Wednesday, June 22, 1796.
Dear Thelwall,—That I have not written you has been an act of self-denial, not indolence. I heard that you were electioneering, and would not be the occasion that any of your thoughts should diverge from that focus.
I wish very much to see you. Have you given up the idea of spending a few weeks or month at Bristol? You might be making way in your review of Burke’s life and writings, and give us once or twice a week a lecture, which I doubt not would be crowded. We have a large and every way excellent library, to which I could make you a temporary subscriber, that is, I would get a subscription ticket transferred to you.
You are certainly well calculated for the review you meditate. Your answer to Burke is, I will not say, the best, for that would be no praise; it is certainly the only good one, and it is a very good one. In style and in reflectiveness it is, I think, your chef d’œuvre. Yet the “Peripatetic”[117]—for which accept my thanks—pleased me more because it let me into your heart; the poetry is frequently sweet and possesses the fire of feeling, but not enough (I think) of the light of fancy. I am sorry that you should entertain so degrading an opinion of me as to imagine that I industriously collected anecdotes unfavourable to the characters of great men. No, Thelwall, but I cannot shut my ears, and I have never given a moment’s belief to any one of those stories unless when they were related to me at different times by professed democrats. My vice is of the opposite class, a precipitance in praise; witness my panegyric on Gerrald and that black gentleman Margarot in the “Conciones,” and my foolish verses to Godwin in the “Morning Chronicle.”[118] At the same time, Thelwall, do not suppose that I admit your palliations. Doubtless I could fill a book with slanderous stories of professed Christians, but those very men would allow they were acting contrary to Christianity; but, I am afraid, an atheistic bad man manufactures his system of principles with an eye to his peculiar propensities, and makes his actions the criterion of what is virtuous, not virtue the criterion of his actions. Where the disposition is not amiable, an acute understanding I deem no blessing. To the last sentence in your letter I subscribe fully and with all my inmost affections. “He who thinks and feels will be virtuous; and he who is absorbed in self will be vicious, whatever maybe his speculative opinions.” Believe me, Thelwall, it is not his atheism that has prejudiced me against Godwin, but Godwin who has, perhaps, prejudiced me against atheism. Let me see you—I already know a deist, and Calvinists, and Moravians whom I love and reverence—and I shall leap forwards to realise my principles by feeling love and honour for an atheist. By the bye, are you an atheist? For I was told that Hutton was an atheist, and procured his three massy quartos on the principle of knowledge in the hopes of finding some arguments in favor of atheism, but lo! I discovered him to be a profoundly pious deist,—“independent of fortune, satisfied with himself, pleased with his species, confident in his Creator.”
God bless you, my dear Thelwall! Believe me with high esteem and anticipated tenderness,
Yours sincerely,
S. T. Coleridge.
P. S. We have a hundred lovely scenes about Bristol, which would make you exclaim, O admirable Nature! and me, O Gracious God!
LX. TO THOMAS POOLE.
Saturday, September 24, 1796.