Gloucester is a nothing-to-be-said-about town. The women have almost all of them sharp noses.
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It is wrong, Southey! for a little girl with a half-famished sickly baby in her arms to put her head in at the window of an inn—“Pray give me a bit of bread and meat!” from a party dining on lamb, green peas, and salad. Why? Because it is impertinent and obtrusive! “I am a gentleman! and wherefore the clamorous voice of woe intrude upon mine ear?” My companion is a man of cultivated, though not vigorous understanding; his feelings are all on the side of humanity; yet such are the unfeeling remarks, which the lingering remains of aristocracy occasionally prompt. When the pure system of pantisocracy shall have aspheterized—from ἀ, non, and σφέτερος, proprius (we really wanted such a word), instead of travelling along the circuitous, dusty, beaten highroad of diction, you thus cut across the soft, green, pathless field of novelty! Similes for ever! Hurrah! I have bought a little blank book, and portable ink horn; [and] as I journey onward, I ever and anon pluck the wild flowers of poesy, “inhale their odours awhile,” then throw them away and think no more of them. I will not do so! Two lines of mine:—
And o’er the sky’s unclouded blue
The sultry heat suffus’d a brassy hue.
The cockatrice is a foul dragon with a crown on its head. The Eastern nations believe it to be hatched by a viper on a cock’s egg. Southey, dost thou not see wisdom in her Coan vest of allegory? The cockatrice is emblematic of monarchy, a monster generated by ingratitude or absurdity. When serpents sting, the only remedy is to kill the serpent, and besmear the wound with the fat. Would you desire better sympathy?
Description of heat from a poem I am manufacturing, the title: “Perspiration. A Travelling Eclogue.”
The dust flies smothering, as on clatt’ring wheel
Loath’d aristocracy careers along;
The distant track quick vibrates to the eye,
And white and dazzling undulates with heat,
Where scorching to the unwary travellers’ touch,
The stone fence flings its narrow slip of shade;
Or, where the worn sides of the chalky road
Yield their scant excavations (sultry grots!),
Emblem of languid patience, we behold
The fleecy files faint-ruminating lie.
Farewell, sturdy Republican! Write me concerning Burnett and thyself, and concerning etc., etc. My next shall be a more sober and chastened epistle; but, you see, I was in the humour for metaphors, and, to tell thee the truth, I have so often serious reasons to quarrel with my inclination, that I do not choose to contradict it for trifles. To Lovell, fraternity and civic remembrances! Hucks’ compliments.
S. T. Coleridge.
Addressed to “Robert Southey. Miss Tyler’s, Bristol.”