My dear Friend,—For I am sure by my love for you that you love me too well to have suffered my very rude and uncourteous vehemence of contradiction and reclamation respecting your advocacy of the Catilinarian Reform Bill, when we were last together, to have cooled, much less alienated your kindness; even though the interim had not been a weary, weary time of groaning and life-loathing for me. But I hope that this fearful night-storm is subsiding, as you will have heard from Mr. Green or dear Charles Lamb. I write now to say, that if God, who in His Fatherly compassion and through His love wherewith He hath beheld and loved me in Christ, in whom alone He can love the world, hath worked almost a miracle of grace in and for me by a sudden emancipation from a thirty-three years’ fearful slavery,[212] if God’s goodness should in time and so far perfect my convalescence as that I should be capable of resuming my literary labours, I have a thought by way of a light prelude, a sort of unstiffening of my long dormant joints and muscles, to give a reprint as nearly as possible, except in quality of the paper, a facsimile of John Asgill’s tracts with a life and copious notes,[213] to which I would affix Pastilla et Marginalia. See my MSS. notes, blank leaf and marginal, on Southey’s “Life of Wesley,” and sundry other works. Now can you direct me to any source of information respecting John Asgill, a prince darling of mine, the most honest of all Whigs, whom at the close of Queen Anne’s reign the scoundrelly Jacobite Tories twice expelled from Parliament, under the pretext of his incomparable, or only-with-Rabelais-to-be-compared argument against the base and cowardly custom of ever dying? And this tract is a very treasure, and never more usable as a medicine for our clergy, at least all such as the Bishop of London, Archbishops of Canterbury and of Dublin, the Paleyans and Mageeites,[214] any one or all of whom I would defy to answer a single paragraph of Asgill’s tract, or unloose a single link from the chain of logic. I have no biographical dictionary, and never saw one but in a little sort of one-volume thing. If you can help me in this, do. I give my kindest love to Mrs. Cary.
Yours, with unutterable and unuttered love and regard, in all (but as to the accursed Reform Bill! that mendacium ingens to its own preamble (to which no human being can be more friendly than I am), that huge tapeworm lie of some threescore and ten yards) entire sympathy of heart and soul,
Your affectionate
S. T. Coleridge.
CCLV. TO JOHN PEIRSE KENNARD.[215]
Grove, Highgate, August 13, 1832.
My dear Sir,—Your letter has announced to me a loss too great, too awful, for common grief, or any of its ordinary forms and outlets. For more than an hour after, I remained in a state which I can only describe as a state of deepest mental silence, neither prayer nor thanksgiving, but a prostration of absolute faith, as if the Omnipresent were present to me by a more special intuition, passing all sense and all understanding. Whether Death be but the cloudy Bridge to the Life beyond, and Adam Steinmetz has been wafted over it without suspension, or with an immediate resumption of self-conscious existence, or whether his Life be hidden in God, in the eternal only-begotten, the Pleroma of all Beings and the Habitation both of the Retained and the Retrieved, therein in a blessed and most divine Slumber to grow and evolve into the perfected Spirit,—for sleep is the appointed season of all growth here below, and God’s ordinances in the earthly may shadow out his ways in the Heavenly,—in either case our friend is in God and with God. Were it possible for me even to think otherwise,[216] the very grass in the fields would turn black before my eyes, and nature appear as a skeleton fantastically mossed over beneath the weeping vault of a charnel house!
Deeply am I persuaded that for every man born on earth there is an appointed task, some remedial process in the soul known only to the Omniscient; and, this through divine grace fulfilled, the sole question is whether it be needful or expedient for the church that he should still remain: for the individual himself “to depart and to be with Christ” must needs be GREAT gain. And of my dear, my filial friend, we may with a strong and most consoling assurance affirm that he was eminently one
Who, being innocent, did even for that cause
Bestir him in good deeds!
Wise Virgin He, and wakeful kept his Lamp
Aye trimm’d and full; and thus thro’ grace he liv’d
In this bad World as in a place of Tombs,
And touch’d not the Pollutions of the Dead.
And yet in Christ only did he build a hope. Yea, he blessed the emptiness that made him capable of his Lord’s fullness, gloried in the blindness that was a receptive of his Master’s light, and in the nakedness that asked to be cloathed with the wedding-garment of his Redeemer’s Righteousness. Therefore say I unto you, my young friend, Rejoice! and again I say, Rejoice!
The effect of the event communicated in your letter has been that of awe and sadness on our whole household. Mrs. Gillman mourns as for a son, but with that grief which is felt for a departed saint. Even the servants felt as if an especially loved and honoured member of the family had been suddenly taken away. When I announced the sad tidings to Harriet, an almost unalphabeted but very sensible woman, the tears swelled in her eyes, and she exclaimed, “Ah sir! how many a Thursday night, after Mr. Steinmetz was gone, and I had opened the door for him, I have said to them below, ‘That dear young man is too amiable to live. God will soon have him back.’” These were her very words. Nor were my own anticipations of his recall less distinct or less frequent. Not once or twice only, after he had shaken hands with me on leaving us, I have turned round with the tear on my cheek, and whispered to Mrs. Gillman, “Alas! there is Death in that dear hand.”[217]