My dear Poole,—Here I am just returned from a little tour[207] of five days, having seen rocks and waterfalls, and a pretty river or two; some wide landscapes, and a multitude of ash-tree dells, and the blue waters of the “roaring sea,” as little Hartley says, who on Friday fell down stairs and injured his arm. ’Tis swelled and sprained, but, God be praised, not broken. The views of Totness and Dartmouth are among the most impressive things I have ever seen; but in general what of Devonshire I have lately seen is tame to Quantock, Porlock, Culbone, and Linton. So much for the country! Now as to the inhabitants thereof, they are bigots, unalphabeted in the first feelings of liberality; of course in all they speak and all they do not speak, they give good reasons for the opinions which they hold, viz. they hold the propriety of slavery, an opinion which, being generally assented to by Englishmen, makes Pitt and Paul the first among the moral fitnesses of things. I have three brothers, that is to say, relations by gore. Two are parsons and one is a colonel. George and the colonel, good men as times go—very good men—but alas! we have neither tastes nor feelings in common. This I wisely learnt from their conversation, and did not suffer them to learn it from mine. What occasion for it? Hunger and thirst—roast fowls, mealy potatoes, pies, and clouted cream! bless the inventors of them! An honest philosopher may find therewith preoccupation for his mouth, keeping his heart and brain, the latter in his scull, the former in the pericardium some five or six inches from the roots of his tongue! Church and King! Why I drink Church and King, mere cutaneous scabs of loyalty which only ape the king’s evil, but affect not the interior of one’s health. Mendicant sores! it requires some little caution to keep them open, but they heal of their own accord. Who (such a friend as I am to the system of fraternity) could refuse such a toast at the table of a clergyman and a colonel, his brother? So, my dear Poole! I live in peace. Of the other party, I have dined with a Mr. Northmore, a pupil of Wakefield, who possesses a fine house half a mile from Exeter. In his boyhood he was at my father’s school.... But Southey and self called upon him as authors—he having edited a Tryphiodorus and part of Plutarch, and being a notorious anti-ministerialist and free-thinker. He welcomed us as he ought, and we met at dinner Hucks (at whose house I dine Wednesday), the man who toured with me in Wales and afterwards published his “Tour,” Kendall, a poet, who really looks like a man of genius, pale and gnostic, has the merit of being a Jacobin or so, but is a shallowist—and finally a Mr. Banfill, a man of sense, information, and various literature, and most perfectly a gentleman—in short a pleasant man. At his house we dine to-morrow. Northmore himself is an honest, vehement sort of a fellow who splutters out all his opinions like a fiz-gig, made of gunpowder not thoroughly dry, sudden and explosive, yet ever with a certain adhesive blubberliness of elocution. Shallow! shallow! A man who can read Greek well, but shallow! Yet honest, too, and who ardently wishes the well-being of his fellowmen, and believes that without more liberty and more equality this well-being is not possible. He possesses a most noble library. The victory at Novi![208] If I were a good caricaturist I would sketch off Suwarrow in a car of conquest drawn by huge crabs!! With what retrograde majesty the vehicle advances! He may truly say he came off with éclat, that is, a claw! I shall be back at Stowey in less than three weeks....
We hope your dear mother remains well. Give my filial love to her. God bless her! I beg my kind love to Ward. God bless you and
S. T. Coleridge.
Monday night.
CI. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.
Stowey, Tuesday evening, October 15, 1799.
It is fashionable among our philosophizers to assert the existence of a surplus of misery in the world, which, in my opinion, is no proof that either systematic thinking or unaffected self-observation is fashionable among them. But Hume wrote, and the French imitated him, and we the French, and the French us; and so philosophisms fly to and fro, in series of imitated imitations—shadows of shadows of shadows of a farthing-candle placed between two looking-glasses. For in truth, my dear Southey! I am harassed with the rheumatism in my head and shoulders, not without arm-and-thigh-twitches—but when the pain intermits it leaves my sensitive frame so sensitive! My enjoyments are so deep, of the fire, of the candle, of the thought I am thinking, of the old folio I am reading, and the silence of the silent house is so most and very delightful, that upon my soul! the rheumatism is no such bad thing as people make for. And yet I have, and do suffer from it, in much pain and sleeplessness and often sick at stomach through indigestion of the food, which I eat from compulsion. Since I received your former letter, I have spent a few days at Upcott;[209] but was too unwell to be comfortable, so I returned yesterday. Poor Tom![210] he has an adventurous calling. I have so wholly forgotten my geography that I don’t know where Ferrol is, whether in France or Spain. Your dear mother must be very anxious indeed. If he return safe, it will have been good. God grant he may!
Massena![211] and what say you of the resurrection and glorification of the Saviour of the East after his trials in the wilderness? (I am afraid that this is a piece of blasphemy; but it was in simple verity such an infusion of animal spirits into me.) Buonaparte! Buonaparte! dear, dear, dear Buonaparte! It would be no bad fun to hear the clerk of the Privy Council read this paragraph before Pitt, etc. “You ill-looking frog-voiced reptile! mind you lay the proper emphasis on the third dear, or I’ll split your clerkship’s skull for you!” Poole ordered a paper. He has found out, he says, why the newspapers had become so indifferent to him. Inventive Genius! He begs his kind remembrances to you. In consequence of the news he burns like Greek Fire, under all the wets and waters of this health-and-harvest destroying weather. He flames while his barley smokes. “See!” he says, “how it grows out again, ruining the prospects of those who had cut it down!” You are harvest-man enough, I suppose, to understand the metaphor. Jackson[212] is, I believe, out of all doubt a bad man. Why is it, if it be, and I fear it is, why is it that the studies of music and painting are so unfavourable to the human heart? Painters have been commonly very clever men, which is not so generally the case with musicians, but both alike are almost uniformly debauchees. It is superfluous to say how much your account of Bampfylde[213] interested me. Predisposition to madness gave him a cast of originality, and he had a species of taste which only genius could give; but his genius does not appear a powerful or ebullient faculty (nearer to Lamb’s than to the Gebir-man [Landor], so I judge from the few specimens I have seen). If you think otherwise, you are right I doubt not. I shall be glad to give Mr. and Mrs. Keenan[214] the right hand of welcome with looks and tones in fit accompaniment. For the wife of a man of genius who sympathises effectively with her husband in his habits and feelings is a rara avis with me; though a vast majority of her own sex and too many of ours will scout her for a rara piscis. If I am well enough, Sara and I go to Bristol in a few days. I hope they will not come in the mean time. It is singularly unpleasant to me that I cannot renew our late acquaintances in Exeter without creating very serious uneasinesses at Ottery, Northmore is so preëminently an offensive character to the aristocrats. He sent Paine’s books as a present to a clergyman of my brother’s acquaintance, a Mr. Markes. This was silly enough....
I will set about “Christabel” with all speed; but I do not think it a fit opening poem. What I think would be a fit opener, and what I would humbly lay before you as the best plan of the next Anthologia, I will communicate shortly in another letter entirely on this subject. Mohammed I will not forsake; but my money-book I must write first. In the last, or at least in a late “Monthly Magazine” was an Essay on a Jesuitic conspiracy and about the Russians. There was so much genius in it that I suspected William Taylor for the author; but the style was so nauseously affected, so absurdly pedantic, that I was half-angry with myself for the suspicion. Have you seen Bishop Prettyman’s book? I hear it is a curiosity. You remember Scott the attorney, who held such a disquisition on my simile of property resembling matter rather than blood? and eke of St. John? and you remember, too, that I shewed him in my face that there was no room for him in my heart? Well, sir! this man has taken a most deadly hatred to me, and how do you think he revenges himself? He imagines that I write for the “Morning Post,” and he goes regularly to the coffee-houses, calls for the paper, and reading it he observes aloud, “What damn’d stuff of poetry is always crammed in this paper! such damn’d silly nonsense! I wonder what coxcomb it is that writes it! I wish the paper was kicked out of the coffee-house.” Now, but for Cruikshank, I could play Scott a precious trick by sending to Stuart, “The Angry Attorney, a True Tale,” and I know more than enough of Scott’s most singular parti-coloured rascalities to make a most humorous and biting satire of it.
I have heard of a young Quaker who went to the Lobby, with a monstrous military cock-hat on his head, with a scarlet coat and up to his mouth in flower’d muslin, swearing too most bloodily—all “that he might not be unlike other people!” A Quaker’s son getting himself christen’d to avoid being remarkable is as improbable a lie as ever self-delusion permitted the heart to impose on the understanding, or the understanding to invent without the consent of the heart. But so it is. Soon after Lloyd’s arrival at Cambridge I understand Christopher Wordsworth wrote his uncle, Mr. Cookson,[215] that Lloyd was going to read Greek with him. Cookson wrote back recommending caution, and whether or no an intimacy with so marked a character might not be prejudicial to his academical interests. (This is his usual mild manner.) Christopher Wordsworth returned for answer that Lloyd was by no means a democrat, and as a proof of it, transcribed the most favourable passages from the “Edmund Oliver,” and here the affair ended. You remember Lloyd’s own account of this story, of course, more accurately than I, and can therefore best judge how far my suspicions of falsehood and exaggeration were well-founded. My dear Southey! the having a bad heart and not having a good one are different things. That Charles Lloyd has a bad heart, I do not even think; but I venture to say, and that openly, that he has not a good one. He is unfit to be any man’s friend, and to all but a very guarded man he is a perilous acquaintance. Your conduct towards him, while it is wise, will, I doubt not, be gentle. Of confidence he is not worthy; but social kindness and communicativeness purely intellectual can do you no harm, and may be the means of benefiting his character essentially. Aut ama me quia sum Dei, aut ut sim Dei, said St. Augustin, and in the laxer sense of the word “Ama” there is wisdom in the expression notwithstanding its wit. Besides, it is the way of peace. From Bristol perhaps I go to London, but I will write you where I am. Yours affectionately,