I wrote John Cruikshank this morning, and this moment I have received a letter from him. My letter written before the receipt of his contains everything I would write in answer to it, and I do not like to write to him superfluously, lest I should break in on his domestic terrors and solitary broodings with regard to Anna Cruikshank.[125] May the Father and lover of the meek preserve that meek woman, and give her a safe and joyful deliverance!
I wrote this morning a short note of congratulatory kindliness to your sister, and shall be eager to call on her, when Legion has been thoroughly exorcised from my temple and cheeks. Tell Cruikshank that I have received his letter, and thank him for it.
A few lines in your last letter betokened, I thought, a wounded spirit. Let me know the particulars, my beloved friend. I shall forget and lose my own anxieties while I am healing yours with cheerings of sympathy.
I met with the following sonnet in some very dull poems, among which it shone like a solitary star when the night is dark, and one little space of blue uninvaded by the floating blackness, or, if a terrestrial simile be required, like a red carbuncle on a negro’s nose. From the languor and exhaustion to which pain and my frequent doses of laudanum have reduced me, it suited the feeble temper of [my] mind, and I have transcribed it on the other page. I amused myself the other day (having some paper at the printer’s which I could employ no other way) in selecting twenty-eight sonnets,[126] to bind up with Bowles’s. I charge sixpence for them, and have sent you five to dispose of. I have only printed two hundred, as my paper held out to no more; and dispose of them privately, just enough to pay the printing. The essay which I have written at the beginning I like.... I have likewise sent you Burke’s pamphlet which was given to me; it has all his excellences without any of his faults. This parcel I send to-morrow morning, enclosed in a parcel to Bill Poole of Thurston.
God love you, my affectionate brother, and your affectionate
S. T. Coleridge.
SONNET.
With passive joy the moment I survey
When welcome Death shall set my spirit free.
My soul! the prospect brings no fear to thee,
But soothing Fancy rises to pourtray
The dear and parting words my Friends will say:
With secret Pride their heaving Breast I see,
And count the sorrows that will flow for me.
And now I hear my lingering knell decay
And mark the Hearse! Methinks, with moisten’d eye,
Clara beholds the sad Procession move
That bears me to the Resting-place of Care,
And sighs, “Poor youth! thy Bosom well could love,
And well thy Numbers picture Love’s despair.”
Vain Dreams! yet such as make it sweet to die.
LXIV. TO JOHN THELWALL.
Saturday, November 19, [1796].
Oxford Street, Bristol.