S. T. Coleridge.
CCIV. TO JOHN KENYON.[130]
Mr. B. Morgan’s, Bath, November 3 [1814].
My dear Sir,—At Binn’s, Cheap Street, I found Jeremy Taylor’s “Dissuasive from Popery,” in the largest and only complete edition of his Polemical Tracts. Mr. Binns had no objection to the paragraphs being transcribed any morning or evening at his house, and I put in a piece of paper with the words at which the transcript should begin and with which end—p. 450, l. 5, to p. 451, l. 31, I believe. But indeed I am ashamed, rather I feel awkward and uncomfortable at obtruding on you so long a task, much longer than I had imagined. I don’t like to use any words that might give you unpleasure, but I cannot help fearing that, like a child spoilt by your and Mrs. Kenyon’s great indulgence, I may have been betrayed into presuming on it more than I ought. Indeed, my dear sir! I do feel very keenly how exceeding kind you and Mrs. K. have been to me. It makes this scrawl of mine look dim in a way that was less uncommon with me formerly than it has been for the last eight or ten years.
But to return, or turn off, to the good old Bishop. It would be worth your while to read Taylor’s “Letter on Original Sin,” and what follows. I compare it to an old statue of Janus, with one of the faces, that which looks towards his opponents, the controversial phiz in highest preservation,—the force of a mighty one, all power, all life,—the face of a God rushing on to battle, and, in the same moment, enjoying at once both contest and triumph; the other, that which should have been the countenance that looks toward his followers, that with which he substitutes his own opinion, all weather eaten, dim, useless, a Ghost in marble, such as you may have seen represented in many of Piranesi’s astounding engravings from Rome and the Campus Martius. Jer. Taylor’s discursive intellect dazzle-darkened his intuition. The principle of becoming all things to all men, if by any means he might save any, with him as with Burke, thickened the protecting epidermis of the tact-nerve of truth into something like a callus. But take him all in all, such a miraculous combination of erudition, broad, deep, and omnigenous; of logic subtle as well as acute, and as robust as agile; of psychological insight, so fine yet so secure! of public prudence and practical sageness that one ray of creative Faith would have lit up and transfigured into wisdom, and of genuine imagination, with its streaming face unifying all at one moment like that of the setting sun when through an interspace of blue sky no larger than itself, it emerges from the cloud to sink behind the mountain, but a face seen only at starts, when some breeze from the higher air scatters, for a moment, the cloud of butterfly fancies, which flutter around him like a morning-garment of ten thousand colours—(now how shall I get out of this sentence? the tail is too big to be taken up into the coiler’s mouth)—well, as I was saying, I believe such a complete man hardly shall we meet again.
May God bless you and yours!
Your obliged
S. T. Coleridge.
P. S. My address after Tuesday will be (God permitting) Mr. Page’s, Surgeon, Calne.
J. Kenyon, Esq., 9, Argyle Street.