S. T. Coleridge.
CXLII. TO THE SAME.
Edinburgh, Tuesday morning, September 13, 1803.
My dear Southey,—I wrote you a strange letter, I fear. But, in truth, yours affected my wretched stomach, and my head, in such a way that I wrote mechanically in the wake of the first vivid idea. No conveyance left or leaves this place for Carlisle earlier than to-morrow morning, for which I have taken my place. If the coachman do not turn Panaceist, and cure all my ills by breaking my neck, I shall be at Carlisle on Wednesday, midnight, and whether I shall go on in the coach to Penrith, and walk from thence, or walk off from Carlisle at once, depends on two circumstances, first, whether the coach goes on with no other than a common bait to Penrith, and secondly, whether, if it should not do so, I can trust my clothes, etc., to the coachman safely, to be left at Penrith. There is but eight miles difference in the walk, and eight or nine shillings difference in the expense. At all events, I trust that I shall be with you on Thursday by dinner time, if you dine at half-past two or three o’clock. God bless you! I will go and call on Elmsley.[285] What a wonderful city Edinburgh[286] is! What alternation of height and depth! A city looked at in the polish’d back of a Brobdingnag spoon held lengthways, so enormously stretched-up are the houses! When I first looked down on it, as the coach drove up on the higher street, I cannot express what I felt—such a section of wasps’ nests striking you with a sort of bastard sublimity from the enormity and infinity of its littleness—the infinity swelling out the mind, the enormity striking it with wonder. I think I have seen an old plate of Montserrat that struck me with the same feeling, and I am sure I have seen huge quarries of lime and free stone in which the shafts or strata stood perpendicularly instead of horizontally with the same high thin slices and corresponding interstices. I climbed last night to the crags just below Arthur’s Seat—itself a rude triangle-shaped-base cliff, and looked down on the whole city and firth—the sun then setting behind the magnificent rock, crested by the castle. The firth was full of ships, and I counted fifty-four heads of mountains, of which at least forty-four were cones or pyramids. The smoke was rising from ten thousand houses, each smoke from some one family. It was an affecting sight to me! I stood gazing at the setting sun, so tranquil to a passing look, and so restless and vibrating to one who looked stedfast; and then, all at once, turning my eyes down upon the city, it and all its smokes and figures became all at once dipped in the brightest blue-purple: such a sight that I almost grieved when my eyes recovered their natural tone! Meantime, Arthur’s Crag, close behind me, was in dark blood-like crimson, and the sharpshooters were behind exercising minutely, and had chosen that place on account of the fine thunder echo which, indeed, it would be scarcely possible for the ear to distinguish from thunder. The passing a day or two, quite unknown, in a strange city, does a man’s heart good. He rises “a sadder and a wiser man.”
I had not read that part in your second requesting me to call on Elmsley, else perhaps I should have been talking instead of learning and feeling.
Walter Scott is at Lasswade, five or six miles from Edinburgh. His house in Edinburgh is divinely situated. It looks up a street, a new magnificent street, full upon the rock and the castle, with its zigzag walls like painters’ lightning—the other way down upon cultivated fields, a fine expanse of water, either a lake or not to be distinguished from one, and low pleasing hills beyond—the country well wooded and cheerful. “I’ faith,” I exclaimed, “the monks formerly, but the poets now, know where to fix their habitations.” There are about four things worth going into Scotland for,[287] to one who has been in Cumberland and Westmoreland: First, the views of all the islands at the foot of Loch Lomond from the top of the highest island called Inch devanna (sic); secondly, the Trossachs at the foot of Loch Katrine; third, the chamber and ante-chamber of the Falls of Foyers (the fall itself is very fine, and so, after rain, is White-Water Dash, seven miles below Keswick and very like it); and how little difference a height makes, you know as well as I. No fall of itself, perhaps, can be worth giving a long journey to see, to him who has seen any fall of water, but the pool and whole rent of the mountain is truly magnificent. Fourthly and lastly, the City of Edinburgh. Perhaps I might add Glencoe. It is at all events a good make-weight and very well worth going to see, if a man be a Tory and hate the memory of William the Third, which I am very willing to do; for the more of these fellows dead and living one hates, the less spleen and gall there remains for those with whom one is likely to have anything to do in real life....
I am tolerably well, meaning the day. My last night was not such a noisy night of horrors as three nights out of four are with me.[288] O God! when a man blesses the loud screams of agony that awake him night after night, night after night, and when a man’s repeated night screams have made him a nuisance in his own house, it is better to die than to live. I have a joy in life that passeth all understanding; but it is not in its present Epiphany and Incarnation. Bodily torture! All who have been with me can bear witness that I can bear it like an Indian. It is constitutional with me to sit still, and look earnestly upon it and ask it what it is? Yea, often and often, the seeds of Rabelaisism germinating in me, I have laughed aloud at my own poor metaphysical soul. But these burrs by day of the will and the reason, these total eclipses by night! Oh, it is hard to bear them. I am complaining bitterly to others, I should be administrating comfort; but even this is one way of comfort. There are states of mind in which even distraction is still a diversion; we must none of us brood; we are not made to be brooders.
God bless you, dear friend, and
S. T. Coleridge.
Mrs. C. will get clean flannels ready for me.