Thursday midnight.
I almost despair of John’s coming; but do persuade Henry if you can. I quite long to see him again.
CCXLIV. TO MRS. GILLMAN.
May 3, 1827.
My dear Friend,—I received and acknowledge your this morning’s present both as plant and symbol, and with appropriate thanks and correspondent feeling. The rose is the pride of summer, the delight and the beauty of our gardens; the eglantine, the honeysuckle, and the jasmine, if not so bright or so ambrosial, are less transient, creep nearer to us, clothe our walls, twine over our porch, and haply peep in at our chamber window, with the crested wren or linnet within the tufts wishing good morning to us. Lastly the geranium passes the door, and in its hundred varieties imitating now this now that leaf, odour, blossom of the garden, still steadily retains its own staid character, its own sober and refreshing hue and fragrance. It deserves to be the inmate of the house, and with due attention and tenderness will live through the winter grave yet cheerful, as an old family friend, that makes up for the departure of gayer visitors, in the leafless season. But none of these are the myrtle![203] In none of these, nor in all collectively, will the myrtle find a substitute. All together and joining with them all the aroma, the spices, and the balsams of the hot-house, yet would they be a sad exchange for the myrtle! Oh, precious in its sweetness is the rich innocence of its snow-white blossoms! And dear are they in the remembrance; but these may pass with the season, and while the myrtle plant, our own myrtle plant remains unchanged, its blossoms are remembered the more to endear the faithful bearer; yea, they survive invisibly in every more than fragrant leaf. As the flashing strains of the nightingale to the yearning murmurs of the dove, so the myrtle to the rose! He who has once possessed and prized a genuine myrtle will rather remember it under the cypress tree than seek to forget it among the rose bushes of a paradise.
God bless you, my dearest friend, and be assured that if death do not suspend memory and consciousness, death itself will not deprive you of a faithful participator in all your hopes and fears, affections and solicitudes, in your unalterable
S. T. Coleridge.
CCXLV. TO THE REV. GEORGE MAY COLERIDGE.
Monday, January 14, 1828.