The Project Gutenberg eBook, Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. II (of 2), by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge

LETTERS OF
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

LETTERS

OF

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

EDITED BY
ERNEST HARTLEY COLERIDGE

IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. II

LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
1895
[All rights reserved.]

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.
Printed by H. O. Houghton and Company.

CONTENTS OF VOLUME II

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER VII
A LONG ABSENCE
1804-1806

CHAPTER VII
A LONG ABSENCE
1804-1806

CXLIV. TO RICHARD SHARP.[1]

King’s Arms, Kendal,
Sunday morning, January 15, 1804.

My dear Sir,—I give you thanks—and, that I may make the best of so poor and unsubstantial a return, permit me to say, that they are such thanks as can only come from a nature unworldly by constitution and by habit, and now rendered more than ever impressible by sudden restoration—resurrection I might say—from a long, long sick-bed. I had gone to Grasmere to take my farewell of William Wordsworth, his wife, and his sister, and thither your letters followed me. I was at Grasmere a whole month, so ill, as that till the last week I was unable to read your letters. Not that my inner being was disturbed; on the contrary, it seemed more than usually serene and self-sufficing; but the exceeding pain, of which I suffered every now and then, and the fearful distresses of my sleep, had taken away from me the connecting link of voluntary power, which continually combines that part of us by which we know ourselves to be, with that outward picture or hieroglyphic, by which we hold communion with our like—between the vital and the organic—or what Berkeley, I suppose, would call mind and its sensuous language. I had only just strength enough to smile gratefully on my kind nurses, who tended me with sister’s and mother’s love, and often, I well know, wept for me in their sleep, and watched for me even in their dreams. Oh, dear sir! it does a man’s heart good, I will not say, to know such a family, but even to know that there is such a family. In spite of Wordsworth’s occasional fits of hypochondriacal uncomfortableness,—from which, more or less, and at longer or shorter intervals, he has never been wholly free from his very childhood,—in spite of this hypochondriacal graft in his nature, as dear Wedgwood calls it, his is the happiest family I ever saw, and were it not in too great sympathy with my ill health—were I in good health, and their neighbour—I verily believe that the cottage in Grasmere Vale would be a proud sight for Philosophy. It is with no idle feeling of vanity that I speak of my importance to them; that it is I, rather than another, is almost an accident; but being so very happy within themselves they are too good, not the more, for that very reason, to want a friend and common object of love out of their household. I have met with several genuine Philologists, Philonoists, Physiophilists, keen hunters after knowledge and science; but truth and wisdom are higher names than these—and revering Davy, I am half angry with him for doing that which would make me laugh in another man—I mean, for prostituting and profaning the name of “Philosopher,” “great Philosopher,” “eminent Philosopher,” etc., etc., etc., to every fellow who has made a lucky experiment, though the man should be Frenchified to the heart, and though the whole Seine, with all its filth and poison, flows in his veins and arteries.

Of our common friends, my dear sir, I flatter myself that you and I should agree in fixing on T. Wedgwood and on Wordsworth as genuine Philosophers—for I have often said (and no wonder, since not a day passes but the conviction of the truth of it is renewed in me, and with the conviction, the accompanying esteem and love), often have I said that T. Wedgwood’s faults impress me with veneration for his moral and intellectual character more than almost any other man’s virtues; for under circumstances like his, to have a fault only in that degree is, I doubt not, in the eye of God, to possess a high virtue. Who does not prize the Retreat of Moreau[2] more than all the straw-blaze of Bonaparte’s victories? And then to make it (as Wedgwood really does) a sort of crime even to think of his faults by so many virtues retained, cultivated, and preserved in growth and blossom, in a climate—where now the gusts so rise and eddy, that deeply rooted must that be which is not snatched up and made a plaything of by them,—and, now, “the parching air burns frore.”

W. Wordsworth does not excite that almost painfully profound moral admiration which the sense of the exceeding difficulty of a given virtue can alone call forth, and which therefore I feel exclusively towards T. Wedgwood; but, on the other hand, he is an object to be contemplated with greater complacency, because he both deserves to be, and is, a happy man; and a happy man, not from natural temperament, for therein lies his main obstacle, not by enjoyment of the good things of this world—for even to this day, from the first dawn of his manhood, he has purchased independence and leisure for great and good pursuits by austere frugality and daily self-denials; nor yet by an accidental confluence of amiable and happy-making friends and relatives, for every one near to his heart has been placed there by choice and after knowledge and deliberation; but he is a happy man, because he is a Philosopher, because he knows the intrinsic value of the different objects of human pursuit, and regulates his wishes in strict subordination to that knowledge; because he feels, and with a practical faith, the truth of that which you, more than once, my dear sir, have with equal good sense and kindness pressed upon me, that we can do but one thing well, and that therefore we must make a choice. He has made that choice from his early youth, has pursued and is pursuing it; and certainly no small part of his happiness is owing to this unity of interest and that homogeneity of character which is the natural consequence of it, and which that excellent man, the poet Sotheby, noticed to me as the characteristic of Wordsworth.

Wordsworth is a poet, a most original poet. He no more resembles Milton than Milton resembles Shakespeare—no more resembles Shakespeare than Shakespeare resembles Milton. He is himself and, I dare affirm that, he will hereafter be admitted as the first and greatest philosophical poet, the only man who has effected a complete and constant synthesis of thought and feeling and combined them with poetic forms, with the music of pleasurable passion, and with Imagination or the modifying power in that highest sense of the word, in which I have ventured to oppose it to Fancy, or the aggregating power—in that sense in which it is a dim analogue of creation—not all that we can believe, but all that we can conceive of creation.—Wordsworth is a poet, and I feel myself a better poet, in knowing how to honour him than in all my own poetic compositions, all I have done or hope to do; and I prophesy immortality to his “Recluse,” as the first and finest philosophical poem, if only it be (as it undoubtedly will be) a faithful transcript of his own most august and innocent life, of his own habitual feelings and modes of seeing and hearing.—My dear sir! I began a letter with a heart, Heaven knows! how full of gratitude toward you—and I have flown off into a whole letter-full respecting Wedgwood and Wordsworth. Was it that my heart demanded an outlet for grateful feelings—for a long stream of them—and that I felt it would be oppressive to you if I wrote to you of yourself half of what I wished to write? Or was it that I knew I should be in sympathy with you, and that few subjects are more pleasing to you than a detail of the merits of two men, whom, I am sure, you esteem equally with myself—though accidents have thrown me, or rather Providence has placed me, in a closer connection with them, both as confidential friends and the one as my benefactor, and to whom I owe that my bed of sickness has not been in a house of want, unless I had bought the contrary at the price of my conscience by becoming a priest.

I leave this place this afternoon, having walked from Grasmere yesterday. I walked the nineteen miles through mud and drizzle, fog and stifling air, in four hours and thirty-five minutes, and was not in the least fatigued, so that you may see that my sickness has not much weakened me. Indeed, the suddenness and seeming perfectness of my recovery is really astonishing. In a single hour I have changed from a state that seemed next to death, swollen limbs, racking teeth, etc., to a state of elastic health, so that I have said, “If I have been dreaming, yet you, Wordsworth, have been awake.” And Wordsworth has answered, “I could not expect any one to believe it who had not seen it.” These changes have always been produced by sudden changes of the weather. Dry hot weather or dry frosty weather seem alike friendly to me, and my persuasion is strong as the life within me, that a year’s residence in Madeira would renovate me. I shall spend two days in Liverpool, and hope to be in London, coach and coachman permitting, on Friday afternoon or Saturday at the furthest. And on this day week I look forward to the pleasure of thanking you personally, for I still hope to avail myself of your kind introductions. I mean to wait in London till a good vessel sails for Madeira; but of this when I see you.

Believe me, my dear sir, with grateful and affectionate thanks, your sincere friend,

S. T. Coleridge.

CXLV. TO THOMAS POOLE.

Kendal, Sunday, January 15, 1804.

My dear Poole,—My health is as the weather. That, for the last month, has been unusually bad, and so has my health. I go by the heavy coach this afternoon. I shall be at Liverpool tomorrow night. Tuesday, Wednesday, I shall stay there; not more certainly, for I have taken my place all the way to London, and this stay of two days is an indulgence and entered in the road-bill, so I expect to be in London on Friday evening about six o’clock, at the Saracen’s Head, Snow Hill. Now my dearest friend! will you send a twopenny post letter directed, “Mr. Coleridge (Passenger in the Heavy Coach from Kendal and Liverpool), to be left at the bar, Saracen’s Head, Snow Hill,” informing me whether I can have a bed at your lodgings, or whether Mr. Rickman could let me have a bed for one or two nights,—for I have such a dread of sleeping at an Inn or Coffee house in London, that it quite unmans me to think of it. To love and to be beloved makes hothouse plants of us, dear Poole!

Though wretchedly ill, I have not yet been deserted by hope—less dejected than in any former illness—and my mind has been active, and not vaguely, but to that determinate purpose which has employed me the last three months, and I want only one fortnight steady reading to have got all my materials before me, and then I neither stir to the right nor to the left, so help me God! till the work is finished. Of its contents, the title will, in part, inform you, “Consolations and Comforts from the exercise and right application of the Reason, the Imagination, the Moral Feelings, Addressed especially to those in sickness, adversity, or distress of mind, from speculative gloom,[3] etc.”

I put that last phrase, though barbarous, for your information. I have puzzled for hours together, and could never hit off a phrase to express that idea, that is, at once neat and terse, and yet good English. The whole plan of my literary life I have now laid down, and the exact order in which I shall execute it, if God vouchsafe me life and adequate health; and I have sober though confident expectations that I shall render a good account of what may have appeared to you and others, a distracting manifoldness in my objects and attainments. You are nobly employed,—most worthily of you. You are made to endear yourself to mankind as an immediate benefactor: I must throw my bread on the waters. You sow corn and I plant the olive. Different evils beset us. You shall give me advice, and I will advise you, to look steadily at everything, and to see it as it is—to be willing to see a thing to be evil, even though you see, at the same time, that it is for the present an irremediable evil; and not to overrate, either in the convictions of your intellect, or in the feelings of your heart, the Good, because it is present to you, and in your power—and, above all, not to be too hasty an admirer of the Rich, who seem disposed to do good with their wealth and influence, but to make your esteem strictly and severely proportionate to the worth of the Agent, not to the value of the Action, and to refer the latter wholly to the Eternal Wisdom and Goodness, to God, upon whom it wholly depends, and in whom alone it has a moral worth.

I love and honour you, Poole, for many things—scarcely for anything more than that, trusting firmly in the rectitude and simplicity of your own heart, and listening with faith to its revealing voice, you never suffered either my subtlety, or my eloquence, to proselytize you to the pernicious doctrine of Necessity.[4] All praise to the Great Being who has graciously enabled me to find my way out of that labyrinth-den of sophistry, and, I would fain believe, to bring with me a better clue than has hitherto been known, to enable others to do the same. I have convinced Southey and Wordsworth; and W., as you know, was, even to extravagance, a Necessitarian. Southey never believed and abhorred the Doctrine, yet thought the argument for it unanswerable by human reason. I have convinced both of them of the sophistry of the argument, and wherein the sophism consists, viz., that all have hitherto—both the Necessitarians and their antagonists—confounded two essentially different things under one name, and in consequence of this mistake, the victory has been always hollow, in favor of the Necessitarians.

God bless you, and

S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. If any letter come to your lodgings for me, of course you will take care of it.

CXLVI. TO THE SAME.

[January 26, 1804.]

My dearest Poole,—I have called on Sir James Mackintosh,[5] who offered me his endeavours to procure me a place under him in India, of which endeavour he would not for a moment doubt the success; and assured me on his Honour, on his Soul!! (N. B. his Honour!!) (N. B. his Soul!!) that he was sincere. Lillibullero ahoo! ahoo! ahoo! Good morning, Sir James!

I next called on Davy, who seems more and more determined to mould himself upon the Age, in order to make the Age mould itself upon him. Into this language at least I could have translated his conversation. Oh, it is a dangerous business this bowing of the head in the Temple of Rimmon; and such men I aptly christen Theo-mammonists, that is, those who at once worship God and Mammon. However, God grant better things of so noble a work of His! And, as I once before said, may that Serpent, the World, climb around the club which supports him, and be the symbol of healing; even as in Tooke’s “Pantheon,”[6] you may see the thing done to your eyes in the picture of Esculapius. Well! now for business. I shall leave the note among the schedules. They will wonder, plain, sober people! what damn’d madcap has got among them; or rather I will put it under the letter just arrived for you, that at least it may perhaps be under the Rose.[7]

Well, once again. I will try to get at it, but I am landing on a surfy shore, and am always driven back upon the open sea of various thoughts.

I dine with Davy at five o’clock this evening at the Prince of Wales’s Coffee House, Leicester Square, an he can give us three hours of his company; and I beseech you do make a point and come. God bless you, and may His Grace be as a pair of brimstone gloves to guard against dirty diseases from such bad company as you are keeping—Rose[8] and Thomas Poole!—!!!

S. T. Coleridge.

T. Poole, Esq., Parliament Office.

[Note in Poole’s handwriting: “Very interesting jeu d’esprit, but not sent.”]

CXLVII. TO THE WORDSWORTHS.

Dunmow, Essex, Wednesday night, ½ past 11,
February 8, 1804.

My dearest Friends,—I must write, or I shall have delayed it till delay has made the thought painful as of a duty neglected. I had meant to have kept a sort of journal for you, but I have not been calm enough; and if I had kept it, I should not have time to transcribe, for nothing can exceed the bustle I have been in from the day of my arrival in town. The only incident of any extraordinary interest was a direful quarrel between Godwin and me,[9] in which, to use his own phrase (unless Lamb suggested it to him), I “thundered and lightened with frenzied eloquence” at him for near an hour and a half. It ended in a reconciliation next day; but the affair itself, and the ferocious spirit into which a plusquam sufficit of punch had betrayed me, has sunk deep into my heart. Few events in my life have grieved me more, though the fool’s conduct richly merited a flogging, but not with a scourge of scorpions. I wrote to Mrs. Coleridge the next day, when my mind was full of it, and, when you go into Keswick, she will detail the matter, if you have nothing better to talk of. My health has greatly improved, and rich and precious wines (of several of which I had never before heard the names) agree admirably with me, and I fully believe, most dear William! they would with you. But still I am as faithful a barometer, and previously to, and during all falling weather, am as asthmatic and stomach-twitched as when with you. I am a perfect conjuror as to the state of the weather, and it is such that I detected myself in being somewhat flattered at finding the infallibility of my uncomfortable feelings, as to falling weather, either coming or come. What Sicily may do for me I cannot tell, but Dalton,[10] the Lecturer on Natural Philosophy at the R. Institution, a man devoted to Keswick, convinced me that there was five times the duration of falling weather at Keswick compared with the flat of midland counties, and more than twice the gross quantity of water fallen. I have as yet been able to do nothing for myself. My plans are to try to get such an introduction to the Captain of the war-ship that shall next sail for Malta, as to be taken as his friend (from Malta to Syracuse is but six hours passage in a spallanza). At Syracuse I shall meet with a hearty welcome from Mr. Lecky, the Consul, and I hope to be able to have a letter from Lord Nelson to the Convent of Benedictines at Catania to receive and lodge me for such time as I may choose to stay. Catania is a pleasant town, with pleasant, hospitable inhabitants, at the foot of Etna, though fifteen miles, alas! from the woody region. Greenough[11] has read me an admirable, because most minute, journal of his Sights, Doings, and Done-untos in Sicily.

As to money, I shall avail myself of £105, to be repaid to you on the first of January, 1805, and another £100, to be employed in paying the Life Assurance, the bills at Keswick, Mrs. Fricker, next half year; and if any remain, to buy me comforts for my voyage, etc., Dante and a dictionary. I shall borrow part from my brothers, and part from Stuart. I can live a year at Catania (for I have no plan or desire of travelling except up and down Etna) for £100, and the getting back I shall trust to chance.

O my dear, dear friends! if Sicily should become a British island,—as all the inhabitants intensely desire it to be,—and if the climate agreed with you as well as I doubt not it will with me,—and if it be as much cheaper than even Westmoreland, as Greenough reports, and if I could get a Vice-Consulship, of which I have little doubt, oh, what a dream of happiness could we not realize! But mortal life seems destined for no continuous happiness, save that which results from the exact performance of duty; and blessed are you, dear William! whose path of duty lies through vine-trellised elm-groves, through Love and Joy and Grandeur. “O for one hour of Dundee!”[12] How often shall I sigh, “Oh! for one hour of ‘The Recluse’!”

I arrived at Dunmow on Tuesday, and shall stay till Tuesday morning. You will direct No. 116 Abingdon St., Westminster. I was not received here with mere kindness; I was welcomed almost as you welcomed me when first I visited you at Racedown. And their solicitude and attention is enough to effeminate one. Indeed, indeed, they are kind and good people; and old Lady Beaumont, now eighty-six, is a sort of miracle for beauty and clear understanding and cheerfulness. The house is an old house by a tan-yard, with nothing remarkable but its awkward passages. We talk by the long hours about you and Hartley, Derwent, Sara, and Johnnie; and few things, I am persuaded, would delight them more than to live near you. I wish you would write out a sheet of verses for them, and I almost promised for you that you should send that delicious poem on the Highland Girl at Inversnade. But of more importance, incomparably, is it, that Mary and Dorothy should begin to transcribe all William’s MS. poems for me. Think what they will be to me in Sicily! They should be written in pages and lettered up in parcels not exceeding two ounces and a quarter each, including the seal, and three envelopes, one to the Speaker, under that, one to John Rickman, Esqre, and under that, one to me. (Terrible mischief has happened from foolish people of R.’s acquaintance neglecting the middle envelope, so that the Speaker, opening his letter, finds himself made a letter smuggler to Nicholas Noddy or some other unknown gentleman.) But I will send you the exact form. The weight is not of much importance, but better not exceed two ounces and a quarter. I will write again as soon as I hear from you. In the mean time, God bless you, dearest William, Dorothy, Mary, S., and my godchild.

S. T. Coleridge.

CXLVIII. TO HIS WIFE.

February 19, 1804.

“J. Tobin, Esqre.,[13] No. 17 Barnard’s Inn, Holborn. For Mr. Coleridge.” So, if you wish me to answer it by return of post: but if it be of no consequence, whether I receive it four hours sooner or four hours later, then direct “Mr. Lambe,[14] East India House, London.”

I did not receive your last letter written on the “very, very windy and very cold Sunday night,” till yesterday afternoon, owing to Poole’s neglect and forgetfulness. But Poole is one of those men who have one good quality, namely, that they always do one thing at a time; but who likewise have one defect, that they can seldom think but of one thing at a time. For instance, if Poole is intent on his matter while he is speaking, he cannot give the least attention to his language or pronunciation, in consequence of which there is no one error in his dialect which he has ever got rid of. My mind is in general of the contrary make. I too often do nothing, in consequence of being impressed all at once (or so rapidly consecutively as to appear all at once) by a variety of impressions. If there are a dozen people at table I hear, and cannot help giving some attention to what each one says, even though there should be three or four talking at once. The detail of the Good and the Bad, of the two different makes of mind, would form a not uninteresting brace of essays in a Spectator or Guardian.

You will of course repay Southey instantly all the money you may have borrowed either for yourself or for Mr. Jackson,[15] and do not forget to remember that a share of the wine-bill belonged to me. Likewise when you pay Mr. Jackson, you will pay him just as if he had not had any money from you. Is it half a year? or a year and a half’s rent that we owe him? Did we pay him up to July last? If we did, then, were I you, I would now pay him the whole year’s rent up to July next, and tell him that you shall not want the twenty pounds which you have lent him till the beginning of May. Remember me to him in the most affectionate manner, and say how sincerely I condole with him on his sprain. Likewise, and as affectionately, remember me to Mrs. Wilson.

It gave me pain and a feeling of anxious concern on our own account, as well as Mr. Jackson’s, to find him so distressed for money. I fear that he will be soon induced to sell the house.

Now for our darling Hartley. I am myself not at all anxious or uneasy respecting his habits of idleness; but I should be very unhappy if he were to go to the town school, unless there were any steady lad that Mr. Jackson knew and could rely on, who went to the same school regularly, and who would be easily induced by half-a-crown once in two or three months to take care of him, let him always sit by him, and to whom you should instruct the child to yield a certain degree of obedience. If this can be done (and you will read what I say to Mr. Jackson), I have no great objection to his going to school and making a fair trial of it. Oh, may God vouchsafe me health that he may go to school to his own father! I exceedingly wish that there were any one in Keswick who would give him a little instruction in the elements of drawing. I will go to-morrow and enquire for some very elementary book, if there be any, that proposes to teach it without the assistance of a drawing master, and which you might make him read to you instead of his other books. Sir G. Beaumont was very much pleased and interested by Hartley’s promise of attachment to his darling Art. If I can find the book I will send it off instantly, together with the Spillĕkins (Spielchen, or Gamelet, I suppose), a German refinement of our Jack Straw. You or some one of your sisters will be so good as to play with Hartley, at first, that Derwent may learn it. Little Albert at Dr. Crompton’s, and indeed all the children, are quite spillekin mad. It is certainly an excellent game to teach children steadiness of hand and quickness of eye, and a good opportunity to impress upon them the beauty of strict truth, when it is against their own interest, and to give them a pride in it, and habits of it,—for the slightest perceptible motion produced in any of the spillekins, except the one attempted to be crooked off the heap, destroys that turn, and there is a good deal of foresight executed in knowing when to give it a lusty pull, so as to move the spillekins under, if only you see that your adversary who will take advantage of this pull, will himself not succeed, and yet by his or the second pull put the spillekin easily in the power of the third pull.... I am now writing in No. 44 Upper Titchfield Street, where I have for the first time been breakfasting with A. Welles, who seems a kind, friendly man, and instead of recommending any more of his medicine to me, advises me to persevere in and expedite my voyage to a better climate, and has been very pressing with me to take up my home at his house. To-morrow I dine with Mr. Rickman at his own house; Wednesday I dine with him at Tobin’s. I shall dine with Mr. Welles to-day, and thence by eight o’clock to the Royal Institution to the lecture.[16] On Thursday afternoon, two o’clock to the lecture, and Saturday night, eight o’clock to the lecture. On Friday, I spend the day with Davy certainly, and I hope with Mr. Sotheby likewise. To-morrow or Wednesday I expect to know certainly what my plans are to be, whither to go and when, and whether the intervening space will make it worth my while to go to Ottery, or whether I shall go back to Dunmow, and return with Sir George and Lady B. when they come to their house in Grosvenor Square. I cannot express to you how very, very affectionate the behaviour of these good people has been to me; and how they seem to love by anticipation those very few whom I love. If Southey would but permit me to copy that divine passage of his “Madoc,”[17] respecting the Harp of the Welsh Bard, and its imagined divinity, with the Two Savages, or any other detachable passage, or to transcribe his “Kehama,” I will pledge myself that Sir George Beaumont and Lady B. will never suffer a single individual to hear or see a single line, you saying that it is to be kept sacred to them, and not to be seen by any one else.

[No signature.]

CXLIX. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

Rickman’s Office, H. of Commons,
February 20, 1804, Monday noon.

Dear Southey,—The affair with Godwin began thus. We were talking of reviews, and bewailing their ill effects. I detailed my plan for a review, to occupy regularly the fourth side of an evening paper, etc., etc., adding that it had been a favourite scheme with me for two years past. Godwin very coolly observed that it was a plan which “no man who had a spark of honest pride” could join with. “No man, not the slave of the grossest egotism, could unite in,” etc. Cool and civil! I asked whether he and most others did not already do what I proposed in prefaces. “Aye! in prefaces; that is quite a different thing.” I then adverted to the extreme rudeness of the speech with regard to myself, and added that it was not only a very rough, but likewise a very mistaken opinion, for I was nearly if not quite sure that it had received the approbation both of you and of Wordsworth. “Yes, sir! just so! of Mr. Southey—just what I said,” and so on mōrĕ Godwiniāno in language so ridiculously and exclusively appropriate to himself, that it would have made you merry. It was even as if he was looking into a sort of moral looking-glass, without knowing what it was, and, seeing his own very, very Godwinship, had by a merry conceit christened it in your name, not without some annexment of me and Wordsworth. I replied by laughing in the first place at the capricious nature of his nicety, that what was gross in folio should become double-refined in octavo foolscap or pickpocket quartos, blind slavish egotism in small pica, manly discriminating self-respect in double primer, modest as maiden’s blushes between boards, or in calf-skin, and only not obscene in naked sheets. And then in a deep and somewhat sarcastic tone, tried to teach him to speak more reverentially of his betters, by stating what and who they were, by whom honoured, by whom depreciated. Well! this gust died away. I was going home to look over his Duncity; he begged me to stay till his return in half an hour. I, meaning to take nothing more the whole evening, took a crust of bread, and Mary Lamb made me a glass of punch of most deceitful strength. Instead of half an hour, Godwin stayed an hour and a half. In came his wife, Mrs. Fenwick,[18] and four young ladies, and just as Godwin returned, supper came in, and it was now useless to go (at supper I was rather a mirth-maker than merry). I was disgusted at heart with the grossness and vulgar insanocecity of this dim-headed prig of a philosophocide, when, after supper, his ill stars impelled him to renew the contest. I begged him not to goad me, for that I feared my feelings would not long remain in my power. He (to my wonder and indignation) persisted (I had not deciphered the cause), and then, as he well said, I did “thunder and lighten at him” with a vengeance for more than an hour and a half. Every effort of self-defence only made him more ridiculous. If I had been Truth in person, I could not have spoken more accurately; but it was Truth in a war-chariot, drawn by the three Furies, and the reins had slipped out of the goddess’s hands!... Yet he did not absolutely give way till that stinging contrast which I drew between him as a man, as a writer, and a benefactor of society, and those of whom he had spoken so irreverently. In short, I suspect that I seldom, at any time and for so great a length of time, so continuously displayed so much power, and do hope and trust that never did I display one half the scorn and ferocity. The next morning, the moment when I awoke, O mercy! I did feel like a very wretch. I got up and immediately wrote and sent off by a porter, a letter, I dare affirm an affecting and eloquent letter to him, and since then have been working for him, for I was heart-smitten with the recollection that I had said all, all in the presence of his wife. But if I had known all I now know, I will not say that I should not have apologised, but most certainly I should not have made such an apology, for he confessed to Lamb that he should not have persisted in irritating me, but that Mrs. Godwin had twitted him for his prostration before me, as if he was afraid to say his life was his own in my presence. He admitted, too, that although he never to the very last suspected that I was tipsy, yet he saw clearly that something unusual ailed me, and that I had not been my natural self the whole evening. What a poor creature! To attack a man who had been so kind to him at the instigation of such a woman![19] And what a woman to instigate him to quarrel with me, who with as much power as any, and more than most of his acquaintances, had been perhaps the only one who had never made a butt of him—who had uniformly spoken respectfully to him. But it is past! And I trust will teach me wisdom in future.

I have undoubtedly suffered a great deal from a cowardice in not daring to repel unassimilating acquaintances who press forward upon my friendship; but I dare aver, that if the circumstances of each particular case were examined, they would prove on the whole honourable to me rather than otherwise. But I have had enough and done enough. Hereafter I shall show a different face, and calmly inform those who press upon me that my health, spirits, and occupation alike make it necessary for me to confine myself to the society of those with whom I have the nearest and highest connection. So help me God! I will hereafter be quite sure that I do really and in the whole of my heart esteem and like a man before I permit him to call me friend.

I am very anxious that you should go on with your “Madoc.” If the thought had happened to suggest itself to you originally and with all these modifications and polypus tendrils with which it would have caught hold of your subject, I am afraid that you would not have made the first voyage as interesting at least as it ought to be, so as to preserve entire the fit proportion of interest. But go on!

I shall call on Longman as soon as I receive an answer from him to a note which I sent....

God bless you and

S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. I have just received Sara’s four lines added to my brother George’s letter, and cannot explain her not having received my letters. If I am not mistaken I have written three or four times: upon an average I have written to Greta Hall once every five days since I left Liverpool—if you will divide the letters, one to each five days. I will write to my brother immediately. I wrote to Sara from Dunmow; to you instantly on my return, and now again. I do not deserve to be scolded at present. I met G. Burnett the day before yesterday in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, so nervous, so helpless with such opium-stupidly-wild eyes.

Oh, it made the place one calls the heart feel as it was going to ache.

CL. TO HIS WIFE.

Mr. J. C. Motley’s, Thomas Street, Portsmouth,
Sunday, April 1, 1804.

My dear Sara,—I am waiting here with great anxiety for the arrival of the Speedwell. The Leviathan, Man of War, our convoy, has orders to sail with the first fair wind, and whatever wind can bring in the Speedwell will carry out the Leviathan, unless she have other orders than those generally known. I have left the Inn, and its crumena-mulga natio, and am only at the expense of a lodging at half a guinea a week, for I have all my meals at Mr. Motley’s, to whom a letter from Stuart introduced me, and who has done most especial honour to the introduction. Indeed he could not well help, for Stuart in his letter called me his very, very particular friend, and that every attention would sink more into his heart than one offered to himself or his brother. Besides, you know it is no new thing for people to take sudden and hot likings to me. How different Sir G. B.! He disliked me at first. When I am in better spirits and less flurried I will transcribe his last letter. It breathed the very soul of calm and manly yet deep affection.

Hartley will receive his and Derwent’s Spillekins with a letter from me by the first waggon that leaves London after Wednesday next.

My dear Sara! the mother, the attentive and excellent mother of my children must needs be always more than the word friend can express when applied to a woman. I pray you, use no word that you use with reluctance. Yet what we have been to each other, our understandings will not permit our hearts to forget! God knows, I weep tears of blood, but so it is! For I greatly esteem and honour you. Heaven knows if I can leave you really comfortable in your circumstances I shall meet Death with a face, which I feel at the moment I say it, it would rather shock than comfort you to imagine.

My health is indifferent. I am rather endurably unwell than tolerably well. I will write Southey to-morrow or next day, though Motley rides and drives me about sightseeing so as to leave me but little time. I am not sure that I shall see the Isle of Wight.

Write to Wordsworth. Inform him that I have received all and everything and will write him very soon, as soon as I can command spirits and time.... Motley can send off all letters to Malta under Government covers. You direct, therefore, at all times merely to me at Mr. J. C. Motley’s, Portsmouth.

My very dear Sara, may God Almighty bless you and your affectionate

S. T. Coleridge.

I mourn for poor Mary.

CLI. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

Off Oporto and the coast of Portugal,
Monday noon, April 16, 1804.

My dear Southey,—I was thinking long before daylight this morning, that I ought, spite of toss and tumble and cruel rocking, to write a few letters in the course of this and the three following days; at the end of which, if the northwest wind still blows behind, we may hope to be at Gibraltar. I have two or three very unpleasant letters to write, and I was planning whether I should not begin with these, have them off my hands and thoughts, in short, whistle them down into the sea, and then take up the paper, etc., a whole man. When, lo! I heard the Captain above deck talking of Oporto, slipped on my greatcoat and went shoeless up to have a look. And a beautiful scene verily it was and is! The high land of Portugal, and the mountain land behind it, and behind that fair mountains with blue pyramids and cones. By the glass I could distinguish the larger buildings in Oporto, a scrambling city, part of it, seemingly, walls washed by the sea, part of it upon hills. At first view, it looked much like a vast brick kiln in a sandy, clayey country on a hot summer afternoon; seen more distinctly, it gave the nobler idea of a ruined city in a wilderness, its houses and streets lying low in ruins under its ruined walls, and a few temples and palaces standing untouched. But over all the sea between us and the land, short of a stone’s throw on the left of the vessel, there is such a delicious warm olive green, almost yellow, on the water, and now it has taken in the vessel, and its boundary is a gunshot to my right, and one fine vessel exactly on its edge. This, though occasioned by the impurity of the nigh shore and the disemboguing rivers, forms a home scene; it is warm and landlike. The air is balmy and genial, and all that the fresh breeze can do can scarcely keep under its vernal warmth. The country round about Oporto seems darkly wooded; and in the distant gap far behind and below it on the curve of that high ridge forming a gap, I count seventeen conical and pyramidal summits; below that the high hills are saddlebacked. (In picturesque cant I ought to have said BUT below that, etc.) To me the saddleback is a pleasant form which it never would have occurred to me to christen by that name. Tents and marquees with little points and summits made by the tent-poles suggest a more striking likeness. Well! I need not say that the sight of the coast of Portugal made it impossible for me to write to any one before I had written to you—I now seeing for the first time a country you love so dearly. But you, perhaps, are not among my mountains! God Almighty grant that you may not. Yes! you are in London: all is well, and Hartley has a younger sister than tiny Sally. If it be so, call her Edith—Edith by itself—Edith. But somehow or other I would rather it were a boy, then let nothing, I conjure you, no false compliment to another, no false feeling indulged in yourself, deprive your eldest son of his father’s name. Such was ever the manner of our forefathers, and there is a dignity, a self-respect, or an awful, preëminently self-referring event in the custom, that makes it well worthy of our imitation. I would have done [so], but that from my earliest years I have had a feeling of dislike and disgust connected with my own Christian name—such a vile short plumpness, such a dull abortive smartness in the first syllable, and this so harshly contrasted by the obscurity and indefiniteness of the syllabic vowel, and the feebleness of the uncovered liquid with which it ends, the wobble it makes, and struggling between a dis- and a tri-syllable, and the whole name sounding as if you were abeeceeing S. M. U. L. Altogether, it is, perhaps, the worst combination of which vowels and consonants are susceptible. While I am writing we are in 41° 10m. latitude, and are almost three leagues from land; at one time we were scarcely one league from it, and about a quarter of an hour ago, the whole country looked so very like the country from Hutton Moor to Saddleback and the adjoining part of Skiddaw.

I cannot help some anxious feelings respecting you, nor some superstitious twitches within, as if it were wrong at this distance to write so prospectively and with such particularization of that which is contingent, which may be all otherwise. But—God forbid! and, surely, hope is less ominous than fear. We set sail from St. Helier’s, April 9th, Monday morning, having dropped down thither from Spithead on Sunday evening. We lost twenty-six hours of fair wind before our commodore gave the signal—our brig, a most excellent and first-rate sailor, but laden deep with heavy goods (eighty-four large cannon for Trieste in the hold), which makes it rock most cruelly. I can only—

Wed. April 18. I was going to say I can only compare it to a wench kept at home on some gay day to nurse a fretful infant and who, having long rocked it in vain, at length rocks it in spite.... But though the rough weather and the incessant rocking does not disease me, yet the damn’d rocking depresses one inconceivably, like hiccups or itching; it is troublesome and impertinent and forces you away from your thoughts like the presence and gossip of an old aunt, or long-staying visitor, to two lovers. Oh with what envy have I gazed at our commodore, the Leviathan of seventy-four guns, the majestic and beautiful creature sailing right before us, sometimes half a mile, oftener a furlong (for we are always first), with two or at most three topsails that just bisect the naked masts—as much naked mast above as below, upright, motionless as a church with its steeple, as though it moved by its will, as though its speed were spiritual, the being and essence without the body of motion, or as though the distance passed away by it and the objects of its pursuit hurried onward to it! In all other respects I cannot be better off, except perhaps the two passengers; the one a gay, worldly-minded fellow, not deficient in sense or judgment, but inert to everything except gain and eating; the other, a woman once housekeeper in General Fox’s family, a creature with a horrible superfluity of envelope, a monopolist and patentee of flabby flesh, or rather fish. Indeed, she is at once fish, flesh, and fowl, though no chicken. But, ... to see the man eat and this Mrs. Carnosity talk about it! “I must have that little potato” (baked in grease under the meat), “it looks so smilingly at me.” “Do cut me, if you please” (for she is so fat she cannot help herself), “that small bit, just there, sir! a leetle, tiny bit below if you please.” “Well, I have brought plenty of pickles, I always think,” etc. “I have always three or four jars of brandy cherries with me: for with boil’d rice now,” etc., “for I always think,” etc. And true enough, if it can be called thinking, she does always think upon some little damned article of eating that belongs to the housekeeper’s cupboard’s locker. And then her plaintive yawns, such a mixture of moan and petted child’s dry cry, or try at a cry in them. And then she said to me this morning, “How unhappy, I always think, one always is, when there is nothing and nobody as one may say, about one to amuse one. It makes me so nervous.” She eats, drinks, snores, and simply the being stupid, and silly, and vacant the learned body calls nervous. Shame on me for talking about her! The sun is setting so exactly behind my back that a ball from it would strike the stem of the vessel against which my back rests. But sunsets are not so beautiful, I think, at sea as on land. I am sitting at my desk, namely the rudder-case, on the duck coop, the ducks quacking at my legs. The chicken and duck coops run thus

and so inclose on three sides the rudder-case. But now immediately that the sun has sunk, the sea runs high, and the vessel begins its old trick of rocking, which it had intermitted the whole day—the second intermission only since our voyage. Oh, how glad I was to see Cape Mondego, and then yesterday the Rock of Lisbon and the fine mountains at its interior extremity, which I conceived to be Cintra! Its outline from the sea is something like this

and just at A. where the fine stony M. begins, with a C. lying on its back, is a village or villages, and before we came abreast of this, we saw far inland, seemingly close by, several breasted peaks, two towers, and, by the glass, three, of a very large building, be it convent or palace. However, I knew you had seen all these places over and over again. The dome-shaped mountain or Cape Esperichel, between Lisbon and Cape St. Vincent, is one of the finest I ever saw; indeed all the mountains have a noble outline. We sail on at a wonderful rate, and considering that we are in convoy, shall have made a most lucky voyage to Gibraltar, if we are not becalmed and taken in the Gut; for we shall be there to-morrow afternoon if the wind hold, and have gone it in ten days. It is unlucky to prophesy good things, but if we have as good fortune in the Mediterranean, instead of nine or eleven weeks, we may reach Malta in a month or five weeks, including the week which we shall most probably stay at Gibraltar. I shall keep the letters open till we arrive there, simply put two strokes under the word “Gibraltar,” and close up the letter, as I may gain thereby a fortnight’s post. You will not expect to hear from me again till we get to Malta. I had hoped to have done something during my voyage; at all events, to have written some letters, etc. But what with the rains, the incessant rocking, and my consequent ill health or stupefaction, I have done little else than read through the Italian Grammar. I took out with me some of the finest wine and the oldest in the kingdom, some marvellous brandy, and rum twenty years old, and excepting a pint of wine, which I had mulled at two different times, and instantly ejected again, I have touched nothing but lemonade from the day we set sail to the present time. So very little does anything grow into a habit with me! This I should say to poor Tobin, who continued advising and advising to the last moment. O God, he is a good fellow, but this rage of advising and discussing character, and (as almost all men of strong habitual health have the trick of doing) of finding out the cause of everybody’s ill health in some one malpractice or other. This, and the self-conceit and presumption necessarily generated by it, added to his own marvellous genius at utterly misunderstanding what he hears, and transposing words often in a manner that would be ludicrous if one did not suspect that his blindness had a share in producing it—all this renders him a sad mischief-maker, and with the best intentions, a manufacturer and propagator of calumnies. I had no notion of the extent of the mischief till I was last in town. I was low, even to sinking, when I was at the Inn. Stuart, best, kindest man to me! was with me, and Lamb, and Sir G. B.’s valet. But Tobin fastened upon me, and advised and reproved, and just before I stepped into the coach, reminded me of a debt of ten pounds which I had borrowed of him for another person, an intimate friend of his, on the condition that I was not to repay him till I could do it out of my own purse, not borrowing of another, and not embarrassing myself—in his very words, “till he wanted it more than I.” I was calling to Stuart in order to pay the sum, but he stopped me with fervour, and, fully convinced that he did it only in the rage of admonition, I was vexed that it had angered me. Therefore say nothing of it, for really he is at bottom a good man.

I dare say nothing of home. I will write to Sara from Malta, the moment of my arrival, if I have not time to write from Gibraltar. One of you write to me by the regular post, “S. T. Coleridge, Esqre. Dr. Stoddart’s, Malta:” the other to me at Mr. J. C. Motley’s, Portsmouth, that I may see whether Motley was right or no, and which comes first.

God bless you all and

S. T. Coleridge.

Remember me kindly to Mr. Jackson, Mrs. Wilson, to the Calverts and Mrs. Wilkinson, to Mary Stamper, etc.

CLII. TO DANIEL STUART.

On board the Speedwell, at anchor in the Bay of Gibraltar,
Saturday night, April 21, 1804.

My dear Stuart,—We dropped anchor half a mile from the landing place of the Rock of Gibraltar on Thursday afternoon between four and five; a most prosperous voyage of eleven days....

Since we anchored I have passed nearly the whole of each day in scrambling about on the back of the rock, among the monkeys. I am a match for them in climbing, but in hops and flying leaps they beat me. You sometimes see thirty or forty together of these our poor relations, and you may be a month on the rock and go to the back every day and not see one. Oh, my dear friend! it is a most interesting place, this! A rock which thins as it rises up, so that you can sit a-straddle on almost any part of its summit, between two and three miles from north to south.

Rude as this line is, it gives you the outline of its appearance, from the sea close to it, tolerably accurately; only, in nature, it gives you very much the idea of a rude statue of a lion couchant, like that in the picture of the Lion and the Gnat, in the common spelling-books, or of some animal with a great dip in the neck. The lion’s head [turns] towards the Spanish, his stiffened tail (4) to the African coast. At (5) a range of Moorish towers and wall begins; and at (6) the town begins, the Moorish wall running straight down by the side of it. Above the town, little gardens and neat small houses are scattered here and there, wherever they can force a bit of gardenable ground; and in these are poplars, with a profusion of geraniums and other flowers unknown to me; and their fences are most commonly that strange vegetable monster, the prickly aloe; its leaves resembling the head of a battledore, or the wooden wings of a church-cherub, and one leaf growing out of another. Under the Lion’s Tail is Europa Point, which is full of gardens and pleasant trees; but the highest head of this mountain is a heap of rocks, with the palm-trees growing in vast quantities in their interstices, with many flowering weeds very often peeping out of the small holes or slits in the body of the rock, just as if they were growing in a bottle. To have left England only eleven days ago, with two flannel waistcoats on, and two others over them; with two flannel drawers under cloth pantaloons, and a thick pair of yarn stockings; to have had no temptation to lay any part of these aside during the whole voyage, and now to find myself in the heat of an English summer, among flowers, and seeking shade, and courting the sea-breezes; all the trees in rich foliage, and the corn knee-high, and so exquisitely green! and to find myself forced to retain only one flannel waistcoat, and roam about in a pair of silk stockings and nankeen pantaloons, is a delightful transition. How I shall bear the intensity of a Maltese or even a Sicilian summer I cannot guess; but if I get over it, I am confident, from what I have experienced the last four days, that their late autumn and winter will almost re-create me. I could fill a fresh sheet with the description of the singular faces, dresses, manners, etc., etc., of the Spaniards, Moors, Jews (who have here a peculiar dress resembling a college dress), Greeks, Italians, English, etc., that meet in the hot crowded streets of the town, or walk under the aspen poplars that form an Exchange in the very centre. But words would do nothing. I am sure that any young man who has a turn for character-painting might pass a year on the Rock with infinite advantage. A dozen plates by Hogarth from this town! We are told that we shall not sail to-morrow evening. The Leviathan leaves us and goes to join the fleet, and the Maidstone Frigate is to convoy us to Malta. When you write, send one letter to me at Mr. J. C. Motley’s, Portsmouth, and another by the post to me at Dr. Stoddart’s,[20] Malta, that I may see which comes first. God grant that my present health may continue, and then my after-letters will be better worth the postage. But even this scrawl will not be unwelcome to you, since it tells you that I am safe, improving in my health, and ever, ever, my dear Stuart, with true affection, and willing gratitude, your sincere friend,

S. T. Coleridge.

In the diary of his voyage on the Speedwell Coleridge records at greater length and in a more impassioned strain his first impressions of Gibraltar. “Saturday, April 21st, went again on shore, walked up to the furthermost signal-house, the summit of that third and last segment of the mountain ridge which looks over the blue sea to Africa. The mountains around me did not anywhere arrange themselves strikingly, and few of their shapes were striking. One great pyramidal summit far above the rest, on the coast of Spain, and an uncouth form, an old Giant’s Head and shoulders, looking in upon us from Africa far inland, were the most impressive; but the sea was so blue, calm, sunny, so majestic a lake where it is enshored by mountains, and, where it is not [enshored], having its indefiniteness the more felt from those huge mountain boundaries, which yet by their greatness prepared the mind for the sublimity of unbounded ocean—altogether it reposed in the brightness and quietness of the noon—majestic, for it was great with an inseparable character of unity, and, thus, the more touching to me who had looked from far loftier mountains over a far more manifold landscape, the fields and habitations of Englishmen, children of one family, one religion, and that my own, the same language and manners—by every hill, by every river some sweet name familiar to my ears, or, if first heard, remembered as soon as heard! But here, on this side of me, Spaniards, a degraded race that dishonour Christianity; on the other, Moors of many nations, wretches that dishonour human nature! If any one were near me and could tell me, ‘that mountain yonder is called so and so, and at its foot runs such and such a river,’ oh, with how blank an ear should I listen to sounds which probably my tongue could not repeat, and which I should be sure to forget, and take no pleasure in remembering! And the Rock itself, on which I stand (nearly the same in length as our Carrock, but not so high, nor one tenth as wide), what a complex Thing! At its feet mighty ramparts establishing themselves in the sea with their huge artillery, hollow trunks of iron where Death and Thunder sleep; the gardens in deep moats between lofty and massive walls; a town of all nations and all languages—close below me, on my left, fields and gardens and neat small mansions—poplars, cypresses, and willow-leaved aspens, with fences of prickly aloe—strange plant that does not seem to be alive, but to have been so, a thing fantastically carved in wood, and coloured—some hieroglyphic or temple ornament of undiscovered meaning. On my right and immediately with and around me white stone above stone, an irregular heap of marble rocks, with flowers growing out of the holes and fissures, and palmettoes everywhere ... beyond these an old Moorish tower, and then galleries and halls cut out by human labour out of the dense hard rock, with enormous cannon the apertures for which no eye could distinguish, from the sea or the land below them, from the nesting-holes of seafowl. On the north side, aside these, one absolutely perpendicular precipice, the absolute length of the Rock, at its highest a precipice of 1,450 feet—the whole eastern side an unmanageable mass of stones and weeds, save one place where a perpendicular precipice of stone slants suddenly off in a swelling slope of sand like the Screes on Wastwater. The other side of this rock 5,000 men in arms, and no less than 10,000 inhabitants—in this [side] sixty or seventy apes! What a multitude, an almost discordant complexity of associations! The Pillars of Hercules, Calpe, and Abyla, the realms of Masinissa, Jugurtha, and Syphax: Spain, Gibraltar: the Dey of Algiers, dusky Moor and black African, and others. Quiet it is to the eye, and to the heart, which in it will entrance itself in the present vision, and know nothing, feel nothing, but the abiding things of Nature, great, calm, majestic, and one! From the road I climbed up among the rocks, crushing the tansy, the strong smell of which the open air reconciled to me. I reached the ‘striding edge,’ where, as I sate, I fell into the above musing.”

CLIII. TO HIS WIFE.

[Malta,] June, 1804.

[My dear Sara,]—[I wrote] to Southey from Gibraltar, directing you to open the letter in case Southey should be in town. You received it, I trust, and learnt from it that I had been pretty well, and that we had had a famous quick passage. At Gibraltar we stayed five days, and so lost our fair wind, and [during our] after-voyage to Malta [there] was [a] storm, that carried away our main yard, etc., long dead calms, every rope of the whole ship reflected in the bright, soft blue sea, and light winds, often varying every quarter of an hour, and more often against us than for us. We were the best sailing vessel in the whole convoy; but every day we had to lie by and wait for the laggards. This is very disheartening; likewise the frequent danger in light winds or calms, or in foggy weather of running foul of each other is another heavy inconvenience of convoy, and, in case of a deep calm in a narrow sea, as in the Gut of Gibraltar and in the Archipelago, etc., where calms are most common, a privateering or piratical row-boat might board you and make slaves of you under the very nose of the man-of-war, which would lie a lifeless hulk on the smooth water. For these row-boats, mounting from one to four or five guns, would instantly sink a man-of-war’s boat, and one of them, last war, had very nearly made a British frigate strike. I mention these facts because it is a common notion that going under convoy you are “as snug as a bug in a rug.” If I had gone without convoy on board the Speedwell, we should have reached Malta in twenty days from the day I left Portsmouth, but, however, we were congratulated on having had a very good passage for the time of the year, having been only forty days including our stay at Gibraltar; and if there be inconvenience in a convoy, I have reason to know and to be grateful for its advantages. The whole of the voyage from Gibraltar to Malta, excepting the four or five last days, I was wretchedly unwell.... The harbour at Valetta is narrow as the neck of a bottle in the entrance; but instantly opens out into a lake with tongues of land, capes, one little island, etc., etc., where the whole navy of England might lie as in a dock in the worst of weather. All around its banks, in the form of an amphitheatre, rise the magnificent houses of Valetta, and its two over-the-water towns, Burmola and Flavia (which are to Valetta what the Borough is to London). The houses are all lofty and built of fine white freestone, something like Bath, only still whiter and newer looking, yet the windows, from the prodigious thickness of the walls, being all out of sight, the whole appeared to me as Carthage to Æneas, a proud city, well nigh but not quite finished. I walked up a long street of good breadth, all a flight of stairs (no place for beast or carriage, each broad stair composed of a cement-sand of terra pozzolana, hard and smooth as the hardest pavement of smooth rock by the seaside and very like it). I soon found out Dr. Stoddart’s house, which seemed a large pile of building. He was not at home, but I stayed for him, and in about two hours he came, and received me with an explosion of surprise and welcome—more fun than affection in the manner, but just as I wished it.... Yesterday and to-day I have been pretty well. In a hot climate, now that the glass is high as 80 in the shade, the healthiest persons are liable to fever on the least disagreement of food with the first passages, and my general health is, I would fain believe, better on the whole.... I will try the most scrupulous regimen of diet and exercise; and I rejoice to find that the heat, great as it is, does not at all annoy me. In about a fortnight I shall probably take a trip into Sicily, and spend the next two or three months in some cooler and less dreary place, and return in September. For eight months in the year the climate of Malta is delightful, but a drearier place eye never saw. No stream in the whole island, only one place of springs, which are conveyed by aqueducts and supply the island with about one third of its water; the other two thirds they depend for upon the rain. And the reservoirs under the houses, walls, etc., to preserve the rain are stupendous! The tops of all the houses are flat, and covered with that smooth, hard composition, and on these and everywhere where rain can fall are channels and pipes to conduct it to the reservoirs. Malta is about twenty miles by twelve—a mere rock of freestone. In digging out this they find large quantities of vegetable soil. They separate it, and with the stones they build their houses and garden and field walls, all of an enormous thickness. The fields are seldom so much as half an acre

one above another in that form, so that everything grows as in huge garden pots. The whole island looks like one monstrous fortification. Nothing green meets your eye—one dreary, grey-white,—and all the country towns from the retirement and invisibility of the windows look like towns burnt out and desolate. Yet the fertility is marvellous. You almost see things grow, and the population is, I suppose, unexampled. The town of Valetta itself contains about one hundred and ten streets, all at right angles to each other, each having from twelve to fifty houses; but many of them very steep—a few staired all across, and almost all, in some part or other, if not the whole, having the footway on each side so staired. The houses lofty, all looking new. The good houses are built with a court in the centre, and the rooms large and lofty, from sixteen to twenty feet high, and walls enormously thick, all necessary for coolness. The fortifications of Valetta are endless. When I first walked about them, I was struck all of a heap with their strangeness, and when I came to understand a little of their purpose, I was overwhelmed with wonder. Such vast masses—bulky mountain-breasted heights; gardens with pomegranate trees—the prickly pears in the fosses, and the caper (the most beautiful of flowers) growing profusely in the interstices of the high walls and on the battlements. The Maltese are a dark, light-limbed people. Of the women five tenths are ugly; of the remainder, four fifths would be ordinary but that they look so quaint, and one tenth, perhaps, may be called quaint-pretty. The prettiest resemble pretty Jewesses in England. They are the noisiest race[21] under heaven, and Valetta the noisiest place. The sudden shot-up, explosive bellows-cries you ever heard in London would give you the faintest idea of it. Even when you pass by a fruit stall the fellow will put his hand like a speaking trumpet to his mouth and shoot such a thunderbolt of sound full at you. Then the endless jangling of those cursed bells, etc. Sir Alexander Ball and General Valette (the civil and military commanders) have been marvellously attentive—Sir A. B. even friendly and confidential to me.

Poor Mrs. Stoddart was brought to bed of a little girl on the 24th of May, and it died on Tuesday, June 5th. On the night of its birth, poor little lamb! I had such a lively vision of my little Sara, that it brought on a sort of hysterical fit on me. O merciful God! how I tremble at the thought of letters from England. I should be most miserable without them, and yet I shall receive them as a sentence of death! So terribly has fear got the upper hand in my habitual feelings, from my long destitution of hope and joy.

Hartley, Derwent, my sweet children! a father’s blessing on you! With tears and clasped hands I bless you. Oh, I must write no more of this. I have been haunted by the thought that I have lost a box of books containing Shakespeare (Stockdale’s), the four or five first volumes of the “British Poets,” Young’s “Syllabus” (a red paper book), Condillac’s “Logic,” “Thornton on Public Credit,” etc. Be sure you inform me whether or no I did take these books from Keswick. I will write to Southey by the next opportunity. You recollect that I went away without knowing the result of Edith’s confinement; not a day in which I do not think of it.

My love to dear Southey, and remember me to Mr. Jackson, and Mrs. Wilson with the kindest words, and to Mary Stamper. My kind remembrances to Mr. and Mrs. Wilkinson, and to the Calverts. How is your sister Mary in her spirits? My wishes and prayers attend her. I am anxious to hear about poor George and shall write about him to Portsmouth in the course of a week, for by that time a convoy will be going to England as we expect. I hope that in the course of three weeks or a month I may be able to give a more promising account of my health. As it is, I have reason to be satisfied. The effect of years cannot be done away in a few weeks. I am tranquil and resigned, and, even if I should not bring back health, I shall at least bring back experience, and suffer with patience and in silence. Again and again God bless you, my dear Sara! Let me know everything of your health, etc., etc. Oh, the letters are on the sea for me, and what tidings may they not bring to me!

S. T. Coleridge.

Single sheet. Per Germania a Londra. An. 1804.

CLIV. TO DANIEL STUART.

Syracuse,[22] October 22, 1804.

My dear Stuart,—I have written you a long letter this morning by way of Messina, and from other causes am so done up and brain weary that I must put you to the expense of this as almost a blank, except that you will be pleased to observe my attention to business in having written two letters of advice, as well as transmitted first and second of exchange for £50 which I have drawn upon you, payable to order of Dr. Stoddart at usance. I shall want no more for my return. I shall stay a month at Messina, and in that time visit Naples. Supposing the letter of this morning to miss, I ought to repeat to you that I leave the publication of the Pacquet,[23] which is waiting for convoy at Malta for you, to your own opinion. If the information appear new or valuable to you, and the letters themselves entertaining, etc., publish them; only do not sell the copyright of more than the right of two editions to the bookseller. He will not give more, or much more for the copyright of the whole.

May God bless you! I am, and shall be as long as I exist, your truly grateful and affectionate friend,

S. T. Coleridge.

CLV. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

Sat. morning, 4 o’clock. Treasury, Malta.
February 2, 1805.

Dear Southey,—A Privateer is to leave this Port to-day at noon for Gibraltar, and, it chancing that an officer of rank takes his passage in her, Sir A. Ball trusts his dispatches with due precaution to this unusual mode of conveyance, and I must enclose a letter to you in the government parcel. I pray that the lead attached to it will not be ominous of its tardy voyage, much less of its making a diving tour whither the spirit of Shakespeare went, under the name of the Dreaming Clarence.[24] Certain it is that I awoke about some half hour ago from so vivid a dream that the work of sleep had completely destroyed all sleepiness. I got up, went to my office-room, rekindled the wood-fire for the purpose of writing to you, having been so employed from morn till eve in writing public letters, some as long as memorials, from the hour that this opportunity was first announced to me, that for once in my life, at least, I can with strict truth affirm that I have had no time to write to you, if by time be understood the moments of life in which our powers are alive. I am well—at least, till within the last fortnight I was perfectly so, till the news of the sale of my blessed house played “the foe intestine” with me. But of that hereafter.

My dear Southey![25] the longer I live, and the more I see, know, and think, the more deeply do I seem to know and feel your goodness; and why, at this distance, may I not allow myself to utter forth my whole thought by adding your greatness? “Thy kingdom come” will have been a petition already granted, when in the minds and hearts of all men both words mean the same; or (to shake off a state of feeling deeper than may be serviceable to me) when gulielmosartorially speaking (i. e. William “Taylorice”) the latter word shall have become an incurable synonym, a lumberly duplicate, thrown into the kennel of the Lethe-lapping Chronos Anubioeides,[26] as a carriony, bare-ribbed tautology. Oh me! it will not do! You, my children, the Wordsworths, are at Keswick and Grasmere, and I am at Malta, and it is a silly hypocrisy to pretend to joke when I am heavy at heart. By the accident of the sale of a dead Colonel’s effects, who arrived in this healing climate too late to be healed, I procured the perusal of the second volume of the “Annual Review.” I was suddenly and strangely affected by the marked attention which you had paid to my few hints, by the insertion of my joke on Booker; but more, far more than all, by the affection for me which peeped forth in that “William Brown of Ottery.” I knew you stopped before and after you had written the words. But I am to speak of your reviews in general. I am confident, for I have carefully reperused almost the whole volume, and what I knew or detected to be yours I have read over and over again, with as much care and as little warping of partiality as if it had been a manuscript of my own going to the press—I can say confidently that in my best judgment they are models of good sense and correct style; of high and honest feeling intermingled with a sort of wit which (I now translate as truly, though not as verbally, as I can, the sense of an observation which a literary Venetian, who resides here as the editor of a political journal, made to me after having read your reviews of Clarke’s “Maritime Discoveries”) unites that happy turn of words, which is the essence of French wit, with those comic picture-making combinations of fancy that characterises the old wit of old England. If I can find time to copy off what in the hurry of the moment I wrote on loose papers that cannot be made up into a letter without subjecting you to an expense wholly disproportionate to their value, I shall prove to you that I have been watchful in marking what appeared to me false, or better-not, or better-otherwise, parts, no less than what I felt to be excellent. It is enough to say at present, that seldom in my course of reading have I been more deeply impressed than by the sense of the diffused good they were likely to effect. At the same time I could not help feeling to how many false and pernicious principles, both in taste and in politics, they were likely, by their excellence, to give a non-natural circulation. W. Taylor grows worse and worse. As to his political dogmata concerning Egypt, etc., God forgive him! He knows not what he does! But as to his spawn about Milton and Tasso—nay, Heaven forbid it should be spawn, it is pure toad-spit, not as toad-spit is, but as it is vulgarly believed to be. (See, too, his Article in the “Critical Review.”) Now for your feelings respecting “Madoc.” I regard them as all nerve and stomach-work, you having too recently quitted the business. Genius, too, has its intoxication, which, however divine, leaves its headaches and its nauseas. Of the very best of the few bad, good, and indifferent things, I have had the same sensations. Concerning the immediate chryso-poetic powers of “Madoc” I can only fear somewhat and hope somewhat. Midas and Apollo are as little cronies as Marsyas and Apollo. But of its great and lasting effects on your fame, if I doubted, I should then doubt all things in which I had hitherto had firm faith. Neither am I without cheerful belief respecting its ultimate effects on your worldly fortune. O dear Southey! when I see this booby with his ten pound a day as Mr. Commissary X., and that thorough-rogue two doors off him with his fifteen pound a day as Mr. General Paymaster Y. Z., it stirs up a little bile from the liver and gives my poor stomach a pinch, when I hear you talk of having to look forward to an £100 or £150. But cheerily! what do we complain of? would we be either of these men? Oh, had I domestic happiness, and an assurance only of the health I now possess continuing to me in England, what a blessed creature should I be, though I found it necessary to feed me and mine on roast potatoes for two days in each week in order to make ends meet, and to awake my beloved with a kiss on the first of every January. “Well, my best darling! we owe nobody a farthing! and I have you, my children, two or three friends, and a thousand books!” I have written very lately to Mrs. Coleridge. If my letter reaches her, as I have quoted in it a part of yours of Oct. 19th, she will wonder that I took no notice of the house and the Bellygerent. From Mrs. C. I have received no letter by the last convoy. In truth I am and have reason to be ashamed to own to what a diseased excess my sensibility has worsened into. I was so agitated by the receipt of letters, that I did not bring myself to open them for two or three days, half-dreaming that from there being no letter from Mrs. C. some one of the children had died, or that she herself had been ill, or—for so help me God! most ill-starred as our marriage has been, there is perhaps nothing that would so frightfully affect me as any change respecting her health or life; and, when I had read about a third of your letter, I walked up and down and then out, and much business intervening, I wrote to her before I had read the remainder, or my other letters. I grieve exceedingly at the event, and my having foreseen it does not diminish the shock. My dear study! and that house in which such persons have been! where my Hartley has made his first love-commune with Nature, to belong to White. Oh, how could Mr. Jackson have the heart to do it! As to the climate, I am fully convinced that to an invalid all parts of England are so much alike, that no disadvantages on that score can overbalance any marked advantages from other causes. Mr. J. well knows that but for my absolute confidence in him I should have taken the house for a long lease—but, poor man! I am rather to soothe than to reproach him. When will he ever again have loving friends and housemates like to us? And dear good Mrs. Wilson! Surely Mrs. Coleridge must have written to me, though no letter has arrived. Now for myself. I am most anxiously expecting the arrival of Mr. Chapman from Smyrna, who is (by the last ministry if that should hold valid) appointed successor to Mr. Macaulay, as Public Secretary of Malta, the second in rank to the Governor. Mr. M., an old man of eighty, died on the 18th of last month, calm as a sleeping baby, in a tremendous thunder-and-lightning storm. In the interim, I am and some fifty times a day subscribe myself, Segretario Pubblico dell’ Isole di Malta, Gozo, e delle loro dipendenze. I live in a perfect palace and have all my meals with the Governor; but my profits will be much less than if I had employed my time and efforts in my own literary pursuits. However, I gain new insights and if (as I doubt not I shall) I return having expended nothing, having paid all my prior debts as well as interim expense (of the which debts I consider the £100 borrowed by me from Sotheby on the firm of W. Wordsworth, the heaviest), with health, and some additional knowledge both in things and languages, I surely shall not have lost a year. My intention is, assuredly, to leave this place at the farthest in the latter end of this month, whether by the convoy, or over-land by Trieste, Vienna, Berlin, Embden, and Denmark, but I must be guided by circumstances. At all events, it will be well if a letter should be left for me at the “Courier” office in London, by the first of May, informing me of all which it is necessary for me to know. But of one thing I am most anxious, namely, that my assurance money should be paid. I pray you, look to that. You will have heard long before this letter reaches you that the French fleet have escaped from Toulon. I have no heart for politics, else I could tell you how for the last nine months I have been working in memorials concerning Egypt, Sicily, and the coast of Africa. Could France ever possess these, she would be, in a far grander sense than the Roman, an Empire of the World. And what would remain to England? England; and that which our miserable diplomatists affect now to despise, now to consider as a misfortune, our language and institutions in America. France is blest by nature, for in possessing Africa she would have a magnificent outlet for her population as near her own coasts as Ireland to ours; an America that must forever be an integral part of the mother-country. Egypt is eager for France—only eager, far more eager for G. Britain. The universal cry there (I have seen translations of twenty, at least, mercantile letters in the Court of Admiralty here (in which I have made a speech with a wig and gown, a true Jack of all Trades), all stating that the vox populi) is English, English, if we can! but Hats at all events! (Hats means Europeans in contradistinction to Turbans.) God bless you, Southey! I wish earnestly to kiss your child. And all whom you love, I love, as far as I can, for your sake.

For England. Per Inghilterra.
Robert Southey, Esqre, Greta Hall, Keswick, Cumberland.

CLVI. TO DANIEL STUART.

Favoured by Captain Maxwell of the Artillery.—N. B., an amiable mild man, who is prepared to give you any information.

Malta, April 20, 1805.

Dear Stuart,—The above is a duplicate, or rather a sex or septem-plicate of an order sent off within three weeks after my draft on you had been given by me; and very anxious I have been, knowing that all or almost all of my letters have failed. It seems like a judgment on me. Formerly, when I had the sure means of conveying letters, I neglected my duty through indolence or procrastination. For the last year, when, having all my heart, all my hope in England, I found no other gratification than that of writing to Wordsworth and his family, his wife, sister, and wife’s sister; to Southey, to you, to T. Wedgwood, Sir. G. Beaumont, etc. Indeed, I have been supererogatory in some instances—but an evil destiny has dogged them—one large and (forgive my vanity!) rather important set of letters to you on Sicily and Egypt were destroyed at Gibraltar among the papers of a most excellent man, Major Adye, to whom I had entrusted them on his departure from Sicily, and who died of the Plague FOUR DAYS after his arrival at Gibraltar. But still was I afflicted (shame on me! even to violent weeping) when all my many, many letters were thrown overboard from the Arrow, the Acheron, and a merchant vessel, to all which I had entrusted them; the last through my own over care. For I delivered them to the captain with great pomp of seriousness, in my official character as Public Secretary of the Islands.[27] He took them, and considering them as public papers, on being close chased and expecting to be boarded, threw them overboard; and he, however, escaped, steering for Africa, and returned to Malta. But regrets are idle things.

In my letter, which will accompany this, I have detailed my health and all that relates to me. In case, however, that letter should not arrive, I will simply say, that till within the last two months or ten weeks my health had improved to the utmost of my hopes, though not without some intrusions of sickness; but latterly the loss of my letters to England, the almost entire non-arrival of letters from England, not a single one from Mrs. Coleridge or Southey or you; and only one from the Wordsworths, and that dated September, 1804! my consequent heart-saddening anxieties, and still, still more, the depths which Captain John Wordsworth’s death[28] sunk into my heart, and which I heard abruptly, and in the very painfullest way possible in a public company—all these joined to my disappointment in my expectation of returning to England by this convoy, and the quantity and variety of my public occupations from eight o’clock in the morning to five in the afternoon, having besides the most anxious duty of writing public letters and memorials which belongs to my talents rather than to my pro-tempore office; these and some other causes that I cannot mention relative to my affairs in England have produced a sad change indeed on my health; but, however, I hope all will be well.... It is my present intention to return home over-land by Naples, Ancona, Trieste, etc., on or about the second of next month.

The gentleman who will deliver this to you is Captain Maxwell of the Royal Artillery, a well-informed and very amiable countryman of yours. He will give you any information you wish concerning Malta. An intelligent friend of his, an officer of sense and science, has entrusted to him an essay on Lampedusa,[29] which I have advised him to publish in a newspaper, leaving it to the Editor to divide it. It may, perhaps, need a little softening, but it is an accurate and well-reasoned memorial. He only wishes to give it publicity, and to have not only his name concealed, but every circumstance that could lead to a suspicion. If after reading it you approve of it, you would greatly oblige him by giving it a place in the “Courier.” He is a sensible, independent man. For all else to my other letter.—I am, dear Stuart, with faithful recollections, your much obliged and truly grateful friend and servant,

S. T. Coleridge.

April 20, 1805.

CLVII. TO HIS WIFE.

Malta, July 21, 1805.

Dear Sara,—The Niger is ordered off for Gibraltar at a moment’s warning, and the Hall is crowded with officers and merchants whose oaths I am to take, and accompts to sign. I will not, however, suffer it to go without a line, and including a draft for £110—another opportunity will offer in a week or ten days, and I will enclose a duplicate in a letter at large. Now for the most important articles. My health had greatly improved; but latterly it has been very, very bad, in great measure owing to dejection of spirits, my letters having failed, the greater part of those to me, and almost all mine homeward.... My letters and the duplicates of them, written with so much care and minuteness to Sir George Beaumont—those to Wedgwood, to the Wordsworths, to Southey, Major Adye’s sudden death, and then the loss of the two frigates, the capture of a merchant’s privateer, all have seemed to spite. No one not absent on a dreary island, so many leagues of sea from England, can conceive the effect of these accidents on the spirit and inmost soul. So help me Heaven! they have nearly broken my heart. And, added to this, I have been hoping and expecting to get away for England for five months past, and Mr. Chapman not arriving, Sir Alexander’s importunities have always overpowered me, though my gloom has increased at each disappointment. I am determined, however, to go in less than a month. My office, as Public Secretary, the next civil dignitary to the Governor, is a very, very busy one, and not to involve myself in the responsibility of the Treasurer I have but half the salary. I oftentimes subscribe my name 150 times a day, S. T. Coleridge, Pub. Sec. to H. M. Civ. Commiss^r, or (if in Italian) Seg. Pub. del Commiss’ Regio, and administer half as many oaths—besides which I have the public memorials to write, and, worse than all, constant matters of arbitration. Sir A. Ball is indeed exceedingly kind to me. The officers will be impatient. I would I could write a more cheerful account of my health; all I can say is that I am better than I have been, and that I was very much better before so many circumstances of dejection happened. I should overset myself completely, if I ventured to mention a single name. How deeply I love, O God! it is agony at morning and evening.

S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. On being abruptly told by Lady Ball of John Wordsworth’s fate, I attempted to stagger out of the room (the great saloon of the Palace with fifty people present), and before I could reach the door fell down on the ground in a convulsive hysteric fit. I was confined to my room for a fortnight after; and now I am afraid to open a letter, and I never dare ask a question of any new-comer. The night before last I was much affected by the sudden entrance of poor Reynell (our inmate at Stowey);[30] more of him in my next. May God Almighty bless you and—

(Signed with seal, ΕΣΤΗΣΕ.)

For England.
Mrs. Coleridge, Keswick, Cumberland.

Postmark, Sept. 8, 1805.

CLVIII. TO WASHINGTON ALLSTON.

Direct to me at Mr. Degens, Leghorn. God bless you!

Tuesday, June 17, 1806.[31]

My dear Allston,—No want of affection has occasioned my silence. Day after day I expected Mr. Wallis. Benvenuti received me with almost insulting coldness, not even asking me to sit down; neither could I, by any enquiry, find that he ever returned my call, and even in answer to a very polite note enquiring for letters, sent a verbal message, that there was one, and that I might call for it. However, within the last seven or eight days he has called and made his amende honourable; he says he forgot the name of my inn, and called at two or three in vain. Whoo! I did not tell him that within five days I sent him a note in which the inn was mentioned, and that he sent me a message in consequence, and yet never called for ten days afterwards. However, yester-evening the truth came out. He had been bored by letters of recommendation, and till he received a letter from Mr. —— looked upon me as a bore—which, however, he might and ought to have got rid of in a more gentlemanly manner. Nothing more was necessary than the day after my arrival to have sent his card by his servant. But I forgive him from my heart. It should, however, be a lesson to Mr. Wallis, to whom, and for whom, he gives letters of recommendation.

I have been dangerously ill for the last fortnight, and unwell enough, Heaven knows, previously; about ten days ago, on rising from my bed, I had a manifest stroke of palsy along my right side and right arm. My head felt like another man’s head, so dead was it, that I seemed to know it only by my left hand, and a strange sense of numbness....

Enough of it, continual vexations and preyings upon the spirit—I gave life to my children,[32] and they have repeatedly given it to me; for, by the Maker of all things, but for them I would try my chance. But they pluck out the wing-feathers from the mind. I have not entirely recovered the sense of my side or hand, but have recovered the use. I am harassed by local and partial fevers. This day, at noon, we set off for Leghorn;[33] all passage through the Italian States and Germany is little other than impossible for an Englishman, and Heaven knows whether Leghorn may not be blockaded. However, we go thither, and shall go to England in an American ship. Inform Mr. Wallis of this, and urge him to make his way—assure him of my anxious thoughts and fervent wishes respecting him and of my love for T——, and his family. Tell Mr. Migliorus [?] that I should have written him long ago but for my ill health; and will not fail to do it on my arrival at Pisa—from thence, too, I will write a letter to you, for this I do not consider as a letter. Nothing can surpass Mr. Russell’s[34] kindness and tender-heartedness to me, and his understanding is far superior to what it appears on first acquaintance. I will write likewise to Mr. Wallis and conjure him not to leave Amelia. I have heard in Leghorn a sad, sad character of one of those whom you called acquaintance, but who call you their dear friend.

My dear Allston, somewhat from increasing age, but more from calamity and intense fra[ternal affections], my heart is not open to more than kind, good wishes in general. To you, and to you alone, since I left England, I have felt more, and had I not known the Wordsworths, should have esteemed and loved you first and most; and, as it is, next to them I love and honour you. Heaven knows, a part of such a wreck as my head and heart is scarcely worth your acceptance.

S. T. Coleridge.

CLIX. TO DANIEL STUART.

Bell Inn, Friday Street,
Monday morning, August 18, 1806.

My dear Sir,—I arrived here from Stangate Creek last night, a little after ten, and have found myself so unusually better ever since I leaped on land yester-afternoon, that I am glad that neither my strength nor spirits enabled me to write to you on my arrival in Quarantine on the eleventh. Both the captain and my fellow-passengers were seriously alarmed for my life; and indeed such have been my unremitting sufferings from pain, sleeplessness, loathing of food, and spirits wholly despondent, that no motive on earth short of an awful duty would ever prevail on me to take any sea-voyage likely to be longer than three or four days. I had rather starve in a hovel, and, if life through disease become worthless, will choose a Roman death. It is true I was very low before I embarked.... To have been working so hard for eighteen months in a business I detested; to have been flattered, and to have flattered myself that I should, on striking the balance, have paid all my debts and maintained both myself and family during my exile out of my savings and earnings, including my travels through Germany, through which I had to the very last hoped to have passed, and found myself!—but enough! I cannot charge my conscience with a single extravagance, nor even my judgment with any other imprudences than that of suffering one good and great man to overpersuade me from month to month to a delay which was gnawing away my very vitals, and in being duped in disobedience to my first feelings and previous ideas by another diplomatic Minister.... A gentleman offered to take me without expense to Rome, which I accepted with the full intention of staying only a fortnight, and then returning to Naples to pass the winter.... I left everything but a good suit of clothes and my shirts, etc., all my letters of credit, manuscripts, etc. I had not been ten days in Rome before the French torrent rolled down on Naples. All return was impossible, and all transmission of papers not only insecure, but being English and many of them political, highly dangerous both to the sender and sendee.... But this is only a fragment of a chapter of contents, and I am too much agitated to write the details, but will call on you as soon as my two or three remaining [guineas] shall have put a decent hat upon my head and shoes upon my feet. I am literally afraid, even to cowardice, to ask for any person or of any person. Including the Quarantine we had fifty-five days of shipboard, working up against head-winds, rotting and sweating in calms, or running under hard gales with the dead lights secured. From the captain and my fellow-passenger I received every possible tenderness, only when I was very ill they laid their wise heads together, and the latter in a letter to his father begged him to inform my family that I had arrived, and he trusted that they would soon see me in better health and spirits than when I had quitted them; a letter which must have alarmed if they saw into it, and wounded if they did not. I was not informed of it till this morning. God bless you, my dear sir! I have yet cheerful hopes that Heaven will not suffer me to die degraded by any other debts than those which it ever has been, and ever will be, my joy and pride still to pay and still to owe; those of a truly grateful heart, and to you among the first of those to whom they are due.

S. T. Coleridge.

CHAPTER VIII
HOME AND NO HOME
1806-1807

CHAPTER VIII
HOME AND NO HOME
1806-1807

CLX. TO DANIEL STUART.

Monday, (?) September 15, 1806.

My dear Stuart,—I arrived in town safe, but so tired by the next evening, that I went to bed at nine and slept till past twelve on Sunday. I cannot keep off my mind from the last subject we were talking about; though I have brought my notions concerning it to hang so well on the balance that I have in my own judgment few doubts as to the relative weight of the arguments persuasive and dissuasive. But of this “face to face.” I sleep at the “Courier” office, and shall institute and carry on the inquiry into the characters of Mr. Pitt and Mr. Fox, and having carried it to the Treaty of Amiens, or rather to the recommencement of the War, I propose to give a full and severe Critique of the “Enquiry into the State of the Nation,” taking it for granted that this work does, on the whole, contain Mr. Fox’s latest political creed; and this for the purpose of answering the “Morning Chronicle”(!) assertions, that Mr. Fox was the greatest and wisest statesman; that Mr. Pitt was no statesman. I shall endeavour to show that both were undeserving of that high character; but that Mr. Pitt was the better; that the evils which befell him were undoubtedly produced in great measure by blunders and wickedness on the Continent which it was almost impossible to foresee; while the effects of Mr. Fox’s measures must in and of themselves produce calamity and degradation.

To confess the truth, I am by no means pleased with Mr. Street’s character of Mr. Fox as a speaker and man of intellect. As a piece of panegyric, it falls woefully short of the Article in the “Morning Chronicle” in style and selection of thoughts, and runs at least equally far beyond the bounds of truth. Persons who write in a hurry are very liable to contract a sort of snipt, convulsive style, that moves forward by short repeated PUSHES, with iso-chronous asthmatic pants, “He—He—He—He—,” or the like, beginning a dozen short sentences, each making a period. In this way a man can get rid of all that happens at any one time to be in his memory, with very little choice in the arrangement and no expenditure of logic in the connection. However, it is the matter more than the manner that displeased me, for fear that what I shall write for to-morrow’s “Courier” may involve a kind of contradiction. To one outrageous passage I persuaded him to add a note of amendment, as it was too late to alter the Article itself. It was impossible for me, seeing him satisfied with the Article himself, to say more than that he appeared to me to have exceeded in eulogy. But beyond doubt in the political position occupied by the “Courier,” with so little danger of being anticipated by the other papers in anything which it ought to say, except some obvious points which being common to all the papers can give credit to none, it would have been better to have announced his death, and simply led the way for an after disquisition by a sort of shy disclosure with an appearance of suppression of the spirit with which it could be conducted.

There are letters at the Post Office, Margate, for me. Be so good as to send them to me, directed to the “Courier” office. I think of going to Mr. Smith’s[35] to-morrow, or not at all. Whether Mr. Fox’s death[36] will keep Mr. S. in town, or call him there, I do not know. At all events I shall return by the time of your arrival.

May God bless you! I am ever, my dear sir, as your obliged, so your affectionately grateful friend,

S. T. Coleridge.

CLXI. TO HIS WIFE.

September 16, [1806.]

My dear Sara,—I had determined on my arrival in town to write to you at full, the moment I could settle my affairs and speak decisively of myself. Unfortunately Mr. Stuart was at Margate, and what with my journey to and fro, day has passed on after day, Heaven knows, counted by me in sickness of heart. I am now obliged to return to Parndon to Mr. W. Smith’s, at whose house Mr. and Mrs. Clarkson are, and where I spent three or four days a fortnight ago. The reason at present is that Lord Howick has sent a very polite message to me through Mr. Smith, expressing his desire to make my acquaintance. To this I have many objections which I want to discuss with Mr. S., and at all events I had rather go with him to his Lordship’s than by myself. Likewise I have had application from the R. Institution for a course of lectures, which I am much disposed to accept, both for money and reputation. In short, I must stay in town till Friday sen’night; for Mr. Stuart returns to town on Monday next, and he relies on my being there for a very interesting private concern of his own, in which he needs both my counsel and assistance. But on Friday sen’night, please God, I shall quit town, and trust to be at Keswick on Monday, Sept. 29th. If I finally accept the lectures, I must return by the middle of November, but propose to take you and Hartley with me, as we may be sure of rooms either in Mr. Stuart’s house at Knightsbridge, or in the Strand. My purpose is to divide my time steadily between my reflections moral and political, grounded on information obtained during two years’ residence in Italy and the Mediterranean, and the lectures on the “Principles common to all the Fine Arts.” It is a terrible misfortune that so many important papers are not in my power, and that I must wait for Stoddart’s care and alertness, which, I am sorry to say, is not to be relied on. However, it is well that they are not in Paris.

My heart aches so cruelly that I do not dare trust myself to the writing of any tenderness either to you, my dear, or to our dear children. Be assured, I feel with deep though sad affection toward you, and hold your character in general in more than mere esteem—in reverence.... I do not gather strength so fast as I had expected; but this I attribute to my very great anxiety. I am indeed very feeble, but after fifty-five days of such horrors, following the dreary heart-wasting of a year and more, it is a wonder that I am as I am. I sent you from Malta £110, and a duplicate in a second letter. If you have not received it, the triplicate is either at Malta or on its way from thence. I had sent another £100, but by Elliot’s villainous treatment of me[37] was obliged to recall it. But these are trifles.

Mr. Clarkson is come, and is about to take me down to Parndon (Mr. S.’s country seat in Essex, about twenty miles from town). I shall return by Sunday or Monday, and my address, “S. T. Coleridge, Esqre, No. 348 Strand, London.”

My grateful love to Southey, and blessing on his little one. And may God Almighty preserve you, my dear! and your faithful, though long absent husband,

S. T. Coleridge.

CLXII. TO THE SAME.

[Farmhouse near Coleorton,]
December 25, 1806.

My dear Sara,—By my letter from Derby you will have been satisfied of our safety so far. We had, however, been grossly deceived as to the equi-distance of Derby and Loughborough. The expense was nearly double. Still, however, I was in such torture and my boils bled, throbbed, and stabbed so con furia, that perhaps I have no reason for regret. At Coleorton we found them dining, Sunday, ½ past one o’clock. To-day is Xmas day. Of course we were welcomed with an uproar of sincere joy: and Hartley hung suspended between the ladies for a long minute. The children, too, jubilated at Hartley’s arrival. He has behaved very well indeed—only that when he could get out of the coach at dinner, I was obliged to be in incessant watch to prevent him from rambling off into the fields. He twice ran into a field, and to the further end of it, and once after the dinner was on table, I was out five minutes seeking him in great alarm, and found him at the further end of a wet meadow, on the marge of a river. After dinner, fearful of losing our places by the window (of the long coach), I ordered him to go into the coach and sit in the place where he was before, and I would follow. In about five minutes I followed. No Hartley! Halloing—in vain! At length, where should I discover him! In the same meadow, only at a greater distance, and close down on the very edge of the water. I was angry from downright fright! And what, think you, was Cataphract’s excuse! “It was a misunderstanding, Father! I thought, you see, that you bid me go to the very same place, in the meadow where I was.” I told him that he had interpreted the text by the suggestions of the flesh, not the inspiration of the spirit; and his Wish the naughty father of the baseborn Thought. However, saving and excepting his passion for field truantry, and his hatred of confinement [in which his fancy at least—

Doth sing a doleful song about green fields;
How sweet it were in woods and wild savannas;
To hunt for food and be a naked man
And wander up and down at liberty!],[38]

he is a very good and sweet child, of strict honour and truth, from which he never deviates except in the form of sophism when he sports his logical false dice in the game of excuses. This, however, is the mere effect of his activity of thought, and his aiming at being clever and ingenious. He is exceedingly amiable toward children. All here love him most dearly: and your namesake takes upon her all the duties of his mother and darling friend, with all the mother’s love and fondness. He is very fond of her; but it is very pretty to hear how, without any one set declaration of his attachment to Mrs. Wilson and Mr. Jackson, his love for them continually breaks out—so many things remind him of them, and in the coach he talked to the strangers of them just as if everybody must know Mr. J. and Mrs. W. His letter is only half written; so cannot go to-day. We all wish you a merry Christmas and many following ones. Concerning the London Lectures, we are to discuss it, William and I, this evening, and I shall write you at full the day after to-morrow. To-morrow there is no post, but this letter I mean merely as bearer of the tidings of our safe arrival. I am better than usual. Hartley has coughed a little every morning since he left Greta Hall; but only such a little cough as you heard from him at the door. He is in high health. All the children have the hooping cough; but in an exceedingly mild degree. Neither Sarah Hutchinson nor I ever remember to have had it. Hartley is made to keep at a distance from them, and only to play with Johnny in the open air. I found my spice-megs; but many papers I miss.

The post boy waits.

My love to Mrs. Lovell, to Southey and Edith, and believe me anxiously and for ever,

Your sincere friend
S. T. Coleridge.

CLXIII. TO HARTLEY COLERIDGE, ÆTAT. X.[39]

April 3, 1807.

My dear Boy,—In all human beings good and bad qualities are not only found together, side by side, as it were, but they actually tend to produce each other; at least they must be considered as twins of a common parent, and the amiable propensities too often sustain and foster their unhandsome sisters. (For the old Romans personified virtues and vices both as women.) This is a sufficient proof that mere natural qualities, however pleasing and delightful, must not be deemed virtues until they are broken in and yoked to the plough of Reason. Now to apply this to your own case—I could equally apply it to myself—but you know yourself more accurately than you can know me, and will therefore understand my argument better when the facts on which it is built exist in your own consciousness. You are by nature very kind and forgiving, and wholly free from revenge and sullenness; you are likewise gifted with a very active and self-gratifying fancy, and such a high tide and flood of pleasurable feelings, that all unpleasant and painful thoughts and events are hurried away upon it, and neither remain in the surface of your memory nor sink to the bottom of your heart. So far all seems right and matter of thanksgiving to your Maker; and so all really is so, and will be so, if you exert your reason and free will. But on the other hand the very same disposition makes you less impressible both to the censure of your anxious friends and to the whispers of your conscience. Nothing that gives you pain dwells long enough upon your mind to do you any good, just as in some diseases the medicines pass so quickly through the stomach and bowels as to be able to exert none of their healing qualities. In like manner, this power which you possess of shoving aside all disagreeable reflections, or losing them in a labyrinth of day-dreams, which saves you from some present pain, has, on the other hand, interwoven with your nature habits of procrastination, which, unless you correct them in time (and it will require all your best exertions to do it effectually), must lead you into lasting unhappiness.

You are now going with me (if God have not ordered it otherwise) into Devonshire to visit your Uncle G. Coleridge. He is a very good man and very kind; but his notions of right and of propriety are very strict, and he is, therefore, exceedingly shocked by any gross deviations from what is right and proper. I take, therefore, this means of warning you against those bad habits, which I and all your friends here have noticed in you; and, be assured, I am not writing in anger, but on the contrary with great love, and a comfortable hope that your behaviour at Ottery will be such as to do yourself and me and your dear mother credit.

First, then, I conjure you never to do anything of any kind when out of sight which you would not do in my presence. What is a frail and faulty father on earth compared with God, your heavenly Father? But God is always present. Specially, never pick at or snatch up anything, eatable or not. I know it is only an idle, foolish trick; but your Ottery relations would consider you as a little thief; and in the Church Catechism picking and stealing are both put together as two sorts of the same vice, “And keep my hands from picking and stealing.” And besides, it is a dirty trick; and people of weak stomachs would turn sick at a dish which a young filth-paw had been fingering.

Next, when you have done wrong acknowledge it at once, like a man. Excuses may show your ingenuity, but they make your honesty suspected. And a grain of honesty is better than a pound of wit. We may admire a man for his cleverness; but we love and esteem him only for his goodness; and a strict attachment to truth, and to the whole truth, with openness and frankness and simplicity is at once the foundation stone of all goodness, and no small part of the superstructure. Lastly, do what you have to do at once, and put it out of hand. No procrastination; no self-delusion; no “I am sure I can say it, I need not learn it again,” etc., which sures are such very unsure folks that nine times out of ten their sureships break their word and disappoint you.

Among the lesser faults I beg you to endeavour to remember not to stand between the half-opened door, either while you are speaking, or spoken to. But come in or go out, and always speak and listen with the door shut. Likewise, not to speak so loud, or abruptly, and never to interrupt your elders while they are speaking, and not to talk at all during meals. I pray you, keep this letter, and read it over every two or three days.

Take but a little trouble with yourself, and every one will be delighted with you, and try to gratify you in all your reasonable wishes. And, above all, you will be at peace with yourself, and a double blessing to me, who am, my dear, my very dear Hartley, most anxiously, your fond father,

S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. I have not spoken about your mad passions and frantic looks and pout-mouthing; because I trust that is all over.

Hartley Coleridge, Coleorton, Leicestershire.

CLXIV. TO SIR H. DAVY.

September 11, 1807.

... Yet how very few are there whom I esteem and (pardon me for this seeming deviation from the language of friendship) admire equally with yourself. It is indeed, and has long been, my settled persuasion, that of all men known to me I could not justly equal any one to you, combining in one view powers of intellect, and the steady moral exertion of them to the production of direct and indirect good; and if I give you pain, my heart bears witness that I inflicted a greater on myself,—nor should I have written such words, if the chief feeling that mixed with and followed them had not been that of shame and self-reproach, for having profited neither by your general example nor your frequent and immediate incentives. Neither would I have oppressed you at all with this melancholy statement, but that for some days past I have found myself so much better in body and mind, as to cheer me at times with the thought that this most morbid and oppressive weight is gradually lifting up, and my will acquiring some degree of strength and power of reaction.

········

I have, however, received such manifest benefit from horse exercise, and gradual abandonment of fermented and total abstinence from spirituous liquors, and by being alone with Poole, and the renewal of old times, by wandering about among my dear old walks of Quantock and Alfoxden, that I have seriously set about composition, with a view to ascertain whether I can conscientiously undertake what I so very much wish, a series of Lectures at the Royal Institution. I trust I need not assure you how much I feel your kindness, and let me add, that I consider the application as an act of great and unmerited condescension on the part of the managers as may have consented to it. After having discussed the subject with Poole, he entirely agrees with me, that the former plan suggested by me is invidious in itself, unless I disguised my real opinions; as far as I should deliver my sentiments respecting the arts, [it] would require references and illustrations not suitable to a public lecture room; and, finally, that I ought not to reckon upon spirits enough to seek about for books of Italian prints, etc. And that, after all, the general and most philosophical principles, I might naturally introduce into lectures on a more confined plan—namely, the principles of poetry, conveyed and illustrated in a series of lectures. 1. On the genius and writings of Shakespeare, relatively to his predecessors and contemporaries, so as to determine not only his merits and defects, and the proportion that each must bear to the whole, but what of his merits and defects belong to his age, as being found in contemporaries of genius, and what belonged to himself. 2. On Spenser, including the metrical romances, and Chaucer, though the character of the latter as a manner-painter I shall have so far anticipated in distinguishing it from, and comparing it with, Shakespeare. 3. Milton. 4. Dryden and Pope, including the origin and after history of poetry of witty logic. 5. On Modern Poetry and its characteristics, with no introduction of any particular names. In the course of these I shall have said all I know, the whole result of many years’ continued reflection on the subjects of taste, imagination, fancy, passion, the source of our pleasures in the fine arts, in the antithetical balance-loving nature of man, and the connexion of such pleasures with moral excellence. The advantage of this plan to myself is, that I have all my materials ready, and can rapidly reduce them into form (for this is my solemn determination, not to give a single lecture till I have in fair writing at least one half of the whole course), for as to trusting anything to immediate effort, I shrink from it as from guilt, and guilt in me it would be. In short, I should have no objection at once to pledge myself to the immediate preparation of these lectures, but that I am so surrounded by embarrassments....

For God’s sake enter into my true motive for this wearing detail; it would torture me if it had any other effect than to impress on you my desire and hope to accord with your plan, and my incapability of making any final promise till the end of this month.

S. T. Coleridge.

CHAPTER IX
A PUBLIC LECTURER
1807-1808

CHAPTER IX
PUBLIC LECTURER
1807-1808

CLXV. TO THE MORGAN FAMILY.

Hatchett’s Hotel, Piccadilly, Monday evening,
[November 23, 1807.]

My dear Friends,—I arrived here in safety this morning between seven and eight, coach-stunned, and with a cold in my head; but I had dozed away the whole night with fewer disturbances than I had reason to expect, in that sort of whether-you-will-or-no slumber brought upon me by the movements of the vehicle, which I attribute to the easiness of the mail. About one o’clock I moaned and started, and then took a wing of the fowl and the rum, and it operated as a preventive for the after time. If very, very affectionate thoughts, wishes, recollections, anticipations, can score instead of grace before and after meat, mine was a very religious meal, for in this sense my inmost heart prayed before, after, and during. After breakfast, on attempting to clean and dress myself from crown to sole, I found myself quite unfit for anything, and my legs were painful, or rather my feet, and nothing but an horizontal position would remove the feeling. So I got into bed, and did not get up again till Mr. Stuart called at my chamber, past three. I have seen no one else, and therefore must defer all intelligence concerning my lectures, etc., to a second letter, which you will receive in a few days, God willing, with the D’Espriella, etc. When I was leaving you, one of the little alleviations which I looked forward to, was that I could write with less embarrassment than I could utter in your presence the many feelings of grateful affection and most affectionate esteem toward you, that pressed upon my heart almost, as at times it seemed, with a bodily weight. But I suppose it is yet too short a time since I left you—you are scarcely out of my eyes yet, dear Mrs. M. and Charlotte! To-morrow I shall go about the portraits. I have not looked at the profile since, nor shall I till it is framed. An absence of four or five days will be a better test how far it is a likeness. For a day or two, farewell, my dear friends! I bless you all three fervently, and shall, I trust, as long as I am

S. T. Coleridge.

I shall take up my lodgings at the “Courier” office, where there is a nice suite of rooms for me and a quiet bedroom without expense. My address therefore, “Squire Coleridge,” or “S. T. Coleridge, Esq: ‘Courier’ Office, Strand,”—unless you are in a sensible mood, and then you will write Mr. Coleridge, if it were only in compassion to that poor, unfortunate exile, from the covers of letters at least, despised MR.

Mr. Jno. Jas. Morgan,
St. James’s Square, Bristol.

CLXVI. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

[Postmark, December 14, 1807.]

My dear Southey,—I have been confined to my bedroom, and, with exceptions of a few hours each night, to my bed for near a week past—having once ventured out, and suffered in consequence. My complaint a low bilious fever. Whether contagion or sympathy, I know not, but I had it hanging about me from the time I was with Davy. It went off, however, by a journey which I took with Stuart, to Bristol, in a cold frosty air. Soon after my return Mr. Ridout informed me from Drs. Babbington and Bailly, that Davy was not only ill, but his life precarious, his recovery doubtful. And to this day no distinct symptom of safety has appeared, though to-day he is better. I cannot express what I have suffered. Good heaven! in the very springtide of his honour—his? his country’s! the world’s! after discoveries more intellectual, more ennobling, and impowering human nature than Newton’s! But he must not die! I am so much better that I shall go out to-morrow, if I awake no worse than I go to sleep. Be so good as to tell Mrs. Coleridge that I will write to her either Tuesday or Wednesday, and to Hartley and Derwent, with whose letters I was much both amused and affected. I was with Hartley and Mrs. Wilson and Mr. Jackson in spirit at their meeting. Howel’s bill I have paid, tell Mrs. C. (for this is what she will be most anxious about), and that I had no other debt at all weighing upon me, either prudentially or from sense of propriety or delicacy, till the one I shall mention, after better subjects, in the tail of this letter.

I very thoroughly admired your letter to W. Scott,[40] concerning the “Edinburgh Review.” The feeling and the resolve are what any one knowing you half as well as I must have anticipated, in any case where you had room for ten minutes thinking, and relatively to any person, with regard to whom old affection and belief of injury and unworthy conduct had made none of those mixtures, which people the brains of the best men—none but good men having the component drugs, or at least the drugs in that state of composition—but it is admirably expressed—if I had meant only well expressed, I should have said, “and it is well expressed,”—but, to my feeling, it is an unusual specimen of honourable feeling supporting itself by sound sense and conveyed with simplicity, dignity, and a warmth evidently under the complete control of the understanding. I am a fair judge as to such a sentence, for from morbid wretchedness of mind I have been in a far, far greater excess, indifferent about what is said, or written, or supposed, concerning me or my compositions, than W. can have been ever supposed to be interested respecting his—and the “Edinburgh Review” I have not seen for years, and never more than four or five numbers. As to reviewing W.’s poems, my sole objection would rest on the time of the publication of the “Annual Review.” Davy’s illness has put off the commencement of my Lectures to the middle of January. They are to consist of at least twenty lectures, and the subject of modern poetry occupies at least three or four. Now I do not care in how many forms my sentiments are printed: if only I do not defraud my hirers, by causing my lectures to be anticipated. I would not review them at all, unless I can do it systematically, and with the whole strength of my mind. And, when I do, I shall express my convictions of the faults and defects of the poems and system, as plainly as of the excellencies. It has been my constant reply to those who have charged me with bigotry, etc.,—“While you can perceive no excellencies, it is my duty to appear conscious of no defects, because, even though I should agree with you in the instances, I should only confirm you in what I deem a pernicious error, as our principle of disapprobation must necessarily be different.” In my Lectures I shall speak out, of Rogers, Campbell, yourself (that is “Madoc” and “Thalaba;” for I shall speak only of poems, not of poets), and Wordsworth, as plainly as of Milton, Dryden, Pope, etc.... I did not overhugely admire the “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” but saw no likeness whatever to the “Christabel,” much less any improper resemblance.

I heard by accident that Dr. Stoddart had arrived a few days ago, and wrote him a letter expostulating with him for his unkindness in having detained for years my books and MSS., and stating the great loss it had been to me (a loss not easy to be calculated. I have as witnesses T. Poole and Squire Acland[41] (who calls me infallible Prophet), that from the information contained in them, though I could not dare trust my recollection sufficiently for the proofs, I foretold distinctly every event that has happened of importance, with one which has not yet happened, the evacuation of Sicily). This, however, of course, I did not write to Dr. S., but simply requested he would send me my chests. In return I received yesterday an abusive letter confirming what I suspected, that he is writing a book himself. In this he conjures up an indefinite debt, customs, and some old affair before I went to Malta, amounting to more than fifty pounds (the customs twenty-five pounds, all of which I should have had remitted, if he had sent them according to his promise), and informing me that when I send a person properly documented to settle this account, that person may then take away my goods. This I shall do to-morrow, though without the least pledge that I shall receive all that I left.... This will prevent my sending Mrs. C. any money for three weeks, I mean exclusive of the [annuity of] £150 which, assure her, is, and for the future will remain, sacred to her. By Wallis’ attitude to Allston I lost thirty pounds in customs, by my brother’s refusal[42] all the expenses up and down of my family. So it has been a baddish year; but I am not disquieted.

S. T. C.

Poor Godwin is going to the dogs. He has a tragedy[43] to come out on Wednesday. I will write again to you in a few days. After my Lectures I would willingly undertake any Review with you, because I shall then have given my Code. I omit other parts of your letter, not that they interested me less, but because I have no room, and am too much exhausted to take up a second sheet. God bless you. My kisses to your little ones, and love to your wife. The only vindictive idea I have to Dr. S. is the anticipation of showing his letter to Sir Alexander Ball!! The folly of sinning against our first and pure impressions! It is the sin against our own ghost at least!

CLXVII. TO MRS. MORGAN.

348, Strand, Friday morning, January 25, 1808.

Dear and honoured Mary,—Having had you continually, I may almost say, present to me in my dreams, and always appearing as a compassionate comforter therein, appearing in shape as your own dear self, most innocent and full of love, I feel a strong impulse to address a letter to you by name, though it equally respects all my three friends. If it had been told me on that evening when dear Morgan was asleep in the parlour, and you and beloved Caroletta asleep at opposite corners of the sopha in the drawing-room, of which I occupied the centre in a state of blessed half-unconsciousness as a drowsy guardian of your slumbers; if it had been then told me that in less than a fortnight the time should come when I should not wish to be with you, or wish you to be with me, I should have out with one of Caroletta’s harmless “condemn its” (commonly pronounced “damn it”), “that’s no truth!” And yet since on Friday evening, my lecture having made an impression far beyond its worth or my expectation, I have been in such a state of wretchedness, confined to my bed, in such almost continued pain ... that I have been content to see no one but the unlovable old woman, as feeling that I should only receive a momently succession of pangs from the presence of those who, giving no pleasure, would make my wretchedness appear almost unnatural, even as if the fire should cease to be warm. Who would not rather shiver on an ice mount than freeze before the fire which had used to spread comfort through his fibres and thoughts of social joy through his imagination? Yet even this, yet even from this feeling that your society would be an agony, oh I know, I feel how I love you, my dear sisters and friends.

I have been obliged, of course, to put off my lecture of to-day; a most painful necessity, for I disappoint some hundreds! I have sent for Abernethy, who has restored Mr. De Quincey to health! Could I have foreseen my present state I would have stayed at Bristol and taken lodgings at Clifton in order to be within the power of being seen by you, without being a domestic nuisance, for still, still I feel the comfortlessness of seeing no face, hearing no voice, feeling no hand that is dear, though conscious that the pang would outweigh the solace.

When finished, let the two dresses, etc., be sent to me; but if my illness should have a completed conclusion, of me as well as of itself, and there seems to be a distinct inflammation of the mesentery,—then let them be sent to Grasmere for Mrs. Wordsworth and Miss Hutchinson,—gay dresses, indeed, for a mourning.

I write in great pain, but yet I deem, whatever become of me, that it will hereafter be a soothing thought to you that in sickness or in health, in hope or in despondency, I have thought of you with love and esteem and gratitude.

My dear Mary! dear Charlotte! May Heaven bless you! With such a wife and such a sister, my friend is already blest! May Heaven give him health and elastic spirits to enjoy these and all other blessings! Once more bless you, bless you. Ah! who is there to bless

S. T. Coleridge?

P. S. Sunday Night. I do not know when this letter was written—probably Thursday morning, not Wednesday, as I have said in my letter to John. I have opened this by means of the steam of a tea-kettle, merely to say that I have, I know not how or where, lost the pretty shirt-pin Charlotte gave me. I promise her solemnly never to accept one from any other, and never to wear one hereafter as long as I live, so that the sense of its real absence shall make a sort of imaginary presence to me. I am more vexed at the accident than I ought to be; but had it been either of your locks of hair or her profile (which must be by force and association your profile too, and a far more efficacious one than that done for you, which had no other merit than that of having no likeness at all, and this certainly is a sort of negative advantage) I should have fretted myself into superstition and been haunted with it as by an omen. Of the lady and her poetical daughter I had never before heard even the name. Oh these are shadows! and all my literary admirers and flatterers, as well as despisers and calumniators, pass over my heart as the images of clouds over dull sea. So far from being retained, they are scarcely made visible there. But I love you, dear ladies! substantially, and pray do write at least a line in Morgan’s letter, if neither will write me a whole one, to comfort me by the assurance that you remember me with esteem and some affection. Most affectionately have you and Charlotte treated me, and most gratefully do I remember it. Good-night, good-night!

To be read after the other.

Mrs. Morgan,
St. James’s Square, Bristol.

CLXVIII. TO FRANCIS JEFFREY.

348 Strand, May 23, 1808.

Dear Sir,—Without knowing me you have been, perhaps rather unwarrantably, severe on my morals and understanding, inasmuch as you have, I understand,—for I have not seen the Reviews,—frequently introduced my name when I had never brought any publication within your court. With one slight exception, a shilling pamphlet[44] that never obtained the least notice, I have not published anything with my name, or known to be mine, for thirteen years. Surely I might quote against you the complaint of Job as to those who brought against him “the iniquities of his youth.” What harm have I ever done you, dear sir, by act or word? If you knew me, you would yourself smile at some of the charges, which, I am told, you have fastened on me. Most assuredly, you have mistaken my sentiments, alike in morality, politics, and—what is called—metaphysics, and, I would fain hope, that if you knew me, you would not have ascribed self-opinion and arrogance to me. But, be this as it may, I write to you now merely to intreat—for the sake of mankind—an honourable review of Mr. Clarkson’s “History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade.”[45] I know the man, and if you knew him you, I am sure, would revere him, and your reverence of him, as an agent, would almost supersede all judgment of him as a mere literary man. It would be presumptuous in me to offer to write the review of his work. Yet I should be glad were I permitted to submit to you the many thoughts which occurred to me during its perusal. Be assured, that with the greatest respect for your talents—as far as I can judge of them from the few numbers of the “Edinburgh Review” which I have had the opportunity of reading—and every kind thought respecting your motives,

I am, dear sir, your ob. humb. ser’t,
S. T. Coleridge.

—— Jeffray (sic), Esq.,
to the care of Mr. Constable, Bookseller, Edingburgh (sic).

CLXIX. TO THE SAME.

[Postmark] Bury St. Edmunds,
July 20, 1808.

Dear Sir,—Not having been gratified by a letter from you, I have feared that the freedom with which I opened out my opinions may have given you offence. Be assured, it was most alien from my intention. The purport of what I wrote was simply this—that severe and long-continued bodily disease exacerbated by disappointment in the great hope of my Life had rendered me insensible to blame and praise, even to a faulty degree, unless they proceeded from the one or two who love me. The entrance-passage to my heart is choked up with heavy lumber, and I am thus barricadoed against attacks, which, doubtless, I should otherwise have felt as keenly as most men. Instead of censuring a certain quantum of irritability respecting the reception of published composition, I rather envy it—it becomes ludicrous then only, when it is disavowed, and the opposite temper pretended to. The ass’s skin is almost scourge-proof—while the elephant thrills under the movements of every fly that runs over it. But though notoriously almost a zealot in behalf of my friend’s poetic reputation, yet I can leave it with cheerful confidence to the fair working of his own powers. I have known many, very many instances of contempt changed into admiration of his genius; but I neither know nor have heard of a single person, who having been or having become his admirer had ceased to be so. For it is honourable to us all that our kind affections, the attractions and elective affinities of our nature, are of more permanent agency than those passions which repel and dissever. From this cause we may explain the final growth of honest fame, and its tenacity of life. Whenever the struggle of controversy ceases, we think no more of works which give us no pleasure and apply our satire and scorn to some new object, and thus the field is left entire to friends and partisans.

But the case of Mr. Clarkson appeared to me altogether different. I do not hold his fame dear because he is my friend; but I sought and cultivated his acquaintance, because a long and sober enquiry had assured me, that he had been, in an aweful sense of the word, a benefactor of mankind: and this from the purest motives unalloyed by the fears and hopes of selfish superstition—and not with that feverish power which fanatics acquire by crowding together, but in the native strength of his own moral impulses. He, if ever human being did it, listened exclusively to his conscience, and obeyed its voice at the price of all his youth and manhood, at the price of his health, his private fortune, and the fairest prospects of honourable ambition. Such a man I cannot regard as a mere author. I cannot read or criticise such a work as a mere literary production. The opinions publicly expressed and circulated concerning it must of necessity in the author’s feelings be entwined with the cause itself, and with his own character as a man, to which that of the historian is only an accidental accession. Were it the pride of authorship alone that was in danger of being fretted, I should have remained as passive in this instance as in that of my most particular friend, to whom I am bound by ties more close and of longer standing than those which connect me personally with Mr. Clarkson. But I know that any sarcasms or ridicule would deeply wound his feelings, as a veteran warrior in a noble contest, feelings that claim the reverence of all good men.

The Review was sent, addressed to you, by the post of yester-evening. There is not a sentence, not a word in it, which I should not have written, had I never seen the author.

I am myself about to bring out two works—one a small pamphlet[46]—the second of considerable size—it is a rifacciamento, a very free translation with large additions, etc., etc., of the masterly work for which poor Palm was murdered.

I hope to be in the North, at Keswick, in the course of a week or eight days. I shall be happy to hear from you on this or any other occasion.

Yours, dear sir, sincerely,

S. T. Coleridge.

CHAPTER X
GRASMERE AND THE FRIEND
1808-1810

CHAPTER X
GRASMERE AND THE FRIEND
1808-1810

CLXX. TO DANIEL STUART.

[December 9, 1808.]

My dear Stuart,—Scarcely when listening to count the hour, have I been more perplexed by the “Inopem me copia fecit” of the London church clocks, than by the press of what I have to say to you. I must do one at a time. Briefly, a very happy change[47] has taken place in my health and spirits and mental activity since I placed myself under the care and inspection of a physician, and I dare say with confident hope, “Judge me from the 1st January, 1809.”

I send you the Prospectus, and intreat you to do me all the good you can; which like the Lord’s Prayer is Thanksgiving in the disguise of petition. If you think that it should be advertized in any way, or if Mr. Street can do anything for me—but I know you will do what you can.

I have received promises of contribution from many tall fellows with big names in the world of Scribes, and count even Pharisees (two or three Bishops) in my list of patrons. But whether I shall have 50, 100, 500, or 1,000 subscribers I am not able even to conjecture. All must depend on the zeal of my friends, on which I fear I have thrown more water than oil—but some like the Greek fire burn beneath the wave!

Wordsworth has nearly finished a series of most masterly Essays[48] on the Affairs of Portugal and Spain, and by my advice he will first send them to you that if they suit the “Courier” they may be inserted.

I have not heard from Savage, but I suppose that he has printed a thousand of these Prospectuses, and you may have any number from him. He lives hard by some of the streets in Covent Garden which I do not remember, but a note to Mr. Savage, R. Institution, Albemarle Street, will find him.

May God Almighty bless you! I feel that I shall yet live, to give proof of what is deep within me towards you.

S. T. Coleridge.

CLXXI. TO FRANCIS JEFFREY.

Grasmere, December 14, 1808.

Dear Sir,—The only thing in which I have been able to detect any degree of hypochrondriasis in my feelings is the reading and answering of letters, and in this instance I have been at times so wofully under its domination as to have left every letter received lie unopened for weeks together, all the while thoroughly ashamed of the weakness and yet without power to get rid of it. This, however, has not been the case of late, and I was never yet so careless as knowingly to suffer a letter relating to money to remain unanswered by the next post in my power. I, therefore, on reading your very kind letter of 8 Dec. conclude that one letter from you during my movements from Grasmere, now to Keswick, now to Bratha and Elleray, and now to Kendal, has been mislayed.

As I considered your insertion of the review of Mr. Clarkson’s as an act of personal kindness and attention to the request of one a stranger to you except by name, the thought of any pecuniary remuneration never once occurred to me; and had it been written at your request I should have thought twenty guineas a somewhat extravagant price whether I considered the quantity or quality of the communication. As to the alterations, your character and interest, as the known Editor of the Review, are pledged for a general consistency of principle in the different articles with each other, and you had every possible right to alter or omit ad libitum, unless a special condition had been insisted on of aut totum aut nihil. As the writer, therefore, I neither thought nor cared about the alterations; as a general reader, I differed with you as [to] the scale of merit relatively to Mr. Wilberforce, whose services I deem to have been overrated, not, perhaps, so much absolutely as by comparison. At all events, some following passages should have been omitted, as they are in blank contradiction to the paragraph inserted, and betrayed a co-presence of two writers in one article. As to the longer paragraph, Wordsworth thinks you on the true side; and Clarkson himself that you were not far from the truth. As to my own opinion, I believed what I wrote, and deduced my belief from all the facts pro and con, with which Mr. Clarkson’s conversation have furnished [me]; but such is my detestation of that pernicious Minister,[49] such my contempt of the cowardice and fatuity of his measures, and my horror at the yet unended train of their direful consequences, that, if obedience to truth could ever be painful to me, this would have been. I acted well in writing what on the whole I believed the more probable, and I was pleased that you acted equally well in altering it according to your convictions.

I had hoped to have furnished a letter of more interesting contents to you, but an honest gentleman in London having taken a great fancy to two thirds of the possible profits of my literary labours without a shadow of a claim, and having over-hurried the business through overweening of my simplicity and carelessness, has occasioned me some perplexity and a great deal of trouble and letter-writing. I will write, however, again to you my first leisure evening, whether I hear from you or no in the interim.

I trust you have received my scrawl with the prospectus[50] and feel sincerely thankful to you for your kindness on the arrival of the prospectuses, prior to your receipt of the letter which was meant to have announced them. But our post here is very irregular as well as circuitous—but three times a week—and then, too, we have to walk more than two miles for the chance of finding letters. This you will be so good as to take into account whenever my answers do not arrive at the time they might have been expected from places in general. I remain, dear sir, with kind and respectful feeling, your obliged,

S. T. Coleridge.

I entirely coincide in your dislike of “speculative gloom”—it is illogical as well as barbarous, and almost as bad as “picturesque eye.” I do not know how I came to pass it; for when I first wrote it, I undermarked it, not as the expression, but as a remembrancer of some better that did not immediately occur to me. “Year-long absences” I think doubtful—had any one objected to it, I should have altered it; but it would not much offend me in the writings of another. But to “moral impulses” I see at present no objections, nor does any other phrase suggest itself to me which would have expressed my meaning. That there is a semblance of presumptuousness in the manner I exceedingly regret, if so it be—my heart bears me witness that the feeling had no place there. Yet I need not say to you that it is impossible to succeed in such a work unless at the commencement of it there be a quickening and throb in the pulse of hope; and what if a blush from inward modesty disguise itself on these occasions, and the hectic of unusual self-assertion increase the appearance of that excess which it in reality resists and modifies? It will amuse you to be informed that from two correspondents, both of them men of great literary celebrity, I have received reproof for a supposed affectation of humility in the style of the prospectus. In my own consciousness I was guilty of neither. Yet surely to advance as a teacher, and in the very act to declare yourself inferior to those whom you propose to teach, is incongruous; and must disgust a pure mind by its evident hypocrisy.

CLXXII. TO THOMAS WILKINSON.[51]

Grasmere, December 31, 1808.

Dear Sir,—I thank you for your exertions in my behalf, and—which more deeply interests me—for the openness with which you have communicated your doubts and apprehensions. So much, indeed, am I interested, that I cannot lay down my head on my pillow in perfect tranquillity, without endeavoring to remove them. First, however, I must tell you that ... “The Friend” will not appear at the time conditionally announced. There are, besides, great difficulties at the Stamp Office concerning it. But the particulars I will detail when we meet. Myself, with William Wordsworth and the family, are glad that we are so soon to see you. Now then for what is so near my heart. Only a certain number of prospectuses were printed at Kendal, and sent to acquaintances. The much larger number, which were to have been printed at London, have not been printed. When they are, you will see in the article, noted in this copy, that I neither intend to omit, nor from any fear of offence have scrupled to announce my intention of treating, the subject of religion. I had supposed that the words “speculative gloom” would have conveyed this intention. I had inserted another article, which I was induced to omit, from the fear of exciting doubts and queries. This was: On the transition of natural religion into revelation, or the principle of internal guidance: and the grounds of the possibility of the connection of spiritual revelation with historic events; that is, its manifestation in the world of the senses. This meant as a preliminary—leaving, as already performed by others, the proof of the reality of this connection in the particular fact of Christianity. Herein I wished to prove only that true philosophy rather leads to Christianity, than contained anything preclusive of it, and therefore adopted the phrase used in the definition of philosophy in general: namely, The science which answers the question of things actual, how they are possible? Thus the laws of gravitation illustrate the possibility of the motion of the heavenly bodies, the action of the lever, etc.; the reality of which was already known. I mention this, because the argument assigned which induced me to omit it in a prospectus was, that by making a distinction between revelation in itself (i. e. a principle of internal supernatural guidance), and the same revelation conjoined with the power of external manifestation by supernatural works, would proclaim me to be a Quaker, and “The Friend” as intended to propagate peculiar and sectarian principles. Think then, dear Friend! what my regret was at finding that you had taken it for granted that I denied the existence of an internal monitor! I trust I am neither of Paul, or of Apollos, or of Cephas; but of Christ. Yet I feel reverential gratitude toward those who have conveyed the spirit of Christ to my heart and understanding so as to afford light to the latter and vital warmth to the former. Such gratitude I owe and feel toward W. Penn. Take his Preface to G. Fox’s Journal, and his Letter to his Son,—if they contain a faithful statement of genuine Christianity according to your faith, I am one with you. I subscribe to each and all of the principles therein laid down; and by them I propose to try, and endeavour to justify, the charge made by me (my conscience bears me witness) in the spirit of entire love against some passages of the journals of later Friends. Oh—and it is a groan of earnest aspiration! a strong wish of bitter tears and bitter self-dissatisfaction,—Oh that in all things, in self-subjugation, unwearied beneficence, and unfeigned listening and obedience to the Voice within, I were as like the evangelic John Woolman, as I know myself to be in the belief of the existence and the sovran authority of that Voice! When we meet, I will endeavour to be wholly known to you as I am, in principle at least.

A few words more. Unsuspicious of the possibility of misunderstanding, I had inserted in this prospectus Dress and Dancing among the fine Arts, the principles common to which I was to develope. Now surely anything common to Dress or Dancing with Architecture, Gardening, and Poetry could contain nothing to alarm any man who is not alarmed by Gardening, Poetry, etc., and secondly, principles common to Poetry, Music, etc., etc., could hardly be founded in the ridiculous hopping up and down in a modern ball-room, or the washes, paints, and patches of a fine lady’s toilet. It is well known how much I admired Thomas Clarkson’s Chapter on Dancing. The truth is, that I referred to the drapery and ornamental decoration of Painting, Statuary, and the Greek Spectacles; and to the scientific dancing of the ancient Greeks, the business of a life confined to a small class, and placed under the direction of particular magistrates. My object was to prove the truth of the principles by shewing that even dress and dancing, when the ingenuity and caprice of man had elaborated them into Fine Arts, were bottomed in the same principles. But desirous even to avoid suspicion, the passage will be omitted in the future prospectuses. Farewell! till we meet.

S. T. Coleridge. See P. S.

P. S. Do you not know enough of the world to be convinced that by declaring myself a warm defender of the Established Church against all sectarians, or even by attacking Quakerism in particular as a sect hateful to the bigots of the day from its rejection of priesthood and outward sacraments, I should gain twenty subscribers to one? It shocks me even to think that so mean a motive could be supposed to influence me. I say aloud everywhere, that in the essentials of their faith I believe as the Quakers do, and so I make enemies of the Church, of the Calvinists, and even of the Unitarians. Again, I declare my dissatisfaction with several points both of notion and of practice among the present Quakers—I dare not conceal my convictions—and therefore receive little good opinion even from those, with whom I most accord. But Truth is sacred.

CLXXIII. TO THOMAS POOLE.

Grasmere, Kendal, February 3, 1809.

My dearest Poole,—For once in my life I shall have been blamed by you for silence, indolence, and procrastination without reason. Even now I write this letter on a speculation, for I am to take it with me to-morrow to Kendal, and if I can bring the proposed printer and publisher to final terms, to put it into the post. It would be a tiresome job were I to detail to you all the vexations, hindrances, scoundrelisms, disappointments, and pros and cons that, without the least fault or remissness on my part, have rendered it impracticable to publish “The Friend” till the first week of March. The whole, however, is now settled, provided that Pennington (a worthy old bookseller and printer of Kendal, but a genius and mightily indifferent about the affairs of this life, both from that cause and from age, and from being as rich as he wishes) will become, as he has almost promised, the printer and publisher.[52]

“The Friend” will be stamped as a newspaper and under the Newspaper Act, which will take 3½d. from each shilling, but enable the essay to pass into all parts and corners of the Empire without expense or trouble. It will be so published as to appear in London every Saturday morning, and be sent off from the Kendal post to every part of the Kingdom by the Thursday morning’s post. I hope that Mr. Stuart will have the prospectuses printed by this time,—at all events, within a day or two after your receipt of this letter you will receive a parcel of them. The money is to be paid to the bookseller, the agent, in the next town, once in twenty weeks, where there are several subscribers in the same vicinity; otherwise, [it] must be remitted to me direct. This is the ugliest part of the business: but there is no getting over it without a most villainous diminution of my profits. You will, I know, exert yourself to procure me as many names as you can, for if it succeeds, it will almost make me.

Among my subscribers I have Mr. Canning and Sturges Bourne, and Mr. W. Rose, of whose moral odour your nose, I believe, has had competent experience. The first prospectus I receive, I shall send with letters to Lord Egmont and Lady E. Percival, and to Mr. Acland.

You will probably have seen two of Wordsworth’s Essays in the “Courier,” signed “G.” The two last columns of the second, excepting the concluding paragraph, were written all but a few sentences by me.[53] An accident in London delayed the publication ten days. The whole, therefore, is now publishing as a pamphlet, and I believe with a more comprehensive title.

I cannot say whether I was—indeed, both I and W. W.—more pleased or affected by the whole of your last letter; it came from a very pure and warm heart through the moulds of a clear and strong brain. But I have not now time to write on these concerns. For my opinions, feelings, hopes, and apprehensions, I can safely refer you to Wordsworth’s pamphlet. The minister’s conduct hitherto is easily defined. A great deal too much because not half enough. Two essays of my own on this most lofty theme,—what we are entitled to hope, what compelled to fear concerning the Spanish nation, by the light of history and psychological knowledge, you will soon see in the “Courier.” Poor Wardle![54] I fear lest his zeal may have made him confound that degree of evidence which is sufficient to convince an unprejudiced private company with that which will satisfy an unwilling numerous assembly of factious and corrupt judges. As to the truth of the charges, I have little doubt, knowing myself similar facts.

O dear Poole! Beddoes’ departure[55] has taken more hope out of my life than any former event except perhaps T. Wedgwood’s. That did indeed pull very hard at me; never a week, seldom two days have passed in which the recollection has not made me sad or thoughtful. Beddoes’ seems to pull yet harder, because it combines with the former, because it is the second, and because I have not been in the habit of connecting such a weight of despondency with my attachment to him as with my love of my revered and dear benefactor. Poor Beddoes! he was good and beneficent to all men, but to me he was, moreover, affectionate and loving, and latterly his sufferings had opened out his being to a delicacy, a tenderness, a moral beauty, and unlocked the source of sensibility as with a key from heaven.

My own health is more regular than formerly, for I am severely temperate and take nothing that has not been pronounced medically unavoidable; yet my sufferings are often great, and I am rarely indeed wholly without pain or sensations more oppressive than definite pain. But my mind, and what is far better, my will is active. I must leave a short space to add at Kendal after all is settled.

My beloved and honoured friend! may God preserve you and your obliged, and affectionately grateful,

S. T. Coleridge.

My dearest Poole,—Old Mr. Pennington has ultimately declined the printing and publishing; indeed, he is about to decline business altogether. There is no other in this country capable of doing the work, and to printing and publishing in London there are gigantic objections. What think you of a press at Grasmere? I will write when I get home. Oh, if you knew what a warmth of unusual feeling, what a genial air of new and living hope breathed upon me as I read that casual sentence in your letter, seeming to imply a chance we have of seeing you at Grasmere! I assure you that the whole family, Mrs. Wordsworth and her all-amiable sister, not with less warmth than W. W. and Dorothy, were made cheerful and wore a more holiday look the whole day after. Oh, do, do come!

CLXXIV. TO DANIEL STUART.

Posted March 31, 1809.