His sketch is very beautiful, and has more expression than I ever found in his former productions—excepting, indeed, his Imogen.
Allston is hard at work on a large Scripture piece—the dead man recalled to life by touching the bones of the Prophet. He models every figure. Dawe, who was delighted with the Cupid and Psyche, seemed quite astonished at the facility and exquisiteness with which Allston modelled. Canova at Rome expressed himself to me in very warm terms of admiration on the same subject. He means to exhibit but two or at the most three pictures, all poetical or history painting, in part by my advice. It seemed to me impolitic to appear to be trying in half a dozen ways, as if his mind had not yet discovered its main current. The longer I live the more deeply am I convinced of the high importance, as a symptom, of the love of beauty in a young painter. It is neither honourable to a young man’s heart or head to attach himself year after year to old or deformed objects, comparatively too so easy, especially if bad drawing and worse colouring leaves the spectator’s imagination at lawless liberty, and he cries out, “How very like!” just as he would at a coal in the centre of the fire, or at a frost-figure on a window pane. It is on this, added to his quiet unenvious spirit, to his lofty feelings concerning his art, and to the religious purity of his moral character, that I chiefly rest my hopes of Allston’s future fame. His best productions seem to please him principally because he sees and has learnt something which enables him to promise himself, “I shall do better in my next.”
I have not been at the “Courier” office for some months past. I detest writing politics, even on the right side, and when I discovered that the “Courier” was not the independent paper I had been led to believe, and had myself over and over again asserted, I wrote no more for it. Greatly, indeed, do I prefer the present Ministers to the leaders of any other party, but indiscriminate support of any class of men I dare not give, especially when there is so easy and honourable an alternative as not to write politics at all, which, henceforth, nothing but blank necessity shall compel me to do. I will write for the Permanent, or not at all. “The Comet” therefore I have never seen or heard of it, yet most true it is that I myself have composed some verses on the comet, but I am quite certain that no one ever saw them, for the best of all reasons, that my own brain is the only substance on which they have been recorded. I will, however, consign them to paper, and send them to you with the “Courier” poem as soon as I can procure it, for the curiosity of the thing....
My most affectionate respects to Lady Beaumont, and believe me, dear Sir George, with heartfelt regard,
Your obliged and grateful friend,
S. T. Coleridge.
P. S. Were you in town, I should be very sorry, indeed, to see you in Fetter Lane.[77] The lectures were meant for the young men of the City. Several of my friends join to take notes, and if I can correct what they can shape out of them into any tolerable form, I will send them to you. On Monday I lecture on “Love and the Female Character as displayed by Shakespeare.” Good Dr. Bell is in town. He came from Keswick, all delight with my little Sara, and quite enchanted with Southey. Some flights of admiration in the form of questions to me (“Did you ever see anything so finely conceived? so profoundly thought? as this passage in his review on the Methodists? or on the Education?” etc.) embarrassed me in a very ridiculous way; and, I verily believe, that my odd way of hesitating left on Bell’s mind some shade of a suspicion, as if I did not like to hear my friend so highly extolled. Half a dozen words from Southey would have precluded this, without diminution to his own fame—I mean, in conversation with Dr. Bell.
CLXXXIV. TO J. J. MORGAN.
Keswick,[78] Sunday, February 28, 1812.
My dear Morgan,—I stayed a day in Kendal in order to collect the reprint of “The Friend,” and reached Keswick on Tuesday last before dinner, having taken Hartley and Derwent with me from Ambleside. Of course the first evening was devoted Laribus domesticis, to Southey and his and my children. My own are all the fondest father could pray for; and little Sara does honour to her mother’s anxieties, reads French tolerably, and Italian fluently, and I was astonished at her acquaintance with her native language. The word “hostile” occurring in what she read to me, I asked her what “hostile” meant? and she answered at once, “Why! inimical; only that ‘inimical’ is more often used for things and measures and not, as ‘hostile’ is, to persons and nations.” If I had dared, I should have urged Mrs. C. to let me take her to London for four or five months, and return with Southey, but I feared it might be inconvenient to you, and I knew it would be presumptuous in me to bring her to you. But she is such a sweet-tempered, meek, blue-eyed fairy and so affectionate, trustworthy, and really serviceable! Derwent is the self-same, fond, small, Samuel Taylor Coleridge as ever. When I went for them from Mr. Dawes,[79] he came in dancing for joy, while Hartley turned pale[80] and trembled all over,—then after he had taken some cold water, instantly asked me some questions about the connection of the Greek with the Latin, which latter he has just begun to learn. Poor Derwent, who has by no means strong health (having inherited his poor father’s tenderness of bowels and stomach, and consequently capriciousness of animal spirits), has complained to me (having no other possible grievance) “that Mr. Dawes does not love him, because he can’t help crying when he is scolded, and because he ain’t such a genius as Hartley—and that though Hartley should have done the same thing, yet all the others are punished, and Mr. Dawes only looks at Hartley and never scolds him, and that all the boys think it very unfair—he is a genius.” This was uttered in low spirits and a tenderness brought on by my petting, for he adores his brother. Indeed, God be praised, they all love each other. I was delighted that Derwent, of his own accord, asked me about little Miss Brent that used to play with him at Mr. and Mrs. Morgan’s, adding that he had almost forgot what sort of a lady she was, “only she was littler,—less I mean—(this was said hastily and laughing at his blunder) than Mama.” A gentleman who took a third of the chaise with me from Ambleside, and whom I found a well-informed and thinking man, said after two hours’ knowledge of us, that the two boys united would be a perfect representation of myself.
I trust I need not say that I should have written on the second day if nothing had happened; but from the dreadful dampness of the house, worse than it was in the rudest state when I first lived in it, and the weather, too, all storm and rain, I caught a violent cold which almost blinded me by inflammation of both my eyes, and for three days bore all the symptoms of an ague or intermittent fever. Knowing I had no time to lose, I took the most Herculean remedies, among others a solution of arsenic, and am now as well as when I left you, and see no reason to fear a relapse. I passed through Grasmere; but did not call on Wordsworth. I hear from Mrs. C. that he treats the affair as a trifle, and only wonders at my resenting it, and that Dorothy Wordsworth before my arrival expressed her confident hope that I should come to them at once! I who “for years past had been an ABSOLUTE NUISANCE in the family.” This illness has thrown me behindhand; so that I cannot quit Keswick till the end of the week. On Friday I shall return by way of Ambleside, probably spend a day with Charles Lloyd.... It will not surprise you that the statements respecting me and Montagu and Wordsworth have been grossly perverted: and yet, spite of all this, there is not a friend of Wordsworth’s, I understand, who does not severely blame him, though they execrate the Montagus yet more heavily. But the tenth part of the truth is not known. Would you believe it possible that Wordsworth himself stated my wearing powder as a proof positive that I never could have suffered any pain of mind from the affair, and that it was all pretence!! God forgive him! At Liverpool I shall either give lectures, if I can secure a hundred pounds for them, or return immediately to you. At all events, I shall not remain there beyond a fortnight, so that I shall be with you before you have changed houses. Mrs. Coleridge seems quite satisfied with my plans, and abundantly convinced of my obligations to your and Mary’s kindness to me. Nothing (she said) but the circumstance of my residing with you could reconcile her to my living in London. Southey is the semper idem. It is impossible for a good heart not to esteem and to love him; but yet the love is one fourth, the esteem all the remainder. His children are, 1. Edith, seven years; 2. Herbert, five; 3. Bertha, four; 4. Catharine, a year and a half.