I will begin with the beginning of your (to me most affecting) letter. Not exactly obligation, my entirely beloved and relied-on friend! The soiling hand of the world has dyed and sunk into the sense and import of the term too inseparably, for it to convey the kind and degree of what I feel towards you, on the one scale. I love you so truly, that in the first glance, as it were, and welcome of your anxious affection, it delights me for the very act’s sake. I think only of it and you, or rather both are one and the same, and I live in you. Nor does the complacency suffer any abatement, but becomes more intense and lively. As a mother would talk of the soothing attentions, the sacrifices and devotion of a son, eager to supply every want and anticipate every wish, so I talk to myself concerning you; and I am proud of you, and proud to be the object of what cannot but appear lovely to my judgment, and which the hard contrast in so many heart-withering instances forced on me by the experience of my last twenty years, compels me to feel and value with an additional glow. Lastly, it is a source of strength and comfort to know that the labours and aspirations and sympathies of the genuine and invisible Humanity exist in a social world of their own; that its attractions and assimilations are no Platonic fable, no dancing flames or luminous bubbles on the magic cauldron of my wishes; but that there are, even in this unkind life, spiritual parentages and filiations of the soul. Can there be a counterpoise to these? Not a counterpoise—but as weights in the counter-scale there will come the self-reproach, that spite of all inauspicious obstacles, not in my power to remove without loss of self-respect, I have not done all I could and might have done to prevent my present state of dependence. I am now able to hope that I shall be capable of setting apart such a portion of my useable time to my greater work (in assertion of the ideal truths and à priori probability, and à posteriori internal and external evidence of the historic truth of the Christian religion), as to leave a sufficient portion for a not unprofitable series of articles for pecuniary supply. I entertain some hope, too, that my Logic, which I could begin printing immediately if I could find a publisher willing to undertake it on equitable terms, might prove an exception to the general fate of my publications. It is a long lane that has no turning, and while my own heart bears witness to the genial delight you would feel in assisting me, I know that you would have a more satisfactory gladness in my not needing it.
And now a few, a very few, words on the latter portion of your letter. You know, my dearest Friend, how I acted myself, and that my example cannot be urged in confirmation of my judgment. I certainly strive hard to divest my mind of every prejudice, to look at the question sternly through the principle of Right separated from all mere Expedience, nay, from the question of earthly happiness for its own sake. But I cannot answer to myself that the image of any serious obstacle to your peace of heart, that the Thought of your full development of soul being put a stop to, of a secret anxiety blighting your utility by cankering your happiness, I cannot be sure—I cannot be sure that this may not have made me weigh with a trembling and unsteady hand, and less than half the presumption of error, afforded by the shrinking and recoil of your moral sense or even feeling, would render it my duty and my impulse to bring my conclusion anew to the ordeal of my Reason and Conscience. But on your side, my dear Friend! try with me to contemplate the question as a problem in the science of Morals, in the first instance, and to recollect that there are false or intrusive weights possible in the other scale; that our very virtues may become, or be transformed into temptations to, or occasions of, partial judgment; that we may judge partially against ourselves from the very fear, perhaps contempt, of the contrary; that self may be moodily gratified by self-sacrifice, and that the Heart itself, in its perplexity, may acquiesce for a time in the decision as a more safe way; and, lastly, that the question can only be fully answered, when Self and Neighbour, as equi-distant
from the conscience or God, are blended in the common term, a Human Being: that we are commanded to love ourselves as our Neighbour in the Law that requires a Christian to love his Neighbour as himself.
But indeed I persuade myself that this dissonance is not real between us, and that it would not have seemed to exist, had I continued the subject into the possible particular cases; e.g., suppose a case in which the misery, and so far the moral incapacitation, of both parties were certainly foreseen as the immediate consequence. A morality of Consequences I, you well know, reprobate; but to exclude the necessary effect of an action is to take away all meaning from the word action—to strike Duty with blindness. I repeat it, that I do not, cannot find it in myself to believe, that on any one case, made out in all its limbs, features, and circumstances, your heart and mine would prompt different verdicts.
But the thought of you personally and individually is at present too strong and stirring to permit me to reason on any points. If the weather is at all plausible, we propose to set off on Saturday. I do most earnestly wish that you could accompany us; a steam-vessel would give us three-fourths of the whole day to tête-à-tête conversation. God bless you,
And your affectionate and faithful friend,
S. T. Coleridge.
T. Allsop, Esq.
Cottle saw Coleridge for the last time in 1821. He says “It is a consolation to reflect, that, in the year 1821, being in London, I called to see Mr. Coleridge, at Mr. Gillman’s, when he welcomed me in his former kind and cordial manner. The depressing thought filled my mind, that that would be our final interview in this world, as it was. On my going away, Mr. C. presented me with his Statesman’s Manual, in the title-page of which he wrote—‘Joseph Cottle, from his old and affectionate friend, S. T. Coleridge.’”—(Early Recollections, ii, 177.)