Hartley has been with me for the last month. He is very much improved; and, if I could see him more systematic in his studies and in the employment of his time, I should have little to complain of in him or to wish for. He is very desirous to visit the place of his infancy, poor fellow! And I am very desirous, if it were practicable, that he should be in the neighbourhood, as it were, of his uncles, so that there might be a probability of one or the other inviting him to spend a few weeks of his vacation at Ottery. His cousins[148] (the sons of my brothers James and George) are very good and affectionate to him; and it is a great comfort to me to see the chasm of the first generation closing and healing up in the second. From the state of your sister-in-law’s health, when I last saw you, and the probable results of it, I cannot tell how your household is situated. Otherwise, I should venture to entreat of you, that you would give poor Hartley an invitation to pass a fortnight or three weeks with you this vacation.[149]
The object of the third volume of my “Friend,” which will be wholly fresh matter, is briefly this,—that morality without religion is as senseless a scheme as religion without morality; that religion not revealed is a contradiction in terms, and an historical nonentity; that religion is not revealed unless the sacred books containing it are interpreted in the obvious and literal sense of the word, and that, thus interpreted, the doctrines of the Bible are in strict harmony with the Liturgy and Articles of our Established Church.
May God Almighty bless you, my dear Friend! and your obliged and affectionately grateful
S. T. Coleridge.
CCXV. TO H. F. CARY.[150]
Little Hampton, October [29], 1817.
I regret, dear sir! that a slave to the worst of tyrants (outward tyrants, at least), the booksellers, I have not been able to read more than two books and passages here and there of the other, of your translation of Dante. You will not suspect me of the worthlessness of exceeding my real opinion, but like a good Christian will make even modesty give way to charity, though I say, that in the severity and learned simplicity of the diction, and in the peculiar character of the Blank Verse, it has transcended what I should have thought possible without the Terza Rima. In itself, the metre is, compared with any English poem of one quarter the length, the most varied and harmonious to my ear of any since Milton, and yet the effect is so Dantesque that to those who should compare it only with other English poems, it would, I doubt not, have the same effect as the Terza Rima has compared with other Italian metres. I would that my literary influence were enough to secure the knowledge of the work for the true lovers of poetry in general.[151] But how came it that you had it published in so too unostentatious a form? For a second or third edition, the form has its conveniences; but for the first, in the present state of English society, quod non arrogas tibi, non habes. If you have any other works, poems, or poemata, by you, printed or MSS., you would gratify me by sending them to me. In the mean time, accept in the spirit in which it is offered, this trifling testimonial of my respect from, dear sir,
Yours truly,
S. T. Coleridge.
CCXVI. TO THE SAME.
Little Hampton, Sussex, November 6, 1817.