge, seeing a copy of Knickerbocker’s History of New York lying on the table, took it up and began reading. I went to bed, and I think he must have been up the greater part of the night, for the next day I found he had nearly got through Knickerbocker. He was delighted with it.” Leslie adds: “At Salt Hill, and on some other occasions, I witnessed his performance of the duties of friendship in a manner which few men of his constitutional indolence could have roused themselves to equal” (Autobiography, i, pp. 33–35).