My dear Sara,—I write from the Ferry of Ballater.... This is the first post since the day I left Glasgow. We went thence to Dumbarton (look at Stoddart’s tour, where there is a very good view of Dumbarton Rock and Tower), thence to Loch Lomond, and a single house called Luss—horrible inhospitality and a fiend of a landlady! Thence eight miles up the Lake to E. Tarbet, where the lake is so like Ulleswater that I could scarcely see the difference; crossed over the lake and by a desolate moorland walked to another lake, Loch Katrine, up to a place called Trossachs, the Borrowdale of Scotland, and the only thing which really beats us. You must conceive the Lake of Keswick pushing itself up a mile or two into Borrowdale, winding round Castle Crag, and in and out among all the nooks and promontories, and you must imagine all the mountains more detachedly built up, a general dislocation; every rock its own precipice, with trees young and old. This will give you some faint idea of the place, of which the character is extreme intricacy of effect produced by very simple means. One rocky, high island, four or five promontories, and a Castle Crag, just like that in the gorge of Borrowdale, but not so large. It rained all the way, all the long, long day. We slept in a hay-loft,—that is, Wordsworth, I, and a young man who came in at the Trossachs and joined us. Dorothy had a bed in the hovel, which was varnished so rich with peat smoke an apartment of highly polished [oak] would have been poor to it—it would have wanted the metallic lustre of the smoke-varnished rafters. This was [the pleasantest] evening I had spent since my tour; for Wordsworth’s hypochondriacal feelings keep him silent and self-centred. The next day it still was rain and rain; the ferry-boat was out for the preaching, and we stayed all day in the ferry wet to the skin. Oh, such a wretched hovel! But two Highland lassies,[281] who kept house in the absence of the ferryman and his wife, were very kind, and one of them was beautiful as a vision, and put both Dorothy and me in mind of the Highland girl in William’s “Peter Bell.”[282] We returned to E. Tarbet, I with the rheumatism in my head. And now William proposed to me to leave them and make my way on foot to Loch Katrine, the Trossachs, whence it is only twenty miles to Stirling, where the coach runs through to Edinburgh. He and Dorothy resolved to fight it out. I eagerly caught at the proposal; for the sitting in an open carriage in the rain is death to me, and somehow or other I had not been quite comfortable. So on Monday I accompanied them to Arrochar, on purpose to see the Cobbler which had impressed me so much in Mr. Wilkinson’s drawings; and there I parted with them, having previously sent on all my things to Edinburgh by a Glasgow carrier who happened to be at E. Tarbet. The worst thing was the money. They took twenty-nine guineas, and I six—all our remaining cash. I returned to E. Tarbet; slept there that night; the next day walked to the very head of Loch Lomond to Glen Falloch, where I slept at a cottage-inn, two degrees below John Stanley’s (but the good people were very kind),—meaning from hence to go over the mountains to the head of Loch Katrine again; but hearing from the gude man of the house that it was 40 miles to Glencoe (of which I had formed an idea from Wilkinson’s drawings), and having found myself so happy alone (such blessing is there in perfect liberty!) I walked off. I have walked forty-five miles since then, and, except during the last mile, I am sure I may say I have not met with ten houses. For eighteen miles there are but two habitations! and all that way I met no sheep, no cattle, only one goat! All through moorlands with huge mountains, some craggy and bare, but the most green, with deep pinky channels worn by torrents. Glencoe interested me, but rather disappointed me. There was no superincumbency of crag, and the crags not so bare or precipitous as I had expected. I am now going to cross the ferry for Fort William, for I have resolved to eke out my cash by all sorts of self-denial, and to walk along the whole line of the Forts. I am unfortunately shoeless; there is no town where I can get a pair, and I have no money to spare to buy them, so I expect to enter Perth barefooted. I burnt my shoes in drying them at the boatman’s hovel on Loch Katrine, and I have by this means hurt my heel. Likewise my left leg is a little inflamed, and the rheumatism in the right of my head afflicts me sorely when I begin to grow warm in my bed, chiefly my right eye, ear, cheek, and the three teeth; but, nevertheless, I am enjoying myself, having Nature with solitude and liberty—the liberty natural and solitary, the solitude natural and free! But you must contrive somehow or other to borrow ten pounds, or, if that cannot be, five pounds, for me, and send it without delay, directed to me at the Post Office, Perth. I guess I shall be there in seven days or eight at the furthest; and your letter will be two days getting thither (counting the day you put it into the office at Keswick as nothing); so you must calculate, and if this letter does not reach you in time, that is, within five days from the date hereof, you must then direct to Edinburgh. I will make five pounds do (you must borrow of Mr. Jackson), and I must beg my way for the last three or four days! It is useless repining, but if I had set off myself in the Mail for Glasgow or Stirling, and so gone by foot, as I am now doing, I should have saved twenty-five pounds; but then Wordsworth would have lost it.
I have said nothing of you or my dear children. God bless us all! I have but one untried misery to go through, the loss of Hartley or Derwent, ay, or dear little Sara! In my health I am middling. While I can walk twenty-four miles a day, with the excitement of new objects, I can support myself; but still my sleep and dreams are distressful, and I am hopeless. I take no opiates ... nor have I any temptation; for since my disorder has taken this asthmatic turn opiates produce none but positively unpl[easant effects].
[No signature.]
Mrs. Coleridge,
Greta Hall, Keswick, Cumberland, S. Britain.
CXLI. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.
[Edinburgh], Sunday night, 9 o’clock, September 10, 1803.
My dearest Southey,—I arrived here half an hour ago, and have only read your letters—scarce read them.—O dear friend! it is idle to talk of what I feel—I am stunned at present by this beginning to write, making a beginning of living feeling within me. Whatever comfort I can be to you I will—I have no aversions, no dislikes that interfere with you—whatever is necessary or proper for you becomes ipso facto agreeable to me. I will not stay a day in Edinburgh—or only one to hunt out my clothes. I cannot chitchat with Scotchmen while you are at Keswick, childless![283] Bless you, my dear Southey! I will knit myself far closer to you than I have hitherto done, and my children shall be yours till it please God to send you another.
I have been a wild journey, taken up for a spy and clapped into Fort Augustus, and I am afraid they may [have] frightened poor Sara by sending her off a scrap of a letter I was writing to her. I have walked 263 miles in eight days, so I must have strength somewhere, but my spirits are dreadful, owing entirely to the horrors of every night—I truly dread to sleep. It is no shadow with me, but substantial misery foot-thick, that makes me sit by my bedside of a morning and cry.—I have abandoned all opiates, except ether be one.... And when you see me drink a glass of spirit-and-water, except by prescription of a physician, you shall despise me,—but still I cannot get quiet rest.
When on my bed my limbs I lay,
It hath not been my use to pray
With moving lips or bended knees;
But silently, by slow degrees,
My spirit I to Love compose,5
In humble trust my eyelids close,
With reverential resignation,
No wish conceiv’d, no thought exprest,
Only a Sense of supplication,
A Sense o’er all my soul imprest10
That I am weak, yet not unblest,
Since round me, in me, everywhere
Eternal strength and Goodness are!—
But yester-night I pray’d aloud
In anguish and in agony,15
Awaking from the fiendish crowd
Of shapes and thoughts that tortur’d me!
Desire with loathing strangely mixt,
On wild or hateful objects fixt.
Sense of revenge, the powerless will,20
Still baffled and consuming still;
Sense of intolerable wrong,
And men whom I despis’d made strong!
Vain glorious threats, unmanly vaunting,
Bad men my boasts and fury taunting;25
Rage, sensual passion, mad’ning Brawl,
And shame and terror over all!
Deeds to be hid that were not hid,
Which all confus’d I might not know,
Whether I suffer’d or I did:30
For all was Horror, Guilt, and Woe,
My own or others still the same,
Life-stifling Fear, soul-stifling Shame!
Thus two nights pass’d: the night’s dismay
Sadden’d and stunn’d the boding day.35
I fear’d to sleep: Sleep seemed to be
Disease’s worst malignity.
The third night, when my own loud scream
Had freed me from the fiendish dream,
O’ercome by sufferings dark and wild,40
I wept as I had been a child;
And having thus by Tears subdued
My Trouble to a milder mood,
Such punishments, I thought, were due
To Natures, deepliest stain’d with Sin;45
Still to be stirring up anew
The self-created Hell within,
The Horror of the crimes to view,
To know and loathe, yet wish to do!
With such let fiends make mockery—50
But I—Oh, wherefore this on me?
Frail is my soul, yea, strengthless wholly,
Unequal, restless, melancholy;
But free from Hate and sensual Folly!
To live belov’d is all I need,55
And whom I love, I love indeed,
And etc., etc., etc., etc.[284]
I do not know how I came to scribble down these verses to you—my heart was aching, my head all confused—but they are, doggerel as they may be, a true portrait of my nights. What to do, I am at a loss; for it is hard thus to be withered, having the faculties and attainments which I have. We will soon meet, and I will do all I can to console poor Edith.—O dear, dear Southey! my head is sadly confused. After a rapid walk of thirty-three miles your letters have had the effect of perfect intoxication in my head and eyes. Change! change! change! O God of Eternity! When shall we be at rest in thee?