It seemed unnatural to me, nay, it was unnatural to me to write to you or to any of your family with a cold exclusion of the feelings which almost overpower me even at this moment, and I therefore write this preparatory letter to disburthen my heart, as it were, before I sit down to detail my recollections simply, and unmixed with the anguish which, spite of my best efforts, accompany them.
But one thing more, the last complaint that you will hear from me, perhaps. When without my knowledge dear Mary Lamb, just then on the very verge of a relapse, wrote to Grasmere, was it kind or even humane to have returned such an answer, as Lamb deemed it unadvisable to shew me; but which I learnt from the only other person, who saw the answer, amounted in substance to a sneer on my reported high spirits and my wearing powder? When and to whom did I ever make a merit of my sufferings? Is it consistent now to charge me with going about complaining to everybody, and now with my high spirits? Was I to carry a gloomy face into every society? or ought I not rather to be grateful that in the natural activity of my intellect God had given me a counteracting principle to the intensity of my feelings, and a means of escaping from a part of the pressure? But for this I had been driven mad, and yet for how many months was there a continual brooding and going on of the one gnawing recollection behind the curtain of my outward being, even when I was most exerting myself, and exerting myself more in order the more to benumb it! I might have truly said with Desdemona:—
“I am not merry, but I do beguile
The Thing I am, by seeming otherwise.”
And as to the powder, it was first put in to prevent my taking cold after my hair had been thinned, and I was advised to continue it till I became wholly grey, as in its then state it looked as if I had dirty powder in my hair, and even when known to be only the everywhere-mixed-grey, yet contrasting with a face even younger than my real age it gave a queer and contradictory character to my whole appearance. Whatever be the result of this long-delayed explanation, I have loved you and yours too long and too deeply to have it in my own power to cease to do so.
S. T. Coleridge.
CLXXXIX. TO DANIEL STUART.
May 8, 1812.
My dear Stuart,—I send you seven or eight tickets,[90] entreating you, if pre-engagements or your health does not preclude it, to bring a group with you; as many ladies as possible; but gentlemen if you cannot muster ladies—for else I shall not only have been left in the lurch as to the actual receipts by my great patrons (the five hundred half-promised are likely to shrink below fifty) but shall absolutely make a ridiculous appearance. The tickets are transferable. If you can find occasion for more, pray send for them to me, as (what it really will be) a favour done to myself.
I am anxious to see you, and to learn how far Bath has improved or (to use a fashionable slang phrase) disimproved your health.
Sir James and Lady Mackintosh are I hear at Bath Hotel, Jermyn Street. Do you think it will be taken amiss if I enclosed two or three tickets and cards with my respectful congratulations on his safe return.[91] I abhor the doing anything that could be even interpreted into servility, and yet feel increasingly the necessity of not neglecting the courtesies of life....