Henley, Thursday night, February 6 [1794].
Dear Tuckett,—I have this moment received your long letter! The Tuesday before last, an accident of the Reading Fair, our regiment was disposed of for the week in and about the towns within ten miles of Reading, and, as it was not known before we set off to what places we would go, my letters were kept at the Reading post-office till our return. I was conveyed to Henley-upon-Thames, which place our regiment left last Tuesday; but I am ordered to remain on account of these dreadfully troublesome eruptions, and that I might nurse my comrade, who last Friday sickened of the confluent smallpox. So here I am, videlicet the Henley workhouse.[41] It is a little house of one apartment situated in the midst of a large garden, about a hundred yards from the house. It is four strides in length and three in breadth; has four windows, which look to all the winds. The almost total want of sleep, the putrid smell, and the fatiguing struggles with my poor comrade during his delirium are nearly too much for me in my present state. In return I enjoy external peace, and kind and respectful behaviour from the people of the workhouse. Tuckett, your motives must have been excellent ones; how could they be otherwise! As an agent, therefore, you are blameless, but your efforts in my behalf demand my gratitude—that my heart will pay you, into whatever depth of horror your mistaken activity may eventually have precipitated me. As an agent, you stand acquitted, but the action was morally base. In an hour of extreme anguish, under the most solemn imposition of secrecy, I entrusted my place and residence to the young men at Christ’s Hospital; the intelligence which you extorted from their imbecility should have remained sacred with you. It lost not the obligation of secrecy by the transfer. But your motives justify you? To the eye of your friendship the divulging might have appeared necessary, but what shadow of necessity is there to excuse you in showing my letters—to stab the very heart of confidence. You have acted, Tuckett, so uniformly well that reproof must be new to you. I doubtless shall have offended you. I would to God that I, too, possessed the tender irritableness of unhandled sensibility. Mine is a sensibility gangrened with inward corruption and the keen searching of the air from without. Your gossip with the commanding officer seems so totally useless and unmotived that I almost find a difficulty in believing it.
A letter from my brother George! I feel a kind of pleasure that it is not directed—it lies unopened—am I not already sufficiently miserable? The anguish of those who love me, of him beneath the shadow of whose protection I grew up—does it not plant the pillow with thorns and make my dreams full of terrors? Yet I dare not burn the letter—it seems as if there were a horror in the action. One pang, however acute, is better than long-continued solicitude. My brother George possessed the cheering consolation of conscience—but I am talking I know not what—yet there is a pleasure, doubtless an exquisite pleasure, mingled up in the most painful of our virtuous emotions. Alas! my poor mother! What an intolerable weight of guilt is suspended over my head by a hair on one hand; and if I endure to live—the look ever downward—insult, pity, hell! God or Chaos, preserve me! What but infinite Wisdom or infinite Confusion can do it?
XXII. TO THE REV. GEORGE COLERIDGE.
February 8, 1794.
My more than brother! What shall I say? What shall I write to you? Shall I profess an abhorrence of my past conduct? Ah me! too well do I know its iniquity! But to abhor! this feeble and exhausted heart supplies not so strong an emotion. O my wayward soul! I have been a fool even to madness. What shall I dare to promise? My mind is illegible to myself. I am lost in the labyrinth, the trackless wilderness of my own bosom. Truly may I say, “I am wearied of being saved.” My frame is chill and torpid. The ebb and flow of my hopes and fears has stagnated into recklessness. One wish only can I read distinctly in my heart, that it were possible for me to be forgotten as though I had never been! The shame and sorrow of those who loved me! The anguish of him who protected me from my childhood upwards, the sore travail of her who bore me! Intolerable images of horror! They haunt my sleep, they enfever my dreams! O that the shadow of Death were on my eyelids, that I were like the loathsome form by which I now sit! O that without guilt I might ask of my Maker annihilation! My brother, my brother! pray for me, comfort me, my brother! I am very wretched, and, though my complaint be bitter, my stroke is heavier than my groaning.
S. T. Coleridge.
XXIII. TO THE SAME.
Tuesday night, February 11, 1794.
I am indeed oppressed, oppressed with the greatness of your love! Mine eyes gush out with tears, my heart is sick and languid with the weight of unmerited kindness. I had intended to have given you a minute history of my thoughts and actions for the last two years of my life. A most severe and faithful history of the heart would it have been—the Omniscient knows it. But I am so universally unwell, and the hour so late, that I must defer it till to-morrow. To-night I shall have a bed in a separate room from my comrade, and, I trust, shall have repaired my strength by sleep ere the morning. For eight days and nights I have not had my clothes off. My comrade is not dead; there is every hope of his escaping death. Closely has he been pursued by the mighty hunter! Undoubtedly, my brother, I could wish to return to College; I know what I must suffer there, but deeply do I feel what I ought to suffer. Is my brother James still at Salisbury? I will write to him, to all.