CHAPTER V

FROM SOUTH TO NORTH

1799-1800

XCIX. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

NETHER STOWEY, July 29, 1799.

I am doubtful, Southey, whether the circumstances which impel me to write to you ought not to keep me silent, and, if it were only a feeling of delicacy, I should remain silent, for it is good to do all things in faith. But I have been absent, Southey! ten months, and if _you_ knew that domestic affection was hard upon me, and that my own health was declining, would you not have shootings within you of an affection which (“though fallen, though changed”) has played too important a part in the event of our lives and the formation of our character, ever to be _forgotten_? I am perplexed what to write, or how to state the object of my writing. Any

## participation in each other’s moral being I do not wish, simply because I

know enough of the mind of man to know that [it] is impossible. But, Southey, we have similar talents, sentiments nearly similar, and kindred pursuits; we have likewise, in more than one instance, common objects of our esteem and love. I pray and intreat you, if we should meet at any time, let us not withhold from each other the outward expressions of daily kindliness; and if it be no longer in your power to soften your opinions, make your feelings at least more tolerant towards me--(a debt of humility which assuredly we all of us owe to our most feeble, imperfect, and self-deceiving nature). We are few of us good enough to know our own hearts, and as to the hearts of others, let us struggle to hope that they are better than we think them, and resign the rest to our common Maker. God bless you and yours.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

[Southey’s answer to this appeal has not been preserved, but its tenor was that Coleridge had slandered him to others. In his reply Coleridge “avers on his honour as a man and a gentleman” that he never charged Southey with “aught but deep and implacable enmity towards himself,” and that his authorities for this accusation were those on whom Southey relied, that is, doubtless, Lloyd and Lamb. He appeals to Poole, the “repository” of his every thought, and to Wordsworth, “with whom he had been for more than one whole year almost daily and frequently for weeks together,” to bear him out in this statement. A letter from Poole to Southey dated August 8, and forwarded to Minehead by “special messenger,” bears ample testimony to Coleridge’s disavowal. “Without entering into particulars,” he writes, “I will say generally, that in the many conversations I have had with Coleridge concerning yourself, he has never discovered the least personal enmity against, but, on the contrary, the strongest affection for you stifled only by the untoward events of your separation.” Poole’s intervention was successful, and once again the cottage opened its doors to a distinguished guest. The Southeys remained as visitors at Stowey until, in company with their host, they set out for Devonshire.]

[Illustration]

C. TO THOMAS POOLE.

EXETER, Southey’s Lodgings, Mr. Tucker’s, Fore Street Hill, September 16, 1799.[206]

MY DEAR POOLE,--Here I am just returned from a little tour[207] of five days, having seen rocks and waterfalls, and a pretty river or two; some wide landscapes, and a multitude of ash-tree dells, and the blue waters of the “roaring sea,” as little Hartley says, who on Friday fell down stairs and injured his arm. ’Tis swelled and sprained, but, God be praised, not broken. The views of Totness and Dartmouth are among the most impressive things I have ever seen; but in general what of Devonshire I have lately seen is tame to Quantock, Porlock, Culbone, and Linton. So much for the country! Now as to the inhabitants thereof, they are bigots, unalphabeted in the first feelings of liberality; of course in all they speak and all they do not speak, they give good reasons for the opinions which they hold, viz. they hold the propriety of slavery, an opinion which, being generally assented to by Englishmen, makes Pitt and Paul the first among the moral fitnesses of things. I have three brothers, that is to say, relations by gore. Two are parsons and one is a colonel. George and the colonel, good men as times go--very good men--but alas! we have neither tastes nor feelings in common. This I wisely learnt from their conversation, and did not suffer them to learn it from mine. What occasion for it? Hunger and thirst--roast fowls, mealy potatoes, pies, and clouted cream! bless the inventors of them! An honest philosopher may find therewith preoccupation for his mouth, keeping his heart and brain, the latter in his scull, the former in the pericardium some five or six inches from the roots of his tongue! Church and King! Why I drink Church and King, mere cutaneous scabs of loyalty which only ape the king’s evil, but affect not the interior of one’s health. Mendicant sores! it requires some little caution to keep them open, but they heal of their own accord. Who (such a friend as I am to the system of fraternity) could refuse such a toast at the table of a clergyman and a colonel, his brother? So, my dear Poole! I live in peace. Of the other party, I have dined with a Mr. Northmore, a pupil of Wakefield, who possesses a fine house half a mile from Exeter. In his boyhood he was at my father’s school.... But Southey and self called upon him as authors--he having edited a Tryphiodorus and part of Plutarch, and being a notorious anti-ministerialist and free-thinker. He welcomed us as he ought, and we met at dinner Hucks (at whose house I dine Wednesday), the man who toured with me in Wales and afterwards published his “Tour,” Kendall, a poet, who really looks like a man of genius, pale and gnostic, has the merit of being a Jacobin or so, but is a shallowist--and finally a Mr. Banfill, a man of sense, information, and various literature, and most perfectly a gentleman--in short a pleasant man. At his house we dine to-morrow. Northmore himself is an honest, vehement sort of a fellow who splutters out all his opinions like a fiz-gig, made of gunpowder not thoroughly dry, sudden and explosive, yet ever with a certain adhesive blubberliness of elocution. Shallow! shallow! A man who can read Greek well, but shallow! Yet honest, too, and who ardently wishes the well-being of his fellowmen, and believes that without more liberty and more equality this well-being is not possible. He possesses a most noble library. The victory at Novi![208] If I were a good caricaturist I would sketch off Suwarrow in a car of conquest drawn by huge crabs!! With what retrograde majesty the vehicle advances! He may truly say he came off with _éclat_, that is, a claw! I shall be back at Stowey in less than three weeks....

We hope your dear mother remains well. Give my filial love to her. God bless her! I beg my kind love to Ward. God bless you and

S. T. COLERIDGE.

Monday night.

CI. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

STOWEY, Tuesday evening, October 15, 1799.

It is fashionable among our philosophizers to assert the existence of a surplus of misery in the world, which, in my opinion, is no proof that either systematic thinking or unaffected self-observation is fashionable among them. But Hume wrote, and the French imitated him, and we the French, and the French us; and so philosophisms fly to and fro, in series of imitated imitations--shadows of shadows of shadows of a farthing-candle placed between two looking-glasses. For in truth, my dear Southey! I am harassed with the rheumatism in my head and shoulders, not without arm-and-thigh-twitches--but when the pain intermits it leaves my sensitive frame _so_ sensitive! My enjoyments are so deep, of the fire, of the candle, of the thought I am thinking, of the old folio I am reading, and the silence of the silent house is so _most and very_ delightful, that upon my soul! the rheumatism is no such bad thing as _people make for_. And yet I have, and do suffer from it, in much pain and sleeplessness and often sick at stomach through indigestion of the food, which I eat from compulsion. Since I received your former letter, I have spent a few days at Upcott;[209] but was too unwell to be comfortable, so I returned yesterday. Poor Tom![210] he has an adventurous calling. I have so wholly forgotten my geography that I don’t know where Ferrol is, whether in France or Spain. Your dear mother must be very anxious indeed. If he return safe, it will have been good. God grant he may!

_Massena!_[211] and what say you of the resurrection and glorification of the Saviour of the East after his trials in the wilderness? (I am afraid that this is a piece of blasphemy; but it was in simple verity such an infusion of animal spirits into me.) Buonaparte! Buonaparte! dear, dear, _dear_ Buonaparte! It would be no bad fun to hear the clerk of the Privy Council read this paragraph before Pitt, etc. “You ill-looking frog-voiced reptile! mind you lay the proper emphasis on the third _dear_, or I’ll split your clerkship’s skull for you!” Poole ordered a paper. He has _found out_, he says, why the _newspapers_ had become so indifferent to him. _Inventive_ Genius! He begs his kind remembrances to you. In consequence of the news he burns like Greek Fire, under all the wets and waters of this health-and-harvest destroying weather. He flames while his barley smokes. “See!” he says, “how it _grows out again_, ruining the prospects of those who had cut it down!” You are harvest-man enough, I suppose, to understand the metaphor. Jackson[212] is, I believe, out of all doubt a bad man. Why is it, if it be, and I fear it is, why is it that the studies of music and painting are so unfavourable to the human heart? Painters have been commonly very clever men, which is not so generally the case with musicians, but both alike are almost uniformly debauchees. It is superfluous to say how much your account of Bampfylde[213] interested me. Predisposition to madness gave him a cast of originality, and he had a species of _taste_ which only genius could give; but his genius does not appear a _powerful_ or _ebullient_ faculty (nearer to Lamb’s than to the Gebir-man [Landor], so I judge from the few specimens _I_ have seen). If you think otherwise, you are right I doubt not. I shall be glad to give Mr. and Mrs. Keenan[214] the right hand of welcome with looks and tones in _fit_ accompaniment. For the wife of a man of genius who sympathises effectively with her husband in his habits and feelings is a _rara avis_ with me; though a vast majority of her own sex and too many of ours will scout her for a _rara piscis_. If I am well enough, Sara and I go to Bristol in a few days. I hope they will not come in the mean time. It is singularly unpleasant to me that I cannot renew our late acquaintances in Exeter without creating very serious uneasinesses at Ottery, Northmore is so preëminently an offensive character to the aristocrats. He sent Paine’s books as a present to a clergyman of my brother’s acquaintance, a Mr. Markes. This was silly enough....

I will set about “Christabel” with all speed; but I do not think it a fit opening poem. What I think would be a fit opener, and what I would humbly lay before you as the best plan of the next Anthologia, I will communicate shortly in another letter entirely on this subject. Mohammed I will not forsake; but my money-book I must write first. In the last, or at least in a late “Monthly Magazine” was an Essay on a Jesuitic conspiracy and about the Russians. There was so much genius in it that I suspected William Taylor for the author; but the style was so nauseously affected, so absurdly pedantic, that I was half-angry with myself for the suspicion. Have you seen Bishop Prettyman’s book? I hear it is a curiosity. You remember Scott the attorney, who held such a disquisition on my simile of property resembling matter rather than blood? and eke of St. John? and you remember, too, that I shewed him in my face that there was no room for him in my heart? Well, sir! this man has taken a most deadly hatred to me, and how do you think he revenges himself? He imagines that I write for the “Morning Post,” and he goes regularly to the coffee-houses, calls for the paper, and reading it he observes aloud, “What damn’d stuff of poetry is always crammed in this paper! such damn’d silly nonsense! I wonder what coxcomb it is that writes it! I wish the paper was kicked out of the coffee-house.” Now, but for Cruikshank, I could play Scott a precious trick by sending to Stuart, “The Angry Attorney, a True Tale,” and I know more than enough of Scott’s most singular parti-coloured rascalities to make a most humorous and biting satire of it.

I have heard of a young Quaker who went to the Lobby, with a monstrous military cock-hat on his head, with a scarlet coat and up to his mouth in flower’d muslin, swearing too most bloodily--all “that he might not be unlike other people!” A Quaker’s son getting himself christen’d to avoid being remarkable is as _improbable_ a lie as ever self-delusion permitted the heart to impose on the understanding, or the understanding to invent without the consent of the heart. But so it is. Soon after Lloyd’s arrival at Cambridge I understand Christopher Wordsworth wrote his uncle, Mr. Cookson,[215] that Lloyd was going to read Greek with him. Cookson wrote back recommending caution, and whether or no an intimacy with so marked a character might not be prejudicial to his academical interests. (This is his usual mild manner.) Christopher Wordsworth returned for answer that Lloyd was by no means a democrat, and as a proof of it, transcribed the most favourable passages from the “Edmund Oliver,” and here the _affair_ ended. You remember Lloyd’s own account of this story, of course, more accurately than I, and can therefore best judge how far my suspicions of falsehood and exaggeration were well-founded. My dear Southey! the having a bad heart and not having a good one are different things. That Charles Lloyd has a bad heart, I do not even think; but I venture to say, and that openly, that he has not a good one. He is unfit to be any man’s friend, and to all but a very guarded man he is a perilous _acquaintance_. _Your_ conduct towards him, while it is wise, will, I doubt not, be gentle. Of confidence he is not worthy; but social kindness and communicativeness purely intellectual can do you no harm, and may be the means of benefiting his character essentially. _Aut ama me quia sum Dei, aut ut sim Dei_, said St. Augustin, and in the laxer sense of the word “Ama” there is wisdom in the expression notwithstanding its wit. Besides, it is the way of _peace_. From Bristol perhaps I go to London, but I will write you where I am. Yours affectionately,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

I have great affection for Lamb, but I have likewise a perfect Lloyd-and-Lambophobia! Independent of the irritation attending an epistolary controversy with them, their _prose_ comes so damn’d dear! Lloyd especially writes with a woman’s fluency in a large rambling hand, most dull though profuse of feeling. I received from them in last quarter letters so many, that with the postage I might have bought Birch’s Milton.--Sara will write soon. Our love to Edith and your mother.

CII. TO THE SAME.

KESWICK,[216] Sunday, November 10, 1799.

MY DEAR SOUTHEY,--I am anxious lest so long silence should seem unaffectionate, or I would not, having so little to say, write to you from such a distant corner of the kingdom. I was called up to the North by alarming accounts of Wordsworth’s health, which, thank God! are but little more than alarms. _Since_ I have visited the Lakes and in a pecuniary way have made the trip answer to me. From hence I go to London, having had (by accident here) a sort of offer made to me of a pleasant kind, which, if it turn out well, will enable me and Sara to reside in London for the next four or five months--a thing I wish extremely on many and important accounts. So much for myself. In my last letter I said I would give you my reasons for thinking “Christabel,” _were_ it finished, and finished as spiritedly as it commences, yet still an improper opening poem. My reason is it cannot be expected to please all. _Those_ who dislike it will deem it extravagant ravings, and go on through the rest of the collection with the feeling of disgust, and it is not impossible that were it liked by any it would still not harmonise with the _real-life_ poems that follow. It ought, I think, to be the last. The first ought _me judice_ to be a poem in couplets, didactic or satirical, such a one as the lovers of genuine poetry would call sensible and entertaining, such as the ignoramuses and Pope-admirers would deem genuine poetry. I had planned such a one, and, but for the absolute necessity of scribbling prose, I should have written it. The great and master fault of the last “Anthology” was the want of arrangement. It is called a collection, and meant to be continued annually; yet was distinguished in nothing from any other single volume of poems equally good. Yours ought to have been a cabinet with proper compartments, and papers in them, whereas it was only the papers. Some such arrangement as this should have been adopted: First. Satirical and Didactic. 2. Lyrical. 3. Narrative. 4. Levities.

“Sic positi quoniam suaves miscetis odores, Neve inter vites corylum sere”--

is, I am convinced, excellent advice of Master Virgil’s. N. B. A good motto! ’Tis from Virgil’s seventh Eclogue.

“Populus Alcidæ gratissima, vitis Iaccho, Formosæ myrtus Veneri, sua laurea Phœbo; Phyllis amat corylos.”

But still, my dear Southey! it goes grievously against the grain with me, that _you_ should be editing anthologies. I would to Heaven that you could afford to write nothing, or at least to publish nothing, till the completion and publication of the “Madoc.” I feel as certain, as my mind dare feel on any subject, that it would lift you with a spring into a reputation that would give immediate sale to your after compositions and a license of writing more at ease. Whereas “Thalaba” would gain you (for a time at least) more ridiculers than admirers, and the “Madoc” might in consequence be welcomed with an _ecce iterum_. Do, do, my dear Southey! publish the “Madoc” _quam citissime_, not hastily, but yet speedily. I will instantly publish an Essay on Epic Poetry in reference to it. I have been reading the Æneid, and there you will be all victorious, excepting the importance of Æneas and his connection with events existing in Virgil’s time. This cannot be said of “Madoc.” There are other faults in the construction of your poem, but nothing compared to those in the Æneid. Homer I shall read too.

(No signature.)

CIII. TO THE SAME.

December 9, [1799].

MY DEAR SOUTHEY,--I pray you in your next give me the particulars of your health. I hear accounts so contradictory that I know only enough to be a good deal frightened. You will surely think it your duty to suspend all intellectual exertion; as to money, you will get it easily enough. You may easily make twice the money you receive from Stuart by the use of the scissors; for your name is prodigiously high among the London publishers. I would to God your health permitted you to come to London. You might have lodgings in the same house with us. And this I am certain of, that not even Kingsdown is a more healthy or airy place. I have enough for us to do that would be mere child’s work to us, and in which the women might assist us essentially, by the doing of which we might easily get a hundred and fifty pounds each before the first of April. This I speak, not from guess but from absolute conditions with booksellers. The principal work to which I allude would be likewise a great source of amusement and profit to us in the execution, and assuredly we should be a mutual comfort to each other. This I should _press_ on you were not Davy at Bristol, but he is indeed an admirable young man; not only must he be of comfort to you, but in whom can you place such reliance as a medical man? But for Davy, I should advise your coming to London; the difference of expense for three months could not be above fifty pounds. I do not see how it could be half as much. But I pray you write me all particulars, how you have been, how you are, and what you think the particular nature of your disease.

Now for poor George.[217] Assuredly I am ready and willing to become his bondsman for five hundred pounds if, on the whole, you think the scheme a good one. I see enough of the boy to be fully convinced of his goodness and well-intentionedness; of his present or probable talents I know little. To remain all his life an under clerk, as many have done, and earn fifty pounds a year in his old age with a trembling hand--alas! that were a dreary prospect. No creature under the sun is so helpless, so unfitted, I should think, for any other mode of life as a clerk, a mere clerk. Yet still many have begun so and risen into wealth and importance, and it is not impossible that before his term closed we might be able, if nought better offered, perhaps to procure him a place in a public office. We might between us keep him neat in clothes from our own wardrobes, I should think, and I am ready to allow five guineas this year, in addition to Mr. Savary’s twelve pounds. More I am not justified to _promise_. Yet still I think it matter of much reflection with you. The commercial prospects of this country are, in my opinion, gloomy; our present commerce is enormous: that it must diminish after a peace is certain, and should any accident injure the West India trade, and give to France a paramountship in the American affections, that diminution would be vast indeed, and, of course, great would be the number of clerks, etc., wholly out of employment. This is no visionary speculation; for we are consulting concerning a _life_, for probably fifty years. I should have given a more intense conviction to the goodness of the former scheme of apprenticing him to a printer, and would make every exertion to raise my share of the money wanting. However, all this is talk at random. I leave it to you to decide. What does Charles Danvers think? He has been very kind to George. But to whom is he not kind, that body--blood--bone--muscle--nerve--heart and head--good man! I lay final stress on his opinion in almost everything except verses; those I know more about than he does--“God bless him, to use a vulgar phrase.” This is a quotation from Godwin, who used these words in conversation with me and Davy. The pedantry of atheism tickled me hugely. Godwin is no great things in intellect; but in heart and manner he is all the better for having been the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft. Why did not George Dyer (who, by the bye, has written a silly milk-and-water life of you,[218] in which your talents for _pastoral_ and _rural_ imagery are extolled, and in which you are asserted to be a republican), why did not George Dyer send to the “Anthology” that poem in the last “Monthly Magazine?” It is so very far superior to anything I have ever seen of his, and might have made some atonement for his former transgressions. God love him, he is a very good man; but he ought not to degrade himself by writing lives of living characters for Phillips; and all his friends make wry faces, peeping out of the pillory of his advertisemental notes. I hold to my former opinion concerning the _arrangement_ of the “Anthology,” and the booksellers with whom _I_ have talked coincide with me. On this I am decided, that all the _light_ pieces should be put together under one title with a motto[219] thus: “_Nos hæc novimus esse nihil--Phillis amat Corylos_.” I am afraid that I have scarce poetic enthusiasm enough to finish “Christabel;” but the poem, with which Davy is so much delighted, I probably may finish time enough. I shall probably _not_ publish my letters, and if I do so, I shall most certainly _not_ publish any verses in them. Of course, I expect to see them in the “Anthology.” As to title, I should wish a fictitious one or none; were I sure that I could finish the poem I spoke of. I do not know how to get the conclusion of Mrs. Robinson’s poem for you. Perhaps it were better omitted, and I mean to put the thoughts of that concert poem into smoother metre. Our “Devil’s Thoughts” have been admired far and wide, most _enthusiastically_ admired. I wish to have my name in the collection at all events; but I should better like it to better poems than these I have been hitherto able to give you. But I will write again on Saturday. Supposing that Johnson should mean to do nothing more with the “Fears in Solitude” and the two accompanying poems, would they be excluded from the plan of your “Anthology?” There were not above two hundred sold, and what is that to a newspaper circulation? Collins’s Odes were thus reprinted in Dodsley’s Collection. As to my future residence, I can say nothing--only this, that to be near you would be a strong motive with me for my wife’s sake as well as myself. I think it not impossible that a number might be found to go with you and settle in a warmer climate. My kind love to your wife. Sara and Hartley arrived safe, and here they are, No. 21 Buckingham Street, Strand. God bless you, and your affectionate

S. T. COLERIDGE.

Thursday evening.

P. S. Mary Hayes[220] is writing the “Lives of Famous Women,” and is now about your friend _Joan_. She begs you to tell her what books to consult, or to communicate something to her. This from Tobin, who sends his love.

CIV. TO THE SAME.

Tuesday night, 12 o’clock [December 24], 1799.

MY DEAR SOUTHEY,--My Spinosism (if Spinosism it be, and i’ faith ’tis very like it) disposed me to consider this big city as that part of the supreme One which the prophet Moses was allowed to see--I should be more disposed to pull off my shoes, beholding Him in a _Bush_, than while I am forcing my reason to believe that even in theatres _He_ is, yea! even in the Opera House. Your “Thalaba” will beyond all doubt bring you two hundred pounds, if you will sell it at once; but _do_ not print at a venture, under the notion of selling the edition. I assure you that Longman regretted the bargain he made with Cottle concerning the second edition of the “Joan of Arc,” and is indisposed to similar negotiations; but most and very eager to have the property of your works at almost any price. If you have not heard it from Cottle, why, you may hear it from me, that is, the arrangement of Cottle’s affairs in London. The whole and total copyright of your “Joan,” and the first volume of your poems (exclusive of what Longman had before given), was taken by him at three hundred and seventy pounds. You are a strong swimmer, and have borne up poor Joey with all his leaden weights about him, his own and other people’s! Nothing has answered to him but your works. By me he has lost somewhat--by Fox, Amos, and himself _very much_. I can sell your “Thalaba” quite as well in your absence as in your presence. I am employed from I-rise to I-set[221] (that is, from nine in the morning to twelve at night), a pure scribbler. My mornings to booksellers’ compilations, after dinner to Stuart, who pays _all_ my expenses here, let them be what they will; the earnings of the morning go to make up an hundred and fifty pounds for my year’s expenditure; for, supposing _all clear_ my year’s (1800) allowance is anticipated. But this I can do by the first of April (at which time I leave London). For Stuart I write often his leading paragraphs on Secession, Peace, Essay on the new French Constitution,[222] Advice to Friends of Freedom, Critiques on Sir W. Anderson’s Nose, Odes to Georgiana D. of D. (horribly misprinted), Christmas Carols, etc., etc.,--anything not bad in the paper, that is not yours, is mine. So if any verses there strike you as worthy the “Anthology,” “do me the honour, sir!” However, in the course of a week I _do mean_ to conduct a series of essays in that paper which may be of public utility. So much for myself, except that I long to be out of London; and that my Xstmas Carol is a quaint performance, and, in as strict a sense as is _possible_, an Impromptu, and, had I done all I had planned, that “Ode to the Duchess”[223] would have been a better thing than it is--it being somewhat dullish, etc. I have bought the “Beauties of the Anti-jacobin,” and attorneys and counsellors advise me to prosecute, and offer to undertake it, so as that I shall have neither trouble or expense. They say it is a clear case, etc.[224] I will speak to Johnson about the “Fears in Solitude.” If he gives them up they are yours. That dull ode has been printed often enough, and may now be allowed to “sink with dead swoop, and to the bottom _go_,” to quote an admired author; but the two others will do with a little trimming.

My dear Southey! I have said nothing concerning that which most oppresses me. Immediately on my leaving London I fall to the “Life of Lessing;” till that is done, till I have given the Wedgwoods some proof that I am _endeavouring_ to do well for my fellow-creatures, I cannot stir. That being done, I would accompany you, and see no impossibility of forming a pleasant little colony for a few years in Italy or the South of France. Peace will soon come. God love you, my dear Southey! I would write to Stuart, and give up his paper immediately. You should do nothing that did not absolutely _please_ you. Be idle, be very idle! The habits of your mind are such that you will necessarily do much; but be as idle as you can.

Our love to dear Edith. If you see Mary, tell her that we have received our trunk. Hartley is quite well, and my talkativeness is his, without diminution on my side. ’Tis strange, but certainly many things go in the blood, beside gout and scrophula. Yesterday I dined at Longman’s and met Pratt, and that honest piece of prolix dullity and nullity, young Towers, who desired to be remembered to you. To-morrow Sara and I dine at Mister Gobwin’s, as Hartley calls him, who gave the philosopher such a rap on the shins with a ninepin that Gobwin in huge pain _lectured_ Sara on his boisterousness. I was not at home. _Est modus in rebus._ Moshes is somewhat too rough and noisy, but the cadaverous silence of Godwin’s children is to me quite catacombish, and, thinking of Mary Wollstonecraft, I was oppressed by it the day Davy and I dined there.

God love you and S. T. COLERIDGE.

CV. TO THE SAME.

Saturday, January 25, 1800.

MY DEAR SOUTHEY,--No day passes in which I do not as it were yearn after you, but in truth my occupations have lately swoln above smothering point. I am over mouth and nostrils. I have inclosed a poem which Mrs. Robinson gave me for your “Anthology.” She is a woman of undoubted genius. There was a poem of hers in this morning’s paper which both in metre and matter pleased me much. She overloads everything; but I never knew a human being with so _full_ a mind--bad, good, and indifferent, I grant you, but full and overflowing. This poem I _asked_ for you, because I thought the metre stimulating and some of the stanzas really _good_. The first line of the twelfth would of itself redeem a worse poem.[225] I think you will agree with me, but should you not, yet still put it _in_, my dear fellow! for my sake, and out of respect to a woman-poet’s feelings. Miss Hayes I have seen. Charles Lloyd’s conduct has been atrocious beyond what you stated. Lamb himself confessed to me that during the time in which he kept up his ranting, sentimental correspondence with Miss Hayes, he frequently read her letters in company, as a subject for _laughter_, and then sate down and answered them quite _à la Rousseau_! Poor Lloyd! Every hour new-creates him; he is his own posterity in a perpetually flowing series, and his body unfortunately retaining an external identity, _their_ mutual contradictions and disagreeings are united under one name, and of course are called lies, treachery, and rascality! I would not give him up, but that the same circumstances which have wrenched his morals prevent in him any salutary exercise of genius. And therefore he is not worth to the world that I should embroil and embrangle myself in his interests.

Of Miss Hayes’ intellect I do not think so highly as you, or rather, to speak sincerely, I think not _contemptuously_ but certainly _despectively_ thereof. Yet I think you likely in this case to have judged better than I; for to hear a thing, ugly and petticoated, ex-syllogize a God with cold-blooded precision, and attempt to run religion through the body with an icicle, an icicle from a Scotch Hog-trough! _I_ do not endure it; my eye beholds phantoms, and “nothing is, but what is not.”

By your last I could not find whether or no you still are willing to execute the “History of the Levelling Principle.” Let me hear. Tom Wedgwood is going to the Isle of St. Nevis. As to myself, Lessing out of the question; I must stay in England.... Dear Hartley is well, and in high force; he sported of his own accord a theologico-astronomical hypothesis. Having so perpetually heard of good boys being put up into the sky when they are dead, and being now beyond measure enamoured of the lamps in the streets, he said one night coming through the streets, “Stars are dead lamps, they be’nt naughty, they are put up in the sky.” Two or three weeks ago he was talking to himself while I was writing, and I took down his soliloquy. It would make a most original poem.

You say, I illuminize. I think that property will some time or other be modified by the predominance of intellect, even as rank and superstition are now modified by and subordinated to property, that much is to be hoped of the future; but first those particular modes of property which more

## particularly stop the diffusion must be done away, as injurious to

property itself; these are priesthood and the too great patronage of Government. Therefore, if to act on the belief that all things are the process, and that inapplicable truths are moral falsehoods, be to illuminize, why then I illuminize! I know that I have been obliged to _illuminize_ so late at night, or rather mornings, that eyes have smarted as if I had _allum in eyes_! I believe I have misspelt the word, and ought to have written Alum; that aside, ’tis a _humorous pun_!

Tell Davy that I will soon write. God love him! You and I, Southey! know a good and great man or two in this world of ours.

God love you, my dear Southey, and your affectionate

S. T. COLERIDGE.

My kind love to Edith. Let me hear from you, and do not be angry with me that I don’t answer your letters regularly.

CVI. TO THE SAME.

(Early in 1800.)

MY DEAR SOUTHEY,--I shall give up this Newspaper business; it is too, too fatiguing. I have attended the Debates twice, and the first time I was twenty-five hours in activity, and that of a very unpleasant kind; and the second time, from ten in the morning till four o’clock the next morning. I am sure that you will excuse my silence, though indeed after two such letters from you I cannot scarcely excuse it myself. First of the book business. I find a resistance which I did not expect to the _anonymousness_ of the publication. Longman seems confident that a work on such a subject without a name would not do. Translations and perhaps Satires are, he says, the only works that booksellers now venture on _without a name_. He is very solicitous to have your “Thalaba,” and wonders (most wonderful!) that you do not write a novel. That would be the thing! and truly, if by no more pains than a “St. Leon”[226] requires you could get four hundred pounds!! or half the money, I say so too! If we were together we might easily _toss up_ a novel, to be published in the name of one of us, or _two_, if that were all, and then christen ’em by lots. As sure as ink flows in my pen, by help of an amanuensis I could write a volume a week--and Godwin got four hundred pounds! for it--think of that, Master Brooks. I hope that some time or other you will write a novel on that subject of yours! I mean the “Rise and Progress of a _Laugher_”--Le Grice in your eye--the effect of Laughing on taste, manners, morals, and happiness! But as to the Jacobin Book, I must wait till I hear from you. Phillips would be very glad to engage you to write a school book for him, the History of Poetry in all nations, about 400 pages; but this, too, _must_ have your name. He would give sixty pounds. If poor dear Burnett were with you, he might do it under your eye and with your instructions as well as you or I could do it, but it is _the name_. Longman remarked acutely enough, “The booksellers scarcely pretend to judge the merits of the _book_, but we know the _saleableness_ of the name! and as they continue to buy most books on the calculation of a _first_ edition of a thousand copies, they are seldom much mistaken; for the name gives them the excuse for sending it to all the Gemmen in Great Britain and the Colonies, from whom they have standing orders for new books of reputation.” This is the secret why books published by country booksellers, or by authors on their own account, so seldom succeed.

As to my schemes of residence, I am as unfixed as yourself, only that we are under the absolute necessity of fixing somewhere, and that somewhere will, I suppose, be Stowey. There are all my books and all our furniture. In May I am under a kind of engagement to go with Sara to Ottery. My family wish me to fix there, but _that_ I must decline in the names of public liberty and individual free-agency. Elder brothers, not senior in intellect, and not sympathising in main opinions, are subjects of occasional visits; not temptations to a co-township. But if you go to Burton, Sara and I will waive the Ottery plan, if possible, and spend May and June with you, and perhaps July; but she must be settled in a house by the latter end of July, or the first week in August. Till we are with you, Sara means to spend five weeks with the Roskillies, and a week or two at Bristol, where I shall join her. She will leave London in three weeks at least, perhaps a fortnight; and I shall give up lodgings and billet myself free of expense at my friend Purkis’s, at Brentford. This is my present plan. O my dear Southey! I would to God that your health did not enforce you to migrate--we might most assuredly continue to fix a residence somewhere, which might possess a sort of centrality. Alfoxden would make two houses sufficiently divided for unimpinging independence.

Tell Davy that I have not forgotten him, because without an epilepsy I cannot forget him; and if I wrote to him as often as I think of him, Lord have mercy on his pocket!

God bless you again and again.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

I pass this evening with Charlotte Smith at her house.

CVII. TO THE SAME.

[Postmark February 18], 1800.

MY DEAR SOUTHEY,--What do you mean by the words, “it is indeed by expectation”? speaking of your state of health. I cannot bear to think of your going to a strange country without any one who loves and understands you. But we will talk of all this. I have not a moment’s time, and my head aches. I was up till five o’clock this morning. My brain is so overworked that I could doze troublously and with cold limbs, so affected was my circulation. I shall do no more for Stuart. Read Pitt’s speech[227] in the “Morning Post” of to-day (February 18, Tuesday). I reported the whole with notes so scanty, that--Mr. Pitt is much obliged to me. For, by Heaven, he never talked half as eloquently in his life-time. He is a _stupid, insipid_ charlatan, that _Pitt_. Indeed, except Fox, I, you, or anybody might learn to speak better than any man in the House. For the next fortnight I expect to be so busy, that I shall go out of London a mile or so to be wholly uninterrupted. I do not understand the Beguin-nings[228] of Holland. Phillips is a good-for-nothing fellow, but what of that? He will give you sixty pounds, and advance half the money now for a book you can do in a fortnight, or three weeks at farthest. I would advise you not to give it up so hastily. Phillips eats no flesh. I observe, wittily enough, that whatever might be thought of innate ideas, there could be no doubt to a man who had seen Phillips of the existence of innate beef. Let my “Mad Ox” keep my name. “Fire and Famine” do just what you like with. I have no wish either way. The “Fears in Solitude,” I fear, is not my property, and I have no encouragement to think it will be given up, but if I hear otherwise I will let you know speedily; in the mean time, do not rely on it. Your review-plan[229] _cannot_ answer for this reason. It could exist only as long as the ononymous anti-anonymists remained in life, health, and the humour, and no publisher would undertake a periodical publication on so gossamery a tie. Besides, it really would not be right for any man to make so many people have strange and uncomfortable feelings towards him; which must be the case, however kind the reviews might be--and what but nonsense is published? The author of “Gebir” I cannot find out. There are none of his books in town. You have made a sect of Gebirites by your review, but it was not a _fair_, though a very kind review. I have sent a letter to Mrs. Fricker, which Sara directed to you. I hope it has come safe. Let me see, are there any other questions?

So, my dear Southey, God love you, and never, never cease to believe that I am affectionately yours,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

Love to Edith.

CVIII. TO THE SAME.

No. 21 Buckingham Street [early in 1800].

MY DEAR SOUTHEY,--I will see Longman on Tuesday, at the farthest, but I pray you send me up what you have done, if you can, as I will read it to him, unless he will take my word for it. But we cannot expect that he will treat finally without seeing a considerable specimen. Send it by the coach, and be assured that it will be as safe as in your own escritoire, and I will remit it the very day Longman or any bookseller has treated for it satisfactorily. Less than two hundred pounds I would not take. Have you tried warm bathing in a high temperature? As to your travelling, your first business must, of course, be to _settle_. The Greek Islands[230] and Turkey in general are one continued Hounslow Heath, only that the highwaymen there have an awkward habit of murdering people. As to Poland and Hungary, the detestable roads and inns of them both, and the severity of the climate in the former, render travelling there little suited to your state of health. Oh! for peace and the South of France! What a detestable villainy is not the new Constitution.[231] I have written all that relates to it which has appeared in the “Morning Post;” and not without strength or elegance. But the French are children.[232] ’Tis an infirmity to hope or fear concerning them. I wish they had a king again, if it were only that Sieyès and Bonaparte might be _hung_. Guillotining is too republican a death for such reptiles! You’ll write another quarter for Mr. Stuart? You will torture yourself for twelve or thirteen guineas? I pray you do not do so! You might get without the exertion, and with but little more expenditure of time, from fifty to an hundred pounds. Thus, for instance, bring together on your table, or skim over successively Brücker, Lardner’s “History of Heretics,” Russell’s “Modern Europe,” and Andrews’ “History of England,” and write a history of levellers and the levelling principle under some goodly title, neither praising or abusing them. Lacedæmon, Crete, and the attempts at agrarian laws in Rome--all these you have by heart.... Plato and Zeno are, I believe, nearly all that relates to the purpose in Brücker. Lardner’s is a most amusing book to read. Write only a sheet of letter paper a day, which you can easily do in an hour, and in twelve weeks you will have produced (without any toil of brains, observing none but chronological arrangement, and giving you little more than the trouble of transcription) twenty-four sheets octavo. I will gladly write a philosophical introduction that shall enlighten without offending, and therein state the rise of property, etc. For this you might secure sixty or seventy guineas, and receive half the money on producing the first eight sheets, in a month from your first commencement of the work. Many other works occur to me, but I mention this because it might be doing great good, inasmuch as boys and youths would read it with far different impressions from their fathers and godfathers, and yet the latter find nothing alarming in the nature of the work, it being purely historical. If I am not deceived by the _recency_ of their date, my “Ode to the Duchess” and my “Xmas Carol” will _do_ for your “Anthology.” I have therefore transcribed them for you. But I need not ask you, for God’s sake, to use your own judgment without spare.

(No signature.)

CIX. TO THE SAME.

February 28, 1800.

It goes to my heart, my dear Southey! to sit down and write to you, knowing that I can scarcely fill half a side--the postage lies on my conscience. I am translating manuscript plays of Schiller.[233] They are _poems_, full of long speeches, in very polish’d blank verse. The theatre! the theatre! my dear Southey! it will never, never, never do! If you go to Portugal, your History thereof _will_ do, but, for present money, novels or translations. I do not see that a book said by you in the preface to have been written merely as a book for young persons could injure your reputation more than Milton’s “Accidence” injured _his_. I _would do_ it, because you can do it so easily. It is not necessary that you should say much about French or German Literature. Do it so. Poetry of savage nations--Poetry of rudely civilized--Homer and the Hebrew Poetry, etc.--Poetry of civilized nations under Republics and Polytheism, State of Poetry under the Roman and Greek Empires--Revival of it in Italy, in Spain, and England--then go steadily on with England to the end, except one chapter about German Poetry to conclude with, which I can write for you.

In the “Morning Post” was a poem of fascinating metre by Mary Robinson; ’twas on Wednesday, Feb. 26, and entitled the “Haunted Beach.”[234] I was so struck with it that I sent to her to desire that [it] might be preserved in the “Anthology.” She was extremely flattered by the idea of its being there, as she idolizes you and your doings. So, if it be not too late, I pray you let it be in. If you should not have received that day’s paper, write immediately that I may transcribe it. It falls off sadly to the last, wants tale and interest; but the images are new and very distinct--that “silvery carpet” is so _just_ that it is unfortunate it should _seem_ so bad, for it is _really_ good; but the metre, ay! that woman has an ear. William Taylor, from whom I have received a couple of letters full of thought and information, says what astounded me, that double rhymes in our language have always a _ludicrous_ association. Mercy on the man! where are his ears and feelings? His taste cannot be _quite_ right, from this observation; but he is a famous fellow--that is not to be denied.

Sara is poorly still. Hartley rampant, and emperorizes with your pictures. Harry is a fine boy. Hartley told a gentleman, “Metinks you are _like Southey_,” and he _was_ not wholly unlike you--but the chick calling you simple “Southey,” so pompously!

God love you and your Edith.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

## CHAPTER VI A LAKE POET

1800-1803

##