It is seldom, my dearest friend, that I find myself differing from you in judgements of any sort. It is more than seldom that I am left in doubt and query on any judgement of yours of a practical nature, for on the good ground of some sixteen or more years’ experience I feel a take-for-granted faith in the dips and pointings of the needle in every decision of your total mind. But in the instance you spoke of this afternoon, viz., your persistent rebuttal of the Temperance Society Man’s Request, though I do not feel sure that you are not in the right, yet I do feel as if I should have been more delighted and more satisfied if you had intimated your compliance with it. I feel that in this case I should have had no doubt; but that my mind would have leapt forwards with content, like a key to a loadstone.
Assuredly you might, at least you would, have a very promising chance of effecting considerable good, and you might have commenced your address with your own remark of the superfluity of any light of information afforded to an habitual dram-drinker respecting the unutterable evil and misery of his thraldom. As wisely give a physiological lecture to convince a man of the pain of burns, while he is lying with his head on the bars of the fire-grate, instead of snatching him off. But in stating this, you might most effectingly and preventively for others describe the misery of that condition in which the impulse waxes as the motive wanes. (Mem. There is a striking passage in my “Friend” on this subject,[218] and a no less striking one in a schoolboy theme of mine[219] now in Gillman’s possession, and in my own hand, written when I was fourteen, with the simile of the treacherous current of the Maelstrom.) But this might give occasion for the suggestion of one new charitable institution, under authority of a legislative act, namely, a Maison de Santé (what do the French call it?) for lunacy and idiocy of the will, in which, with the full consent of, or at the direct instance of the patient himself, and with the concurrence of his friends, such a person under the certificate of a physician might be placed under medical and moral coercion. I am convinced that London would furnish a hundred volunteers in as many days from the gin-shops, who would swallow their glass of poison in order to get courage to present themselves to the hospital in question. And a similar institution might exist for a higher class of will-maniacs or impotents. Had such a house of health been in existence, I know who would have entered himself as a patient some five and twenty years ago.
Second class. To the persons still capable of self-cure; and lastly, to the young who have only begun, and not yet begun—[add to this] the urgency of connecting the Temperance Society with the Christian churches of all denominations,—the classes known to each other, and deriving strength from religion. This is a beautiful part, or might have been made so, of the Wesleyan Church.
These are but raw hints, but unless the mercy of God should remove me from my sufferings earlier than I dare hope or pray for, we will talk the subject over again; as well as the reason why spirits in any form as such are so much more dangerous, morally and in relation to the forming a habit, than beer or wine. Item: if a government were truly fraternal, a healthsome and sound beer would be made universal; aye, and for the lower half of the middle classes wine might be imported, good and generous, from sixpence to eightpence per quart.
God bless you and your ever affectionate
S. T. Coleridge.
CCLVII. TO MRS. ADERS.[220]
[1833.]
My dear Mrs. Aders,—By my illness or oversight I have occasioned a very sweet vignette to have been made in vain—except for its own beauty. Had I sent you the lines that were to be written on the upright tomb, you and our excellent Miss Denman would have, first, seen the dimension requisite for letters of a distinctly visible and legible size; and secondly, that the homely, plain Church-yard Christian verses would not be in keeping with a Muse (though a lovelier I never wooed), nor with a lyre or harp or laurel, or aught else Parnassian and allegorical. A rude old yew-tree, or a mountain ash, with a grave or two, or any other characteristic of a village rude church-yard,—such a hint of a landscape was all I meant; but if any figure, rather that of an elderly man
Thoughtful, with quiet tears upon his cheek.