S. T. Coleridge.
Our regiment is at Reading, and Hounslow, and Maidenhead, and Kensington; our headquarters, Reading, Berks. The commanding officer there, Lieutenant Hopkinson, our adjutant.
To Captain James Coleridge, Tiverton, Devonshire.
XXV. TO THE REV. GEORGE COLERIDGE.
The Compasses, High Wycombe, March 12, 1794.
My dear Brother,—Accept my poor thanks for the day’s enclosed, which I received safely. I explained the whole matter to the adjutant, who laughed and said I had been used scurvily; he deferred settling the bill till Thursday morning. A Captain Ogle,[42] of our regiment, who is returned from abroad, has taken great notice of me. When he visits the stables at night he always enters into conversation with me, and to-day, finding from the corporal’s report that I was unwell, he sent me a couple of bottles of wine. These things demand my gratitude. I wrote last week—currente calamo—a declamation for my friend Allen on the comparative good and evil of novels. The credit which he got for it I should almost blush to tell you. All the fellows have got copies, and they meditate having it printed, and dispersing it through the University. The best part of it I built on a sentence in a last letter of yours, and indeed, I wrote most part of it feelingly.
I met yesterday, smoking in the recess, a chimney corner of the pot-house[43] at which I am quartered, a man of the greatest information and most original genius I ever lit upon. His philosophical theories of heaven and hell would have both amused you and given you hints for much speculation. He solemnly assured me that he believed himself divinely inspired. He slept in the same room with me, and kept me awake till three in the morning with his ontological disquisitions. Some of the ideas would have made, you shudder from their daring impiety, others would have astounded with their sublimity. My memory, tenacious and systematizing, would enable [me] to write an octavo from his conversation. “I find [says he] from the intellectual atmosphere that emanes from, and envelops you, that you are in a state of recipiency.” He was deceived. I have little faith, yet am wonderfully fond of speculating on mystical schemes. Wisdom may be gathered from the maddest flights of imagination, as medicines were stumbled upon in the wild processes of alchemy. God bless you. Your ever grateful
S. T. Coleridge.
Tuesday evening.—I leave this place [High Wycombe] on Thursday, 10 o’clock, for Reading. A letter will arrive in time before I go.