CHAPTER II

EARLY PUBLIC LIFE

1795-1796

XLVII. TO JOSEPH COTTLE.

Spring, 1795.

MY DEAR SIR,--Can you conveniently lend me five pounds, as we want a little more than four pounds to make up our lodging bill, which is indeed much higher than we expected; seven weeks and Burnett’s lodging for twelve weeks, amounting to eleven pounds?

Yours affectionately, S. T. COLERIDGE.

XLVIII. TO THE SAME.

July 31, 1795.

DEAR COTTLE,--By the thick smokes that precede the volcanic eruptions of Etna, Vesuvius, and Hecla, I feel an impulse to fumigate, at 25 College Street, one pair of stairs’ room; yea, with our Oronoco, and, if thou wilt send me by the bearer four pipes, I will write a panegyrical epic poem upon thee, with as many books as there are letters in thy name. Moreover, if thou wilt send me “the copy-book,” I hereby bind myself, by to-morrow morning, to write out enough copy for a sheet and a half.

God bless you.

S. T. C.

XLIX. TO THE SAME.

1795.

DEAR COTTLE,--Shall I trouble you (I being over the mouth and nose, in doing something of importance, at ----’s) to send your servant into the market and buy a pound of bacon, and two quarts of broad beans; and when he carries it down to College Street, to desire the maid to dress it for dinner, and tell her I shall be home by three o’clock? Will you come and drink tea with me? and I will endeavour to get the etc. ready for you.

Yours affectionately, S. T. C.

L. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

October, 1795.

MY DEAR SOUTHEY,--It would argue imbecility and a latent wickedness in myself, if for a moment I doubted concerning your purposes and final determination. I write, because it is possible that I may suggest some idea to you which should find a place in your answer to your uncle, and I _write_, because in a letter I can express myself more connectedly than in conversation.

The former part of Mr. Hill’s reasonings is reducible to this. It may not be vicious to entertain pure and virtuous sentiments; their criminality is confined to the promulgation (if we believe democracy to be pure and virtuous, to us it is so). Southey! Pantisocracy is not the question: its realization is distant--perhaps a miraculous millennium. What you have seen, or think that you have seen of the human heart, may render the formation even of a pantisocratic _seminary_ improbable to you, but this is not the question. Were £300 a year offered to you as a man of the world, as one indifferent to absolute equality, but still on the supposition that you were commonly honest, I suppose it possible that doubts might arise; your mother, your brother, your Edith, would all crowd upon you, and certain misery might be weighed against distant, and perhaps unattainable happiness. But the point is, whether or no you can _perjure_ yourself. There are men who hold the necessity and moral optimism of our religious establishment. Its peculiar dogmas they may disapprove, but of innovation they see dreadful and unhealable consequence; and they will not quit the Church for a few follies and absurdities, any more than for the same reason they would desert a valued friend. Such men I do not condemn. Whatever I may deem of their reasoning, their hearts and consciences I include not in the anathema. But you disapprove of an establishment altogether; you believe it iniquitous, a mother of crimes. It is impossible that _you_ could uphold it by assuming the badge of affiliation.

My prospects are not bright, but to the eye of reason as bright as when we first formed our plan; nor is there any opposite inducement offered, of which you were not then apprized, or had cause to expect. Domestic happiness is the greatest of things sublunary, and of things celestial it is impossible, perhaps, for unassisted man to believe anything greater; but it is not strange that those things, which, in a pure form of society, will constitute our first blessings, should in its present morbid state be our most perilous temptations. “He that doth not love mother or wife less than me, is not worthy of me!”

This have I written, Southey, altogether disinterestedly. Your desertion or adhesion will in no wise affect my feelings, opinions, or conduct, and in a very inconsiderable degree my fortunes! That Being who is “in will, in deed, Impulse of all to all,” whichever be your determination, will make it ultimately the best.

God love you, my dear Southey!

S. T. COLERIDGE.

LI. TO THOMAS POOLE.

Wednesday evening, October 7, 1795.

MY DEAR SIR,--God bless you; or rather, God be praised for that he _has_ blessed you!

On Sunday morning I was _married_ at St. Mary’s Redcliff, poor Chatterton’s church! The thought gave a tinge of melancholy to the solemn joy which I felt, united to the woman whom I love best of all created beings. We are settled, nay, quite domesticated, at Clevedon, our comfortable cot!

_Mrs. Coleridge!_ I like to write the name. Well, as I was saying, Mrs. Coleridge desires her affectionate regards to you. I talked of you on my wedding night. God bless you! I hope that some ten years hence you will believe and know of my affection towards you what I will not now profess.

The prospect around is perhaps more _various_ than any in the kingdom. Mine eye gluttonizes the sea, the distant islands, the opposite coast! I shall assuredly write rhymes, let the nine Muses prevent it if they can. Cruikshank, I find, is married to Miss Buclé. I am happy to hear it. He will surely, I hope, make a good husband to a woman, to whom he would be a villain who should make a bad one.

[Illustration]

I have given up all thoughts of the magazine, for various reasons. _Imprimis_, I must be connected with R. Southey in it, which I could not be with comfort to my feelings. _Secundo_, It is a thing of monthly _anxiety_ and quotidian bustle. _Tertio_, It would cost Cottle an hundred pounds in buying paper, etc.--all on an uncertainty. _Quarto_, To publish a magazine for _one_ year would be nonsense, and if I pursue what I mean to pursue, my school plan, I could not publish it for more than a year. _Quinto_, Cottle has entered into an engagement to give me a guinea and a half for every hundred lines of poetry I write, which will be perfectly sufficient for my maintenance, I only amusing myself on mornings; and all my prose works he is eager to purchase. _Sexto_, In the course of half a year I mean to return to Cambridge (having previously taken my name off from the University control) and taking lodgings there for myself and wife, finish my great work of “Imitations,” in two volumes. My former works may, I hope, prove somewhat of genius and of erudition. This will be better; it will show great industry and manly consistency; at the end of it I shall publish proposals for school, etc. Cottle has spent a day with me, and takes this letter to Bristol. My next will be long, and full of _something_. This is inanity and egotism. Pray let me hear from you, directing the letter to Mr. Cottle, who will forward it. My respectful and grateful remembrance to your mother, and believe me, dear Poole, your affectionate and mindful _friend_, shall I so soon dare to say? Believe me, my heart prompts it.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

LII. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.[99]

Friday morning, November 13, 1795.

Southey, I _have_ lost friends--friends who still cherish for me sentiments of high esteem and unextinguished tenderness. For the sum total of my misbehaviour, the Alpha and Omega of their accusations, is epistolary neglect. I never speak of them without affection, I never think of them without reverence. Not “to this catalogue,” Southey, have I “added _your_ name.” You are _lost_ to _me_, because you are lost to Virtue. As this will probably be the last time I shall have occasion to address you, I will begin at the beginning and regularly retrace your conduct and my own. In the month of June, 1794, I first became acquainted with your person and character. Before I quitted Oxford, we had struck out the leading features of a pantisocracy. While on my journey through Wales you invited me to Bristol with the full hopes of realising it. During my abode at Bristol the plan was matured, and I returned to Cambridge hot in the anticipation of that happy season when we should remove the _selfish_ principle from ourselves, and prevent it in our children, by an abolition of property; or, in whatever respects this might be impracticable, by such similarity of property as would amount to a _moral_ sameness, and answer all the purposes of _abolition_. Nor were you less zealous, and thought and expressed your opinion, that if any man embraced our system he must comparatively disregard “his father and mother and wife and children and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life also, or he could not be our disciple.” In one of your letters, alluding to your mother’s low spirits and situation, you tell me that “I cannot suppose any _individual_ feelings will have an undue weight with you,” and in the same letter you observe (alas! your recent conduct has made it a prophecy!), “God forbid that the _ebullience_ of _schematism_ should be over. It is the Promethean fire that animates my soul, and when _that_ is gone _all will be darkness_. I have _devoted_ myself!”

Previously to my departure from Jesus College, and during my melancholy detention in London, what convulsive struggles of feeling I underwent, and what sacrifices I made, you know. The liberal proposal from my family affected me no further than as it pained me to wound a revered brother by the positive and immediate refusal which duty compelled me to return. But there was a--I need not be particular; you remember what a fetter I burst, and that it snapt as if it had been a sinew of my heart. However, I returned to Bristol, and my addresses to Sara, which I at first paid from principle, not feeling, from feeling and from principle I renewed; and I met a reward more than proportionate to the greatness of the effort. I love and I am beloved, and I am happy!

Your letter to Lovell (two or three days after my arrival at Bristol), in answer to some objections of mine to the Welsh scheme, was the first thing that alarmed me. Instead of “It is our duty,” “Such and such are the reasons,” it was “I and I” and “will and will,”--sentences of gloomy and self-centering resolve. I wrote you a friendly reproof, and in my own mind attributed this unwonted style to your earnest desires of realising our plan, and the angry pain which you felt when any appeared to oppose or defer its execution. However, I came over to your opinions of the utility, and, in course, the duty of rehearsing our scheme in Wales, and, so, rejected the offer of being established in the Earl of Buchan’s family. To this period of our connection I call your more particular attention and remembrance, as I shall revert to it at the close of my letter.

We commenced lecturing. Shortly after, you began to recede in your conversation from those broad principles in which pantisocracy originated. I opposed you with vehemence, for I well knew that no notion of morality or its motives could be without consequences. And once (it was just before we went to bed) you confessed to me that you had acted wrong. But you relapsed; your manner became cold and gloomy, and pleaded with increased pertinacity for the wisdom of making Self an undiverging Center. At Mr. Jardine’s[100] your language was _strong indeed_. Recollect it. You had left the table, and we were standing at the window. Then darted into my mind the dread that you were meditating a separation. At _Chepstow_[101] your conduct renewed my suspicion, and I was greatly agitated, even to many tears. But in Peircefield Walks[102] you assured me that my suspicions were altogether unfounded, that our differences were merely speculative, and that you would certainly go into Wales. I was glad and satisfied. For my heart was never bent from you but by violent strength, and heaven knows how it leapt back to esteem and love you. But alas! a short time passed ere your departure from our first principles became too flagrant. Remember when we went to Ashton[103] on the strawberry party. Your conversation with George Burnett on the day following he detailed to me. It scorched my throat. Your private resources were to remain your individual property, and everything to be separate except a farm of five or six acres. In short, we were to commence partners in a petty farming trade. This was the mouse of which the mountain Pantisocracy was at last safely delivered. I received the account with indignation and loathings of unutterable contempt. Such opinions were indeed unassailable,--the javelin of argument and the arrows of ridicule would have been equally misapplied; a straw would have wounded them mortally. I did not condescend to waste my intellect upon them; but in the most express terms I declared to George Burnett my opinion (and, Southey, next to my own existence, there is scarce any fact of which at this moment I entertain less doubt), to Burnett I declared it to be my opinion “_that you had long laid a plot_ of separation, and were now developing it by proposing such a vile mutilation of our scheme as you must have been conscious I should reject decisively and with scorn.” George Burnett was your most affectionate friend; I knew his unbounded veneration for you, his personal attachment; I knew likewise his gentle dislike of _me_. Yet him I bade be the judge. I bade him choose his associate. I would adopt the full system or depart. George, I presume, detailed of this my conversation what part he chose; from him, however, I received your sentiments, viz.: that you would go into Wales, or what place I liked. Thus your system of prudentials and your apostasy were not sudden; these constant nibblings had sloped your descent from virtue. “You received your uncle’s letter,” I said--“what answer have you returned?” For to think with almost superstitious veneration of you had been such a deep-rooted habit of my soul that even then I did not dream you could hesitate concerning so infamous a proposal. “None,” you replied, “nor do I know what answer I shall return.” You went to bed. George sat half-petrified, gaping at the pigmy virtue of his supposed giant. I performed the office of still-struggling friendship by writing you my free sentiments concerning the enormous guilt of that which your uncle’s doughty sophistry recommended.

On the next morning I walked with you towards Bath; again I insisted on its criminality. You told me that you had “little notion of guilt,” and that “you had a pretty sort of lullaby faith of your own.” Finding you invulnerable in conscience, for the sake of mankind I did not, however, quit the field, but pressed you on the difficulties of your system. Your uncle’s intimacy with the bishop, and the hush in which you would lie for the two years previous to your ordination, were the arguments (variously urged in a long and desultory conversation) by which you solved those difficulties. “But your ‘Joan of Arc’--the sentiments in it are of the boldest order. What if the suspicions of the Bishop be raised, and he

## particularly questions you concerning your opinions of the Trinity and

the Redemption?” “Oh,” you replied, “I am pretty well up to their jargon, and shall answer them accordingly.” In fine, you left me fully persuaded that you would enter into Holy Orders. And, after a week’s interval or more, you desired George Burnett to act independently of you, and _gave him an invitation to Oxford_. Of course, we both concluded that the matter was absolutely determined. Southey! I am not besotted that I should not know, nor hypocrite enough not to tell you, that you were diverted from being a Priest only by the weight of infamy which you perceived coming towards you like a rush of waters.

Then with good reason I considered you as one _fallen back into the ranks_; as a man admirable for his abilities only, strict, indeed, in the lesser honesties, but, like the majority of men, unable to resist a strong temptation. _Friend_ is a very sacred appellation. You were become an _acquaintance_, yet one for whom I felt no common tenderness. I could not forget what you had been. Your sun was set; your sky was clouded; but those clouds and that sky were yet tinged with the recent sun. As I considered you, so I treated you. I studiously avoided all particular subjects. I acquainted you with nothing relative to myself. Literary topics engrossed our conversation. You were too quick-sighted not to perceive it. I received a letter from you. “You have withdrawn your confidence from me, Coleridge. Preserving still the face of friendship when we meet, you yet avoid me and carry on your plans in secrecy.” If by “the face of friendship” you meant that kindliness which I show to all because I feel it for all, your statement was perfectly accurate. If you meant more, you contradict yourself; for you evidently perceived from my manners that you were a “weight upon me” in company--an intruder, unwished and unwelcome. I pained you by “cold civility, the shadow which friendship leaves behind him.” Since that letter I altered my conduct no otherwise than by avoiding you more. I still generalised, and spoke not of myself, except my proposed literary works. In short, I spoke to you as I should have done to any other man of genius who had happened to be my _acquaintance_. Without the farce and tumult of a rupture I wished you to sink into that class. “Face to face you never changed your manners to me.” And yet I pained you by “cold civility.” Egregious contradiction! Doubtless I always treated you with urbanity, and meant to do so; but I _locked up_ my heart from you, and you perceived it, and I intended you to perceive it. “I planned works in conjunction with you.” Most certainly; the _magazine_ which, long before this, you had planned equally with me, and, if it had been carried into execution, would of course have returned you a third share of the profits. What had you done that should make you an unfit literary associate to me? Nothing. My opinion of you as a _man_ was altered, not as a writer. Our Muses had not quarrelled. I should have read your poetry with equal delight, and corrected it with equal zeal if correction it needed. “I received you on my return from Shurton with my usual shake of the hand.” You gave me your hand, and dreadful must have been my feelings if I had refused to take it. Indeed, so long had I known you, so highly venerated, so dearly loved you, that my hand would have taken yours _mechanically_. But is shaking the hand a mark of _friendship_? Heaven forbid! I should then be a hypocrite many days in the week. It is assuredly the pledge of acquaintance, and nothing more. But after this did I not with most scrupulous care avoid you? You know I did.

In your former letters you say that I made use of these words to you: “You will be retrograde that you may spring the farther forward.” You have misquoted, Southey! You had talked of rejoining pantisocracy in about fourteen years. I exploded this probability, but as I saw you determined to leave it, hoped and wished it might be so--_hoped_ that we might run backwards only to leap forward. Not to mention that during that conversation I had taken the weight and pressing urgency of your motives as truths granted; but when, on examination, I found them a show and mockery of unreal things, doubtless, my opinion of you _must_ have become far less respectful. You quoted likewise the last sentence of my letter to you, as a proof that I approved of your design; you _knew_ that sentence to imply no more than the pious confidence of optimism--however wickedly you might act, God would make it _ultimately_ the best. You _knew_ this was the meaning of it--I could find twenty parallel passages in the lectures. Indeed, such expressions applied to bad actions had become a habit of my conversation. You had named, not unwittingly, Dr. Pangloss. And Heaven forbid that I should not now have faith that however foul your stream may run here, yet that it will filtrate and become pure in its subterraneous passage to the Ocean of Universal Redemption.

Thus far had I written when the necessities of literary occupation crowded upon me, and I met you in Redcliff, and, unsaluted and unsaluting, passed by the man to whom for almost a year I had told my last thoughts when I closed my eyes, and the first when I awoke. But “ere this I have felt sorrow!”

I shall proceed to answer your letters, and first excriminate myself, and then examine your conduct. You charge me with having industriously trumpeted your uncle’s letter. When I mentioned my intended journey to Clevedon with Burnett, and was asked by my immediate friends why _you_ were not with us, should I have been silent and implied something mysterious, or have told an open untruth and made myself your accomplice? I could do neither; I answered that you were quite undetermined, but had some thoughts of returning to Oxford. To Danvers, indeed, and to Cottle I spoke more particularly, for I knew their prudence and their love for you--and my heart was very full. But to Mrs. Morgan I did not mention it. She met me in the streets, and said: “So! Southey is going into the Church! ’Tis all concluded, ’tis in vain to deny it!” I answered: “You are mistaken; you must contradict; Southey has received a splendid offer, but he has not determined.” This, I have some faint recollection, was my answer, but of this particular conversation my recollection is very faint. By what means she received the intelligence I know not; probably from Mrs. Richardson, who might have been told it by Mr. Wade. A considerable time after, the subject was renewed at Mrs. Morgan’s, Burnett and my Sara being present. Mrs. M. told me that you had asserted to her, that with regard to the Church you had barely hesitated, that you might consider your uncle’s arguments, that you had given up no one principle--and that _I_ was more your friend than ever. I own I was roused to an agony of passion; nor was George Burnett undisturbed. Whatever I said that afternoon (and since that time I have but often repeated what I said, in gentler language) George Burnett did give his _decided Amen_ to. And I said, Southey, that you had given up every principle--that confessedly you were going into the law, more opposite to your avowed principles, if possible, than even the Church--and that I had in my pocket a letter in which you charged me with having withdrawn my friendship; and as to your barely hesitating about your uncle’s proposal, I was obliged in my own defence to relate all that passed between us, all on which I had founded a conviction so directly opposite.

I have, you say, distorted your conversation by “gross misrepresentation and wicked and calumnious falsehoods. It has been told me by Mrs. Morgan that I said: ‘I have seen my error! I have been drunk with principle!’” Just over the bridge, at the bottom of the High Street, returning one night from Redcliff Hill, in answer to my pressing contrast of your then opinions of the selfish kind with what you had formerly professed, you said: “I was intoxicated with the novelty of a system!” That you said, “I have seen my error,” I never asserted. It is doubtless implied in the sentence which you did say, but I never charged it to you as your expression. As to your reserving bank bills, etc., to yourself, the charge would have been so palpable a lie that I must have been madman as well as villain to have been guilty of it. If I had, George Burnett and Sara would have contradicted it. I said that your conduct in little things had appeared to me tinged with selfishness, and George Burnett attributed, and still does attribute, your defection to your unwillingness to share your expected annuity with us. As to the long catalogue of other lies, they not being particularised, I, of course, can say nothing about them. Tales may have been fetched and carried with embellishments calculated to improve them in everything but the truth. I spoke “the plain and simple truth” alone.

And now for your conduct and motives. My hand trembles when I think what a series of falsehood and duplicity I am about to bring before the conscience of a man who has dared to write me that “his conduct has been uniformly open.” I must revert to your first letter, and here you say:--

“The plan you are going upon is not of sufficient importance to justify me to myself in abandoning a family, who have none to support them but me.” The plan _you_ are going upon! What plan was I meditating, save to retire into the country with George Burnett and yourself, and taking by degrees a small farm, there be _learning_ to get my own bread by my bodily labour--and then to have all things in common--thus disciplining my body and mind for the successful practice of the same thing in America with more numerous associates? And even if this should never be the case, ourselves and our children would form a society sufficiently large. And was not this your own plan--the plan for the realising of which you invited me to Bristol; the plan for which I abandoned my friends, and every prospect, and every certainty, and the woman whom I loved to an excess which you in your warmest dream of fancy could never shadow out? When I returned from London, when you deemed pantisocracy a _duty_--duty unaltered by numbers--when you said, that, if others left it, you and George Burnett and your brother would stand firm to the post of virtue--what then were our circumstances? Saving Lovell, our number was the same, yourself and Burnett and I. Our _prospects_ were only an uncertain hope of getting thirty shillings a week between us by writing for some London paper--for the remainder we were to rely on our agricultural exertions. And as to your family you stood precisely in the same situation as you now stand. You meant to take your mother with you, and your brother. And where, indeed, would have been the difficulty? She would have earned her maintenance by her management and savings--considering the matter even in this cold-hearted way. But when you broke from us our prospects were brightening; by the magazine or by poetry we might and should have got ten guineas a month.

But if you are acting right, I should be acting right in imitating you. What, then, would George Burnett do--he “whom you seduced

“With other promises and other vaunts Than to repent, boasting _you_ could subdue Temptation!”

He cannot go into the Church, for you did “give him principles”! and I wish that you had indeed “learnt from him how infinitely more to be valued is integrity of heart than effulgence of intellect.” Nor can he go into the law, for the same _principles_ declare against it, and he is not calculated for it. And his father will not support any expense of consequence relative to his further education--for Law or Physic he could not take his degree in, or be called to, without sinking of many hundred pounds. What, Southey, was George Burnett to do?

Then, even if you had persisted in your design of taking Orders, your motives would have been weak and shadowy and vile; but when you changed your ground for the Law they were annihilated. No man dreams of getting bread in the Law, till six or eight years after his first entrance at the Temple. And how very few even then? Before this time your brothers would have been put out, and the money which you must of necessity have sunk in a wicked profession would have given your brother an education, and provided a premium fit for the first compting-house in the world. But I hear that you have again changed your ground. You do not now mean to study the Law, but to maintain yourself by your writings and on your promised annuity, which, you told Mrs. Morgan, would be more than a hundred a year. Could you not have done the same with _us_? I neither have nor could deign to have a hundred a year. Yet by my own exertions I will struggle hard to maintain myself, and my wife, and my wife’s mother and my associate. Or what if you dedicated this hundred a year to your family? Would you not be precisely as I am? Is not George Burnett accurate when he undoubtedly ascribes your conduct to an unparticipating propensity--to a total want of the boasted _flocci-nauci-nihili-pilificating_ sense? O selfish, money-loving man! What principle have you not given up? Though death had been the consequence, I would have spat in that man’s face and called him liar, who should have spoken that last sentence concerning _you_ nine months ago. For blindly did I esteem you. O God! that _such a mind_ should fall in love with that low, dirty, gutter-grubbing trull, _Worldly Prudence_!

Curse on all _pride_! ’Tis a harlot that buckrams herself up in virtue only that she may fetch a higher price. ’Tis a rock where virtue may be planted, but cannot strike root.

Last of all, perceiving that your motives vanished at the first ray of examination, and that those accounts of your mother and family which had drawn easy tears down wrinkled cheeks had no effect on keener minds, your last resource has been to calumniate me. If there be in nature a situation perilous to honesty, it is this, when a man has not heart to _be_, yet lusts to _seem_ virtuous. My _indolence_ you assigned to Lovell as the reason for your quitting pantisocracy. Supposing it true, it might indeed be a reason for rejecting _me_ from the system. But how does this affect pantisocracy, that you should reject _it_? And what has Burnett done, that he should not be a worthy associate? He who leaned on you with all his head and with all his heart; he who gave his all for pantisocracy, and expected that pantisocracy would be at least bread and cheese to him. But neither is the charge a true one. My own lectures I wrote for myself, eleven in number, excepting a very few pages which most reluctantly you eked out for me. And such pages! I would not have suffered them to have stood in a lecture of yours. To _your_ lectures I dedicated my whole mind and heart, and wrote one half in _quantity_; but in quality you must be conscious that all the _tug_ of brain was mine, and that your share was little more than transcription. I wrote with vast exertion of all my intellect the parts in the “Joan of Arc,” and I corrected that and other poems with greater interest than I should have felt for my own. Then my own poems, and the recomposing of my lectures, besides a sermon, and the correction of some poems for a friend. I could have written them in half the time and with less expense of thought. I write not these things boastfully, but to excriminate myself. The truth is, you sat down and wrote; I used to saunter about and think what I should write. And we ought to appreciate our comparative industry by the quantum of mental exertion, not the particular mode of it--by the number of thoughts collected, not by the number of lines through which these thoughts are diffused. But I will suppose myself guilty of the charge. How would an honest man have reasoned in your letter and how acted? Thus: “Here is a man who has abandoned all for what I believe to be virtue. But he professed himself an imperfect being when he offered himself an associate to me. He confessed that all his valuable qualities were ‘sloth-jaundiced,’ and in his letters is a bitter self-accuser. This man did not deceive me. I accepted of him in the hopes of curing him, but I half despair of it. How shall I act? I will tell him fully and firmly, that much as I love him I love pantisocracy more, and if in a certain time I do not see this disqualifying propensity subdued, I must and will reject him.” Such would have been an honest man’s reasoning, such his conduct. Did _you_ act so? Did you even mention to me, “face to face,” my indolence as a motive for your recent conduct? Did you ever mention it in Peircefield Walks? and some time after, that night when you scattered some heart-chilling sentiments, and in great agitation I did ask you _solemnly_ whether you disapproved of anything in _my_ conduct, and you answered, “Nothing. I like you better now than at the commencement of our friendship!” an answer which so startled Sara, that she affronted you into angry silence by exclaiming, “What a story!” George Burnett, I believe, was present. This happened after all our lectures, after every one of those proofs of indolence on which you must found your charge. A charge which with what indignation did you receive when brought against me by Lovell! Yet _then_ there was some shew for it. I _had_ been criminally indolent. But since then I have exerted myself more than I could have supposed myself capable. Enough! I heard for the first time on Thursday that you were to set off for Lisbon on Saturday morning. It gives me great pain on many accounts, but principally that those moments which should be sacred to your affections may be disturbed by this long letter.

Southey, as far as happiness will be conducive to your virtue, which alone is final happiness, may you possess it! You have left a large void in my heart. I know no man big enough to fill it. Others I may love equally, and esteem equally, and some perhaps I may admire as much. But never do I expect to meet another man, who will make me unite attachment for his person with reverence for his heart and admiration of his genius. I did not only venerate you for your own virtues, I prized you as the sheet-anchor of mine; and even as a poet my vanity knew no keener gratification than your praise. But these things are passed by like as when a hungry man dreams, and lo! he feasteth, but he awakes and his soul is empty.

May God Almighty bless and preserve you! and may you live to know and feel and acknowledge that unless we accustom ourselves to meditate adoringly on Him, the source of all virtue, no virtue can be permanent.

Be assured that G. Burnett still loves you better than he can love any other man, and Sara would have you accept her love and blessing; accept it as the future husband of her best loved sister. Farewell!

S. T. COLERIDGE.

LIII. TO JOSIAH WADE.[104]

NOTTINGHAM, Wednesday morning, January 27, 1796.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--You will perceive by this letter that I have changed my route. From Birmingham, which I quitted on Friday last (four o’clock in the morning), I proceeded to Derby, stayed there till Monday morning, and am now at Nottingham. From Nottingham I go to Sheffield; from Sheffield to Manchester; from Manchester to Liverpool; from Liverpool to London; from London to Bristol. Ah, what a weary way! My poor crazy ark has been tossed to and fro on an ocean of business, and I long for the Mount Ararat on which it is to rest. At Birmingham I was extremely unwell.... Business succeeded very well there; about an hundred subscribers, I think. At Derby tolerably well. Mr. Strutt (the successor to Sir Richard Arkwright) tells me I may count on forty or fifty in Derby and round about.

Derby is full of curiosities, the cotton, the silk mills, Wright,[105] the painter, and Dr. Darwin, the everything, except the Christian![106] Dr. Darwin possesses, perhaps, a greater range of knowledge than any other man in Europe, and is the most inventive of philosophical men. He thinks in a _new_ train on all subjects except religion. He bantered me on the subject of religion. I heard all his arguments, and told him that it was infinitely consoling to me, to find that the arguments which so great a man adduced against the existence of a God and the evidences of revealed religion were such as had startled me at fifteen, but had become the objects of my smile at twenty. Not one new objection--not even an ingenious one. He boasted that he had never read one book in defence of _such stuff_, but he had read all the works of infidels! What should you think, Mr. Wade, of a man, who, having abused and ridiculed you, should openly declare that he had heard all that your _enemies_ had to say against you, but had scorned to enquire the truth from any of your own friends? Would you think him an honest man? I am sure you would not. Yet of such are all the infidels with whom I have met. They talk of a subject infinitely important, yet are proud to confess themselves profoundly ignorant of it. Dr. Darwin would have been ashamed to have rejected Hutton’s theory of the earth[107] without having minutely examined it; yet what is it to us _how_ the earth was made, a thing impossible to be known, and useless if known? This system the doctor did not reject without having severely studied it; but _all at once he makes up his mind_ on such important subjects, as whether we be the outcasts of a blind idiot called Nature, or the children of an all-wise and infinitely good God; whether we spend a few miserable years on this earth, and then sink into a clod of the valley, or only endure the anxieties of mortal life in order to fit us for the enjoyment of immortal happiness. These subjects are unworthy a philosopher’s investigation. He deems that there is a certain _self-evidence_ in infidelity, and becomes an atheist by intuition. Well did St. Paul say: “Ye have an evil _heart_ of unbelief.” I had an introductory letter from Mr. Strutt to a Mr. Fellowes of Nottingham. On Monday evening when I arrived I found there was a public dinner in honour of Mr. Fox’s birthday, and that Mr. Fellowes was present. It was a piece of famous good luck, and I seized it, waited on Mr. Fellowes, and was introduced to the company. On the right hand of the president whom should I see but an old College acquaintance? He hallooed out: “_Coleridge, by God!_” Mr. Wright, the president of the day, was his relation--a man of immense fortune. I dined at his house yesterday, and underwent the intolerable slavery of a dinner of three courses. We sat down at four o’clock, and it was six before the cloth was removed.

What lovely children Mr. Barr at Worcester has! After church, in the evening, they sat round and sang hymns so sweetly that they overwhelmed me. It was with great difficulty I abstained from weeping aloud--and the infant in Mrs. Barr’s arms leaned forwards, and stretched his little arms, and stared and smiled. It seemed a picture of Heaven, where the different orders of the blessed join different voices in one melodious allelujah; and the baby looked like a young spirit just that moment arrived in Heaven, startling at the seraphic songs, and seized at once with wonder and rapture.

My kindest remembrances to Mrs. Wade, and believe me, with gratitude and unfeigned friendship, your

S. T. COLERIDGE.

LIV. TO JOSEPH COTTLE.

REDCLIFF HILL, February 22, 1796.

MY DEAR SIR,--It is my duty and business to thank God for all his dispensations, and to believe them the best possible; but, indeed, I think I should have been more thankful, if he had made me a journeyman shoemaker, instead of an author by trade. I have left my friends; I have left plenty; I have left that ease which would have secured a literary immortality, and have enabled me to give the public works conceived in moments of inspiration, and polished with leisurely solicitude; and alas! for what have I left them? for ---- who deserted me in the hour of distress, and for a scheme of virtue impracticable and romantic! So I am forced to write for bread; write the flights of poetic enthusiasm, when every minute I am hearing a groan from my wife. Groans, and complaints, and sickness! The present hour I am in a quick-set hedge of embarrassment, and whichever way I turn a thorn runs into me! The future is cloud and thick darkness! Poverty, perhaps, and the thin faces of them that want bread, looking up to me! Nor is this all. My happiest moments for composition are broken in upon by the reflection that I must make haste. I am too late! I am already months behind! I have received my pay beforehand! Oh, wayward and desultory spirit of genius! Ill canst thou brook a taskmaster! The tenderest touch from the hand of obligation wounds thee like a scourge of scorpions.

I have been composing in the fields this morning, and came home to write down the first rude sheet of my preface, when I heard that your man had brought a note from you. I have not seen it, but I guess its contents. I am writing as fast as I can. Depend on it you shall not be out of pocket for me! I feel what I owe you, and independently of this I love you as a friend; indeed, so much, that I regret, seriously regret, that you have been my copyholder.

If I have written petulantly, forgive me. God knows I am sore all over. God bless you, and believe me that, setting gratitude aside, I love and esteem you, and have your interest at heart full as much as my own.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

LV. TO THOMAS POOLE.

March 30, 1796.

MY DEAR POOLE,--For the neglect in the transmission of “The Watchman,” you must blame George Burnett, who undertook the business. I however will myself see it sent this week with the preceding numbers. I am greatly obliged to you for your communication (on the Slave Trade in No. V.); it appears in this number, and I am anxious to receive more from you, and likewise to know what you _dislike_ in “The Watchman,” and what you like; but particularly the former. You have not given me your opinion of “The Plot Discovered.”[108]

Since last you saw me I have been well nigh distracted. The repeated and most injurious blunders of my printer out-of-doors, and Mrs. Coleridge’s increasing danger at home, added to the gloomy prospect of so many mouths to open and shut like puppets, as I move the string in the eating and drinking way--but why complain to you? Misery is an article with which every market is so glutted, that it can answer no one’s purpose to export it. _Alas! Alas! oh! ah! oh! oh!_ etc.

I have received many abusive letters, post-paid, thanks to the friendly malignants! But I am perfectly callous to disapprobation, except when it tends to lessen profit. There, indeed, I am all one tremble of sensibility, marriage having taught me the wonderful uses of that vulgar commodity, yclept _bread_. “The Watchman” succeeds so as to yield a _bread-and-cheesish_ profit. Mrs. Coleridge is recovering apace, and deeply regrets that she was deprived of seeing [you]. We are in our new house, where there is a bed at your service whenever you will please to delight us with a visit. Surely in spring you might force a few days into a sojourning with me.

Dear Poole, you have borne yourself towards me most kindly with respect to my epistolary ingratitude. But I know that you forbade yourself to feel resentment towards me because you had previously made my neglect ingratitude. A generous temper endures a great deal from one whom it has obliged deeply.

My poems are finished. I will send you two copies the moment they are published. In the third number of “The Watchman” there are a few lines entitled “The Hour when we shall meet again,” “_Dim hour that sleeps on pillowy clouds afar_,” which I think you will like. I have received two or three letters from different _anonymi_, requesting me to give more poetry. One of them writes:--

“Sir! I detest your principles; your prose I think very so-so; but your poetry is so _exquisitely_ beautiful, so _gorgeously_ sublime, that I take in your ‘Watchman’ solely on account of it. In justice therefore to me and some others of my stamp, I intreat you to give us more verse and less democratic scurrility. Your admirer,--not esteemer.”

Have you read over Dr. Lardner on the Logos? It is, I think, scarcely possible to read it and not be convinced.

I find that “The Watchman” comes more easy to me, so that I shall begin about my Christian Lectures. I will immediately order for you, unless you immediately countermand it, Count Rumford’s Essays; in No. V. of “The Watchman” you will see why. I have enclosed Dr. Beddoes’s late pamphlets, neither of them as yet published. The doctor sent them to me. I can get no one but the doctor to agree with me in my opinion that Burke’s “Letter to a Noble Lord”[109] is as contemptible in style as in matter--it is sad stuff.

My dutiful love to your excellent mother, whom, believe me, I think of frequently and with a pang of affection. God bless you. I’ll try and venture to scribble a line and a half every time the man goes with “The Watchman” to you.

N. B. The “Essay on Fasting”[110] I am ashamed of; but it is one of my misfortunes that I am obliged to publish _extempore_ as well as compose. God bless you,

and S. T. COLERIDGE.

LVI. TO THE SAME.

12th May, 1796.

Poole! The Spirit, who counts the throbbings of the solitary heart, knows that what my feelings ought to be, such they are. If it were in my power to give you anything which I have not already given, I should be oppressed by the letter now before me.[111] But no! I feel myself rich in being poor; and because I have nothing to bestow, I know how much I have bestowed. Perhaps I shall not make myself intelligible; but the strong and unmixed affection which I bear to you seems to exclude all emotions of gratitude, and renders even the principle of esteem latent and inert. Its presence is not perceptible, though its absence could not be endured.

Concerning the scheme itself, I am undetermined. Not that I am ashamed to receive--God forbid! I will make every possible exertion; my industry shall be at least commensurate with my learning and talents;--if these do not procure for me and mine the necessary comforts of life, I can receive as I would bestow, and, in either case--receiving or bestowing--be equally grateful to my Almighty Benefactor. I am undetermined, therefore--not because I receive with pain and reluctance, but--because I suspect that you attribute to others your own enthusiasm of benevolence; as if the sun should say, “With how rich a purple those opposite windows are burning!” But with God’s permission I shall talk with you on this subject. By the last page of No. X. you will perceive that I have this day dropped “The Watchman.” On Monday morning I will go _per_ caravan to Bridgewater, where, if you have a horse of tolerable meekness unemployed, you will let him meet me.

I should blame you for the exaggerated terms in which you have spoken of me in the Proposal, did I not perceive the motive. You wished to make it appear an offering--not a favour--and in excess of delicacy have, I fear, fallen into some grossness of flattery.

God bless you, my dear, very dear Friend. The widow[112] is calm, and amused with her beautiful infant. We are all become more religious than we were. God be ever praised for all things! Mrs. Coleridge begs her kind love to you. To your dear mother my filial respects.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

LVII. TO JOHN THELWALL.

May 13, 1796.

MY DEAR THELWALL,--You have given me the affection of a brother, and I repay you in kind. Your letters demand my friendship and deserve my esteem; the zeal with which you have attacked my supposed _delusions_ proves that you are deeply interested for _me_, and interested even to agitation for what you believe to be _truth_. You deem that I have treated “systems and opinions with the furious prejudices of the conventicle, and the illiberal dogmatism of the cynic;” that I have “layed about me on this side and on that with the sledge hammer of abuse.” I have, you think, imitated the “old sect in politics and morals” in their “outrageous violence,” and have sunk into the “clownish fierceness of intolerant prejudice.” I have “branded” the presumptuous children of scepticism “with vile epithets and hunted them down with abuse.” “_These be hard words, Citizen! and I will be bold to say they are not to be justified_” by the unfortunate page which has occasioned them. The only passage in it which appears _offensive_ (I am not now inquiring concerning the truth or falsehood of this or the remaining passages) is the following: “You have studied Mr. G.’s Essay on Politi[cal] Jus[tice]--but to think filial affection folly, gratitude a crime, marriage injustice, and the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes right and wise, may class you among the despisers of vulgar prejudices, but cannot increase the probability that you are a _patriot_. But you act up to your principles--so much the worse. Your principles are villainous ones. I would not entrust my wife or sister to you; think you I would entrust my country?” My dear Thelwall! how are these opinions connected with the conventicle more than with the Stoa, the Lyceum, or the grove of Academus? I do not perceive that to attack _adultery_ is more characteristic of _Christian_ prejudices than of the prejudices of the disciples of Aristotle, Zeno, or Socrates. In truth, the offensive sentence, “Your principles are villainous,” was suggested by the Peripatetic Sage who divides bad men into two classes. The first he calls “wet or intemperate sinners”--men who are hurried into vice by their appetites, but _acknowledge_ their actions to be vicious; these are reclaimable. The second class he names _dry_ villains--men who are not only vicious but who (the steams from the polluted heart rising up and gathering round the head) have brought themselves and others to believe that _vice_ is _virtue_. We mean these men when we say men of bad _principles_--_guilt_ is out of the question. I am a necessarian, and of course deny the possibility of it. However, a letter is not the place for reasoning. In some form or other, or by some channel or other, I shall publish my critique on the New Philosophy, and, I trust, shall demean myself not _ungently_, and disappoint your auguries.... “But, you cannot be a patriot unless you are a Christian.” Yes, Thelwall, the disciples of Lord Shaftesbury and Rousseau as well as of Jesus--but the man who suffers not his hopes to wander beyond the objects of sense will in general be _sensual_, and I again assert that a sensualist is not likely to be a patriot. Have I tried these opinions by the double test of argument and example? I _think_ so. The first would be too large a field, the second some following sentences of your letter forced me to.... _Gerrald_[113] you insinuate is an _atheist_. Was he so, when he offered those solemn prayers to God Almighty at the Scotch conventicle, and was this sincerity? But Dr. Darwin and (I suppose from his actions) Gerrald think sincerity a folly and therefore vicious. Your atheistic brethren square their moral systems exactly according to their inclinations. Gerrald and Dr. Darwin are polite and good-natured men, and willing to attain at good by attainable roads. They deem insincerity a necessary virtue in the present imperfect state of our nature. Godwin, whose very heart is cankered by the love of singularity, and who feels no disinclination to wound by abrupt harshness, pleads for absolute sincerity, because such a system gives him a frequent opportunity of indulging his misanthropy. Poor Williams,[114] the Welsh bard (a very meek man), brought the tear into my eye by a simple narration of the manner in which Godwin insulted him under the pretence of reproof, and Thomas Walker of Manchester told me that his indignation and contempt were never more powerfully excited than by an unfeeling and insolent speech of the said Godwin to the poor Welsh bard. Scott told me some shocking stories of Godwin. His base and anonymous attack on you is enough for me. At that time I had prepared a letter to him, which I was about to have sent to the “Morning Chronicle,” and I convinced Dr. Beddoes by passages from the “Tribune” of the calumnious nature of the attack. I was once and only once in company with Godwin. He appeared to me to possess neither the strength of intellect that discovers truth, nor the powers of imagination that decorate falsehood; he talked sophisms in jejune language. I like Holcroft a thousand times better, and think him a man of much greater ability. Fierce, hot, petulant, the very high priest of atheism, he hates God “with all his heart, with all his mind, with all his soul, and with all his strength.” Every man not an atheist is only not a fool. “Dr. Priestley? there is a _petitesse_ in his mind. Hartley? pshaw! _Godwin_, sir, is a thousand times a better metaphysician!” But this intolerance is founded on benevolence. (I had almost forgotten that horrible story about his son.)

* * * * *

On the subject of using sugar, etc., I will write you a long and serious letter. This grieves me more than you [imagine]. I hope I shall be able by severe and unadorned reasoning to convince you you are wrong.

Your remarks on my poems are, I think, just in general; there is a rage and affectation of double epithets. “Unshuddered, unaghasted” is, indeed, _truly_ ridiculous. But why so violent against _metaphysics_ in poetry? Is not Akenside’s a metaphysical poem? Perhaps you do not like Akenside? Well, but _I do_, and so do a great many others. Why pass an act of _uniformity_ against poets? I received a letter from a very sensible friend abusing love verses; another blaming the introduction of politics, “as wider from true poetry than the equator from the poles.” “Some for each” is my motto. That poetry pleases which interests. My religious poetry interests the _religious_, who read it with rapture. Why? Because it awakes in them all the associations connected with a love of future existence, etc. A very dear friend of mine,[115] who is, in my opinion, the best poet of the age (I will send you his poem when published), thinks that the lines from 364 to 375 and from 403 to 428 the best in the volume,--indeed, worth all the rest. And this man is a republican, and, at least, a _semi_-atheist. Why do you object to “shadowy of truth”? It is, I acknowledge, a Grecism, but, I think, an elegant one. Your remarks on the della-crusca place of emphasis are just in part. Where we wish to point out the _thing_, and the _quality_ is mentioned merely as a decoration, this mode of emphasis is indeed absurd; therefore, I very patiently give up to critical vengeance “_high_ tree,” “_sore_ wounds,” and “_rough_ rock;” but when you wish to dwell chiefly on the _quality_ rather than the _thing_, then this mode is proper, and, indeed, is used in common conversation. Who says good _man_? Therefore, “_big_ soul,” “_cold_ earth,” “_dark_ womb,” and “_flamy_ child” are all right, and introduce a variety into the versification, [which is] an advantage where you can attain it without any sacrifice of sense. As to harmony, it is all _association_. Milton is _harmonious_ to me, and I absolutely nauseate Darwin’s poems.

Yours affectionately, S. T. COLERIDGE.

JOHN THELWALL, Beaufort Buildings, Strand, London.

LVIII. TO THOMAS POOLE.

May 29, 1796.

MY DEAR POOLE,--This said caravan does not leave Bridgewater till nine. In the market place stands the hustings. I mounted it, and, pacing the boards, mused on bribery, false swearing, and other foibles of election times. I have wandered, too, by the river Parret, which looks as filthy as if all the parrots of the House of Commons had been washing their consciences therein. Dear gutter of Stowey![116] Were I transported to Italian plains, and lay by the side of the streamlet that murmured through an orange grove, I would think of thee, dear gutter of Stowey, and wish that I were poring on thee!

So much by way of rant. I have eaten three eggs, swallowed sundries of tea and bread and butter, purely for the purpose of amusing myself! I have seen the horse fed. When at Cross, where I shall dine, I shall think of your happy dinner, celebrated under the auspices of humble independence, supported by brotherly love! I am writing, you understand, for no worldly purpose but that of avoiding anxious thoughts. Apropos of honey-pie, Caligula or Elagabalus (I forget which) had a dish of nightingales’ tongues served up. What think you of the stings of bees? God bless you! My filial love to your mother, and fraternity to your sister. Tell Ellen Cruikshank that in my next parcel to you I will send my Haleswood poem to her. Heaven protect her and you and Sara and your mother and, like a bad shilling passed off between a handful of guineas,

Your affectionate friend and brother, S. T. COLERIDGE.

P. S.--Don’t forget to send by Milton [carrier] my old clothes, and linen _that once was clean, etcetera_. A pretty _periphrasis_ that!

LIX. TO JOHN THELWALL.

Wednesday, June 22, 1796.

DEAR THELWALL,--That I have not written you has been an act of self-denial, not indolence. I heard that you were electioneering, and would not be the occasion that any of your thoughts should diverge from that focus.

I wish very much to see you. Have you given up the idea of spending a few weeks or month at Bristol? You might be _making way_ in your review of Burke’s life and writings, and give us once or twice a week a lecture, which I doubt not would be crowded. We have a large and every way excellent library, to which I could make you a temporary subscriber, that is, I would get a subscription ticket transferred to you.

You are certainly well calculated for the review you meditate. Your answer to Burke is, I will not say, the best, for that would be no praise; it is certainly the only good one, and it is a very good one. In style and in _reflectiveness_ it is, I think, your _chef d’œuvre_. Yet the “Peripatetic”[117]--for which accept my thanks--pleased me more because it let me into your heart; the poetry is frequently _sweet_ and possesses the _fire_ of feeling, but not enough (I think) of the _light_ of fancy. I am sorry that you should entertain so degrading an opinion of me as to imagine that I _industriously_ collected anecdotes unfavourable to the characters of great men. No, Thelwall, but I cannot shut my ears, and I have never given a moment’s belief to any one of those stories unless when they were related to me at different times by professed democrats. My vice is of the opposite class, a precipitance in praise; witness my panegyric on Gerrald and that _black_ gentleman Margarot in the “Conciones,” and my foolish verses to Godwin in the “Morning Chronicle.”[118] At the same time, Thelwall, do not suppose that I admit your palliations. Doubtless I could fill a book with slanderous stories of _professed Christians_, but those very men would allow they were acting contrary to Christianity; but, I am afraid, an atheistic bad man manufactures his system of principles with an eye to his peculiar propensities, and makes his actions the criterion of what is virtuous, not virtue the criterion of his actions. Where the _disposition_ is not amiable, an acute understanding I deem no blessing. To the last sentence in your letter I subscribe fully and with all my inmost affections. “He who thinks and _feels_ will be virtuous; and he who is absorbed in self will be vicious, whatever maybe his speculative opinions.” Believe me, Thelwall, it is not his atheism that has prejudiced me against Godwin, but Godwin who has, perhaps, _prejudiced_ me against atheism. Let me see you--I already know a deist, and Calvinists, and Moravians whom I love and reverence--and I shall leap forwards to realise my _principles_ by _feeling_ love and honour for an atheist. By the bye, are you an atheist? For I was told that Hutton was an atheist, and procured his three massy quartos on the principle of knowledge in the hopes of finding some arguments in favor of atheism, but lo! I discovered him to be a profoundly pious deist,--“independent of fortune, satisfied with himself, pleased with his species, confident in his Creator.”

God bless you, my dear Thelwall! Believe me with high esteem and _anticipated_ tenderness,

Yours sincerely, S. T. COLERIDGE.

P. S. We have a hundred lovely scenes about Bristol, which would make you exclaim, O admirable _Nature_! and me, O Gracious _God_!

LX. TO THOMAS POOLE.

Saturday, September 24, 1796.

MY DEAR, VERY DEAR POOLE,--The heart thoroughly penetrated with the flame of virtuous friendship is in a state of glory; but lest it should be exalted above measure there is given it a thorn in the flesh. I mean that when the friendship of any person forms an essential part of a man’s happiness, he will at times be pestered by the little jealousies and solicitudes of imbecile humanity. Since we last parted I have been gloomily dreaming that you did not leave me so affectionately as you were wont to do. Pardon this littleness of heart, and do not think the worse of me for it. Indeed, my soul seems so mantled and wrapped around by your love and esteem, that even a dream of losing but the smallest fragment of it makes me shiver, as though some tender part of my nature were left uncovered in nakedness.

Last week I received a letter from Lloyd, informing me that his parents had given their joyful concurrence to his residence with me; but that, if it were possible that I could be absent for three or four days, his father wished particularly to see me. I consulted Mrs. Coleridge, who advised me to go.... Accordingly on Saturday night I went by the mail to Birmingham and was introduced to the father, who is a mild man, very liberal in his ideas, and in religion _an allegorizing Quaker_. I mean that all the apparently irrational path of his sect he allegorizes into significations, which for the most part you or I might assent to. We became well acquainted, and he expressed himself “thankful to heaven that his son was about to be with me.” He said he would write to me concerning money matters after his son had been some time under my roof.

On Tuesday morning I was surprised by a letter from Mr. Maurice, our medical attendant, informing me that Mrs. Coleridge was delivered on Monday, September 19, 1796, half past two in the morning, of a SON, and that both she and the child were uncommonly well. I was quite annihilated with the suddenness of the information, and retired to my own room to address myself to my Maker, but I could only offer up to Him the silence of stupefied feelings. I hastened home, and Charles Lloyd returned with me. When I first saw the child,[119] I did not feel that thrill and overflowing of affection which I expected. I looked on it with a melancholy gaze; my mind was intensely contemplative and my heart only sad. But when two hours after I saw it at the bosom of its mother, on her arm, and her eye tearful and watching its little features, then I was thrilled and melted, and gave it the KISS of a _father_.... The baby seems strong, and the old nurse has over-persuaded my wife to discover a likeness of me in its face--no great compliment to me, for, in truth, I have seen handsomer babies in my lifetime. Its name is David Hartley Coleridge. I hope that ere he be a man, if God destines him for continuance in this life, his head will be convinced of, and his heart saturated with, the truths so ably supported by that great master of _Christian_ Philosophy.

Charles Lloyd wins upon me hourly; his heart is uncommonly pure, his affection delicate, and his benevolence enlivened but not sicklied by sensibility. He is assuredly a man of great genius; but it must be in _tête-à-tête_ with one whom he loves and esteems that his colloquial powers open; and this arises not from reserve or want of simplicity, but from having been placed in situations where for years together he met with no congenial minds, and where the contrariety of his thoughts and notions to the thoughts and notions of those around him induced the necessity of habitually suppressing his feelings. His joy and gratitude to Heaven for the circumstance of his domestication with me I can scarcely describe to you; and I believe that his fixed plans are of being always with me. His father told me that if he saw that his son had formed habits of severe economy he should not insist upon his adopting any profession; as then his fair share of his (the father’s) wealth would be sufficient for him.

My dearest Poole, can you conveniently receive us in the course of a week? We can both sleep in one bed, which we do now. And I have much, very much to say to you and consult with you about, for my heart is heavy respecting Derby,[120] and my feelings are so dim and huddled that though I can, I am sure, communicate them to you by my looks and broken sentences, I scarce know how to convey them in a letter. And Charles Lloyd wishes much to know you personally. I shall write on the other side of the paper two of Charles Lloyd’s sonnets, which he wrote in one evening at Birmingham. The latter of them alludes to the conviction of the truth of Christianity, which he had received from me, for he had been, if not a deist, yet quite a sceptic.

Let me hear from you by post immediately; and give my kind love to that young man with the soul-beaming face,[121] which I recollect much better than I do his name.

God bless you, my dear friend.

Believe me, with deep affection, your S. T. COLERIDGE.

LXI. TO CHARLES LAMB.[122]

[September 28, 1796.]

Your letter, my friend, struck me with a mighty horror. It rushed upon me and stupefied my feelings. You bid me write you a religious letter. I am not a man who would attempt to insult the greatness of your anguish by any other consolation. Heaven knows that in the easiest fortunes there is much dissatisfaction and weariness of spirit; much that calls for the exercise of patience and resignation; but in storms like these, that shake the dwelling and make the heart tremble, there is no middle way between despair and the yielding up of the whole spirit unto the guidance of faith. And surely it is a matter of joy that your faith in Jesus has been preserved; the Comforter that should relieve you is not far from you. But as you are a Christian, in the name of that Saviour, who was filled with bitterness and made drunken with wormwood, I conjure you to have recourse in frequent prayer to “his God and your God;” the God of mercies, and father of all comfort. Your poor father is, I hope, almost senseless of the calamity; the unconscious instrument of Divine Providence knows it not, and your mother is in heaven. It is sweet to be roused from a frightful dream by the song of birds and the gladsome rays of the morning. Ah, how infinitely more sweet to be awakened from the blackness and amazement of a sudden horror by the glories of God manifest and the hallelujahs of angels.

As to what regards yourself, I approve altogether of your abandoning what you justly call vanities. I look upon you as a man called by sorrow and anguish and a strange desolation of hopes into quietness, and a soul set apart and made peculiar to God! We cannot arrive at any portion of heavenly bliss without in some measure imitating Christ; and they arrive at the largest inheritance who imitate the most difficult parts of his character, and, bowed down and crushed underfoot, cry in fulness of faith, “Father, thy will be done.”

I wish above measure to have you for a little while here; no visitants shall blow on the nakedness of your feelings; you shall be quiet, and your spirit may be healed. I see no possible objection, unless your father’s helplessness prevent you, and unless you are necessary to him. If this be not the case, I charge you write me that you will come.

I charge you, my dearest friend, not to dare to encourage gloom or despair. You are a temporary sharer in human miseries that you may be an eternal partaker of the Divine nature. I charge you, if by any means it be possible, come to me.

I remain your affectionate S. T. COLERIDGE.

LXII. TO THOMAS POOLE.

Saturday night, November 5, 1796.

Thanks, my heart’s warm thanks to you, my beloved friend, for your tender letter! Indeed, I did not deserve so kind a one; but by this time you have received my last.

To live in a beautiful country, and to enure myself as much as possible to the labour of the field, have been for this year past my dream of the day, my sigh at midnight. But to enjoy these blessings _near_ you, to see you daily, to tell you all my thoughts in their first birth, and to hear yours, to be mingling identities with you as it were,--the vision-wearing fancy has indeed often pictured such things, but _hope_ never dared whisper a promise. Disappointment! Disappointment! dash not from my trembling hand the bowl which almost touches my lips. Envy me not this immortal draught, and I will forgive thee all thy persecutions. Forgive thee! Impious! _I will bless thee_, black-vested minister of optimism, stern pioneer of happiness! Thou hast been “_the cloud_” before me from the day that I left the flesh-pots of Egypt, and was led through the way of a wilderness--the cloud that hast been guiding me to a land flowing with milk and honey--the milk of innocence, the honey of friendship!

I wanted such a letter as yours, for I am very unwell. On Wednesday night I was seized with an intolerable pain from my right temple to the tip of my right shoulder, including my right eye, cheek, jaw, and that side of the throat. I was nearly frantic, and ran about the house naked, endeavouring by every means to excite sensations in different parts of my body, and so to weaken the enemy by creating division. It continued from one in the morning till half past five, and left me pale and fainting. It came on fitfully, but not so violently, several times on Thursday, and began severer threats towards night; but I took between sixty and seventy drops of laudanum,[123] and _sopped_ the Cerberus, just as his mouth began to open. On Friday it only _niggled_, as if the chief had departed from a conquered place, and merely left a small garrison behind, or as if he had evacuated the Corsica,[124] and a few straggling pains only remained. But _this morning_ he returned in full force, and his name is Legion. Giant-fiend of a hundred hands, with a shower of arrowy death-pangs he transpierced me, and then he became a wolf, and lay a-gnawing at my bones! I am not mad, most noble Festus, but in sober sadness I have suffered this day more bodily pain than I had before a conception of. My right cheek has certainly been placed with admirable exactness under the focus of some invisible burning-glass, which concentrated all the rays of a Tartarean sun. My medical attendant decides it to be altogether nervous, and that it originates either in severe application, or excessive anxiety. My beloved Poole! in excessive anxiety, I believe it might originate. I have a blister under my right ear, and I take twenty-five drops of laudanum every five hours, the ease and _spirits_ gained by which have enabled me to write you this flighty but not exaggerated account. With a gloomy wantonness of imagination I had been coquetting with the hideous _possibles_ of disappointment. I drank fears like wormwood, yea, made myself drunken with bitterness; for my ever-shaping and distrustful mind still mingled gall-drops, till out of the cup of hope I almost _poisoned_ myself with despair.

Your letter is dated November 2d; I wrote to you November 1st. Your sister was married on that day; and on that day several times I felt my heart overflowed with such tenderness for her as made me repeatedly ejaculate prayers in her behalf. Such things are strange. It may be superstitious to think about such correspondences; but it is a superstition which softens the heart and leads to no evil. We will call on your dear sister as soon as I am quite well, and in the mean time I will write a few lines to her.

I am anxious beyond measure to be in the country as soon as possible. I would it were possible to get a temporary residence till Adscombe is ready for us. I would that it could be that we could have three rooms in Bill Poole’s large house for the winter. Will you try to look out for a fit servant for us--simple of heart, physiognomically handsome, and scientific in vaccimulgence? That last word is a new one, but soft in sound and full of expression. Vaccimulgence! I am pleased with the word. Write to me all things about yourself. Where I cannot advise I can condole and communicate, which doubles joy, halves sorrow.

Tell me whether you think it at all possible to make any terms with William Poole. You know I would not wish to touch with the edge of the nail of my great toe the line which should be but half a barley-corn out of the niche of the most trembling delicacy. I will write Cruikshank to-morrow, if God permit me.

God bless and protect you, friend, brother, beloved!

S. T. COLERIDGE.

Sara’s best love, and Lloyd’s. David Hartley is well, saving that he is sometimes inspired by the god Æolus, and like Isaiah, “his bowels sound like an harp.” My filial love to your dear mother. Love to Ward. Little Tommy, I often think of thee.

LXIII. TO THE SAME.

Monday night, November 7, 1796.

MY DEAREST POOLE,--I wrote you on Saturday night under the immediate inspiration of laudanum, and wrote you a flighty letter, but yet one most accurately descriptive both of facts and feelings. Since then my pains have been lessening, and the greater part of this day I have enjoyed perfect ease, only I am totally inappetent of food, and languid, even to an inward perishing.

I wrote John Cruikshank this morning, and this moment I have received a letter from him. My letter written before the receipt of his contains everything I would write in answer to it, and I do not like to write to him superfluously, lest I should break in on his domestic terrors and solitary broodings with regard to Anna Cruikshank.[125] May the Father and lover of the meek preserve that meek woman, and give her a safe and joyful deliverance!

I wrote this morning a short note of congratulatory kindliness to your sister, and shall be eager to call on her, when _Legion_ has been thoroughly exorcised from my temple and cheeks. Tell Cruikshank that I have received his letter, and thank him for it.

A few lines in your last letter betokened, I thought, a wounded spirit. Let me know the particulars, my beloved friend. I shall forget and lose my own anxieties while I am healing yours with cheerings of sympathy.

I met with the following sonnet in some very dull poems, among which it shone like a solitary star when the night is dark, and _one_ little space of blue uninvaded by the floating blackness, or, if a _terrestrial_ simile be required, like a red carbuncle on a negro’s nose. From the languor and exhaustion to which pain and my frequent doses of laudanum have reduced me, it suited the feeble temper of [my] mind, and I have transcribed it on the other page. I amused myself the other day (having some _paper_ at the printer’s which I could employ no other way) in selecting twenty-eight sonnets,[126] to bind up with Bowles’s. I charge sixpence for them, and have sent you five to dispose of. I have only printed two hundred, as my paper held out to no more; and dispose of them privately, just enough to pay the printing. The essay which I have written at the beginning I like.... I have likewise sent you Burke’s pamphlet which was given to me; it has all his excellences without any of his faults. This parcel I send to-morrow morning, enclosed in a parcel to Bill Poole of Thurston.

God love you, my affectionate brother, and your affectionate

S. T. COLERIDGE.

SONNET.

With passive joy the moment I survey When welcome Death shall set my spirit free. My soul! the prospect brings no fear to thee, But soothing Fancy rises to pourtray The dear and parting words my Friends will say: With secret Pride their heaving Breast I see, And count the sorrows that will flow for me. And now I hear my lingering knell decay And mark the Hearse! Methinks, with moisten’d eye, CLARA beholds the sad Procession move That bears me to the Resting-place of Care, And sighs, “Poor youth! thy Bosom well could love, And well thy Numbers picture Love’s despair.” Vain Dreams! yet such as make it sweet to die.

LXIV. TO JOHN THELWALL.

Saturday, November 19, [1796]. Oxford Street, Bristol.

MY DEAR THELWALL,--Ah me! literary adventure is but bread and cheese by chance. I keenly sympathise with you. Sympathy, the only poor consolation I can offer you. Can no plan be suggested?... Of course you have read the “Joan of Arc.”[127] Homer is the poet for the warrior, Milton for the religionist, Tasso for women, Robert Southey for the patriot. The first and fourth books of the “Joan of Arc” are to me more interesting than the same number of lines in any poem whatever. But you and I, my dear Thelwall, hold different creeds in poetry as well as religion. _N’importe!_ By the bye, of your works I have now all, except your “Essay on Animal Vitality” which I never had, and your _Poems_, which I bought on their first publication, and lost them. From these poems I should have supposed our poetical tastes more nearly alike than, I find, they are. The poem on the Sols [?] flashes genius through Strophe I, Antistrophe I, and Epode I. The rest I do not perhaps understand, only I love these two lines:--

“Yet sure the verse that shews the friendly mind To Friendship’s ear not harshly flows.”

Your larger _narrative_ affected me greatly. It is admirably written, and displays strong sense animated by feeling, and illumined by imagination, and neither in the thoughts nor rhythm does it encroach on poetry.

There have been two poems of mine in the new “Monthly Magazine,”[128] with my name; indeed, I make it a scruple of conscience never to publish anything, however trifling, without it. Did you like them? The first was written at the desire of a beautiful little aristocrat; consider it therefore as a lady’s poem. Bowles (the bard of my idolatry) has written a poem lately without plan or meaning, but the component parts are divine. It is entitled “Hope, an Allegorical Sketch.” I will copy two of the stanzas, which must be peculiarly interesting to you, virtuous high-treasonist, and your friends the democrats.

“But see, as one awaked from deadly trance, With hollow and dim eyes, and stony stare, Captivity with faltering step advance! Dripping and knotted was her coal-black hair: For she had long been hid, as in the grave; No sounds the silence of her prison broke, Nor one companion had she in her cave Save Terror’s dismal shape, that no word spoke, But to a stony coffin on the floor With lean and hideous finger pointed evermore.

“The lark’s shrill song, the early village chime, The upland echo of the winding horn, The far-heard clock that spoke the passing time, Had never pierced her solitude forlorn: At length released from the deep dungeon’s gloom She feels the fragrance of the vernal gale, She sees more sweet the living landscape bloom, And while she listens to Hope’s tender tale, She thinks her long-lost friends shall bless her sight, And almost faints for joy amidst the broad daylight.”

The last line is exquisite.

Your portrait of yourself interested me. As to me, my face, unless when animated by immediate eloquence, expresses great sloth, and great, indeed, almost idiotic good-nature. ’Tis a mere carcass of a face;[129] fat, flabby, and expressive chiefly of inexpression. Yet I am told that my eyes, eyebrows, and forehead are physiognomically good; but of this the deponent knoweth not. As to my shape, ’tis a good shape enough if measured, but my gait is awkward, and the walk of the whole man indicates _indolence capable of energies_. I am, and ever have been, a great reader, and have read almost everything--a library cormorant. I am _deep_ in all out of the way books, whether of the monkish times, or of the puritanical era. I have read and digested most of the historical writers; but I do not _like_ history. Metaphysics and poetry and “facts of mind,” that is, accounts of all the strange phantasms that ever possessed “your philosophy;” dreamers, from Thoth the Egyptian to Taylor the English pagan, are my darling studies. In short, I seldom read except to amuse myself, and I am almost always reading. Of useful knowledge, I am a so-so chemist, and I love chemistry. All else is _blank_; but I _will_ be (please God) an horticulturalist and a farmer. I compose very little, and I absolutely hate composition, and such is my dislike that even a sense of duty is sometimes too weak to overpower it.

I cannot breathe through my nose, so my mouth, with sensual thick lips, is almost always open. In conversation I am impassioned, and oppose what I deem error with an eagerness which is often mistaken for personal asperity; but I am ever so swallowed up in the _thing_ that I perfectly forget my _opponent_. Such am I. I am just going to read Dupuis’ twelve octavos,[130] which I have got from London. I shall read only one octavo a week, for I cannot _speak_ French at all and I read it slowly.

My wife is well and desires to be remembered to you and your _Stella_ and little ones. N. B. Stella (among the Romans) was a man’s name. All the _classics_ are against you; but our Swift, I suppose, is authority for this unsexing.

Write on the receipt of this, and believe me as ever, with affectionate esteem,

Your sincere friend, S. T. COLERIDGE.

P. S. I have enclosed a five-guinea note. The five shillings over please to lay out for me thus. In White’s (of Fleet Street or the Strand, I forget which--O! the Strand I believe, but I don’t know which), well, in White’s catalogue are the following books:--

4674. Iamblichus,[131] Proclus, Porphyrius, etc., one shilling and sixpence, one little volume.

4686. Juliani Opera, three shillings: which two books you will be so kind as to purchase for me, and send down with the twenty-five pamphlets. But if they should unfortunately be sold, in the same catalogue are:--

2109. Juliani Opera, 12s. 6d.

676. Iamblichus de Mysteriis, 10s. 6d.

2681. Sidonius Apollinaris, 6s.

And in the catalogue of Robson, the bookseller in New Bond Street, Plotini Opera, a Ficino, £1.1.0, making altogether £2.10.0.

If you can get the two former little books, costing only four and sixpence, I will rest content with them; if they are gone, be so kind as to purchase for me the others I mentioned to you, amounting to two pounds, ten shillings; and, as in the course of next week I shall send a small parcel of books and manuscripts to my very dear Charles Lamb of the India House, I shall be enabled to convey the money to you in a letter, which he will leave at your house. I make no apology for this commission, because I feel (to use a vulgar phrase) that I would do as much for you. P. P. S. Can you buy them time enough to send down with your pamphlets? If not, make a parcel _per se_. I hope your hurts from the fall are not serious; you have given a _proof_ now that you are no _Ippokrite_, but I forgot that you are not a Greekist, and perchance you hate puns; but, in Greek, _Krites_ signifies a judge and _hippos_ a horse. Hippocrite, therefore, may mean a _judge of horses_. My dear fellow, I laugh more and talk more nonsense in a week than [most] other people do in a year. Farewell.

JOHN THELWALL, Beaufort Buildings, Strand, London.

LXV. TO THOMAS POOLE.[132]

Sunday morning, December 11, 1796.

MY BELOVED POOLE,--The sight of your villainous hand-scrawl was a great comfort to me. How have you been diverted in London? What of the theatres? And how found you your old friends? I dined with Mr. King yesterday week. He is _quantum suff_: a pleasant man, and (my wife says) very handsome. Hymen lies in the arms of Hygeia, if one may judge by your sister; she looks remarkably well! But has she not caught some complaint in _the head_? Some _scurfy_ disorder? For her _hair_ was filled with an odious white Dandruff. (“N. B. Nothing but powder,” Mrs. King.) About myself, I have so much to say that I really can say nothing. I mean to work _very hard_--as Cook, Butler, Scullion, Shoe-cleaner, occasional Nurse, Gardener, Hind, Pig-protector, Chaplain, Secretary, Poet, Reviewer, and _omnium-botherum_ shilling-Scavenger. In other words, I shall keep no servant, and will cultivate my land-acre and my wise-acres, as well as I can. The motives which led to this determination are numerous and weighty; I have thought much and calmly, and calculated time and money with unexceptionable accuracy; and at length determined not to take the charge of Charles Lloyd’s mind on me. Poor fellow! he still hopes to live with me--is now at Birmingham. I wish that little cottage by the roadside were gettable? That with about two or three rooms--it would quite do for us, as we shall occupy only _two rooms_. I will write more fully on the receipt of yours. God love you and

S. T. COLERIDGE.

LXVI. TO THE SAME.

December 12, 1796.

You tell me, my dear Poole, that my residence near you would give you great pleasure, and I am sure that if you had any objections on your own account to my settling near Stowey you would have mentioned them to me. Relying on this, I assure you that a disappointment would try my philosophy. Your letter did indeed give me unexpected and most acute pain. I will make the cottage do. We want but three rooms. If Cruikshank have promised more than his circumstances enable him to perform, I am sure that I can get the other purchased by my friends in Bristol. I mean, the place at Adscombe. I wrote him pressingly on this head some ten days ago; but he has returned me no answer. Lloyd has obtained his father’s permission and will return to me. He is willing to be his own servant. As to Acton, ’tis out of the question. In Bristol I have Cottle and Estlin (for Mr. Wade is going away) willing and eager to serve me; but how they can serve me more effectually at Acton than at Stowey, I cannot divine. If I live at Stowey, you indeed _can_ serve me effectually, by assisting me in the acquirement of agricultural practice. If you can instruct me to manage an acre and a half of land, and to raise in it, with my own hands, all kinds of vegetables and grain, enough for myself and my wife and sufficient to feed a pig or two with the refuse, I hope that you will have served me _most_ effectually by placing me out of the necessity of being served. I receive about forty guineas yearly from the “Critical Review” and the new “Monthly Magazine.” It is hard if by my greater works I do not get twenty more. I know how little the human mind requires when it is tranquil, and in proportion as I should find it difficult to simplify my wants it becomes my duty to simplify them. For there must be a vice in my nature, which woe be to me if I do not cure. The less meat I eat the more healthy I am; and strong liquors of any kind always and perceptibly injure me. Sixteen shillings would cover all the weekly expenses of my wife, infant, and myself. This I say from my wife’s own calculation.

But whence this sudden revolution in your opinions, my dear Poole? You saw the cottage that was to be our temporary residence, and thought we might be _happy_ in it, and now you hurry to tell me that we shall not even be _comfortable_ in it. You tell me I shall be “too far from my _friends_,” that is, Cottle and Estlin, for I have no other in Bristol. In the name of Heaven, _what can_ Cottle or Estlin [do] for me? They do nothing who do not teach me how to be independent of any except the Almighty Dispenser of sickness and health. And “too far from the press.” With the printing of the review and the magazine I have no concern; and, if I publish any work on my own account, I will send a fair and faultless copy, and Cottle promises to correct the press for me. Mr. King’s family may be very worthy sort of people, for aught I know; but assuredly I can employ my time wiselier than to gabble with my tongue to beings with whom neither my head nor heart can commune. My habits and feelings have suffered a total alteration. I _hate_ company except of my dearest friends, and systematically avoid it; and when in it keep silence as far as social humanity will permit me. Lloyd’s father, in a letter to me yesterday, enquired how I should live without any companions. I answered him not an hour before I received your letter:--

“I shall have six companions: My Sara, my babe, my own shaping and disquisitive mind, my books, my beloved friend Thomas Poole, and lastly, Nature looking at me with a thousand looks of beauty, and speaking to me in a thousand melodies of love. If I were capable of being tired with all these, I should then detect a vice in my nature, and would fly to habitual solitude to eradicate it.”

Yes, my friend, while I opened your letter my heart was glowing with enthusiasm towards you. How little did I expect that I should find you earnestly and vehemently persuading me to prefer Acton to Stowey, and in return for the loss of your society recommending _Mr. King’s_ family as “very pleasant neighbours.” Neighbours! Can mere juxtaposition form a neighbourhood? As well should the louse in my head call himself my friend, and the flea in my bosom style herself my love!

On Wednesday week we must leave our house, so that if you continue to dissuade me from settling near Stowey I scarcely know what I shall do. Surely, my beloved friend, there must be some reason which you have not yet told me, which urged you to send this hasty and heart-chilling letter. I suspect that something has passed between your sister and dear mother (in whose illness I sincerely sympathise with you).

I have never considered my settlement at Stowey in any other relation than its advantages to myself, and they would be great indeed. My objects (assuredly wise ones) were to learn agriculture (and where should I get instructed except at Stowey?) and to be where I can communicate in a literary way. I must conclude. I pray you let me hear from you immediately. God bless you and

S. T. COLERIDGE.

LXVII. TO THE SAME.

Monday night.

I wrote the former letter immediately on receipt of yours, in the first flutter of agitation. The tumult of my spirits has now subsided, but the Damp struck into my very heart; and there I feel it. O my God! my God! where am I to find rest? Disappointment follows disappointment, and Hope seems given me merely to prevent my becoming callous to Misery. Now I know not where to turn myself. I was on my way to the City Library, and wrote an answer to it there. Since I have returned I have been poring into a book, as a shew for not looking at my wife and the baby. By God, I dare not look at them. Acton! The very name makes me grind my teeth! What am I to do there?

“You will have a good garden; you may, I doubt not, have ground.” But am I not ignorant as a child of everything that concerns the garden and the ground? and shall I have one human being there who will instruct me? The House too--what should I do with it? We want but two rooms, or three at the furthest. And the country around is intolerably flat. I would as soon live on the banks of a Dutch canal! And no one human being near me for whom I should, or could, care a rush! No one walk where the beauties of nature might endear solitude to me! There is one Ghost that I _am_ afraid of; with that I should be perpetually haunted in this same cursed Acton--the hideous Ghost of departed Hope. O Poole! how could _you_ make such a proposal to me? I have compelled myself to reperuse your letter, if by any means I may be able to penetrate into your motives. I find three reasons assigned for my not settling at Stowey. The first, the distance from my friends and the Press. This I answered in the former letter. As to my friends, what can they do for me? And as to the Press, even if Cottle had not promised to correct it for me, yet I might as well be fifty miles from it as twelve, for any purpose of correcting. Secondly, the expense of moving. Well, but I must move to Acton, and what will the difference be? Perhaps three guineas.... I would give three guineas that you had not assigned this reason. Thirdly, the wretchedness of that cottage, which alone we can get. But surely, in the house which I saw, _two_ rooms may be found, which, by a little green list and a carpet, and a slight alteration in the fireplace, may be made to exclude the cold: and this is all we want. Besides, it will be but for a while. If Cruikshank cannot buy and repair Adscombe, I have no doubt that my friends here and at Birmingham would, some of them, purchase it. So much for the reasons: but these cannot be the real reasons. I was with you for a week, and then we talked over the whole scheme, and you approved of it, and I gave up Derby. More than nine weeks have elapsed since then, and you saw and examined the cottage, and you knew every other of these reasons, if reasons they can be called. Surely, surely, my friend, something has occurred which you have not mentioned to me. Your mother has manifested a strong dislike to our living near you--or something or other; for the reasons you have assigned tell me nothing except that there are reasons which you have not assigned.

Pardon, if I write vehemently. I meant to have written calmly; but bitterness of soul came upon me. Mrs. Coleridge has observed the workings of my face while I have been writing, and is entreating to know what is the matter. I dread to show her your letter. I dread it. My God! my God! What if she should dare to think that my most beloved friend has grown cold towards me!

Tuesday morning, 11 o’clock.--After an unquiet and almost sleepless night, I resume my pen. As the sentiments over leaf came into my heart, I will not suppress them. I would keep a letter by me which I wrote to a mere acquaintance, lest anything unwise should be found in it; but my friend ought to know not only what my sentiments are, but what my feelings were.

I am, indeed, perplexed and cast down. My first plan, you know, was this--My family was to have consisted of Charles Lloyd, my wife and wife’s mother, my infant, the servant, and myself.

My means of maintaining them--Eighty pounds a year from Charles Lloyd, and forty from the Review and Magazine. My time was to have been divided into four parts: 1. Three hours after breakfast to studies with C. L. 2. The remaining hours till dinner to our garden. 3. From after dinner till tea, to letter-writing and domestic quietness. 4. From tea till prayer-time to the reviews, magazines, and other literary labours.

In this plan I calculated nothing on my garden but amusement. In the mean time I heard from Birmingham that Lloyd’s father had declared that he should insist on his son’s returning to him at the close of a twelvemonth. What am I to do then? I shall be again afloat on the wide sea, unpiloted and unprovisioned. I determined to devote _my whole day_ to the acquirement of practical horticulture, to part with Lloyd immediately, and live without a servant. Lloyd intreated me to give up the Review and Magazine, and devote the evenings to him, but this would be to give up a permanent for a temporary situation, and after subtracting £40 from C. Ll.’s £80 in return for the Review business, and then calculating the expense of a servant, a less severe mode of general living, and Lloyd’s own board and lodging, the remaining £40 would make but a poor figure. And what was I to do at the end of a twelvemonth? In the mean time Mrs. Fricker’s son could not be got out as an apprentice--he was too young, and premiumless, and no one would take him; and the old lady herself manifested a great aversion to leaving Bristol. I recurred therefore to my first promise of allowing her £20 a year; but all her furniture must of course be returned, and enough only remains to furnish one bedroom and a kitchen-parlour.

If Charles Lloyd and the servant went with me I must have bought new furniture to the amount of £40 or £50, which, if not Impossibility in person, was Impossibility’s first cousin. We determined to live by ourselves. We arranged our time, money, and employments. We found it not only practicable _but easy_; and Mrs. Coleridge entered with enthusiasm into the scheme.

To Mrs. Coleridge the nursing and sewing only would have belonged; the rest I took upon myself, and since our resolution have been learning the practice. With only two rooms and two people--their wants severely simple--no great labour can there be in their waiting upon themselves. Our washing we should put out. I should have devoted my whole head, heart, and body to my acre and a half of garden land, and my evenings to literature. Mr. and Mrs. Estlin approved, admired, and applauded the scheme, and thought it not only highly virtuous, but highly prudent. In the course of a year and a half, I doubt not that I should feel myself independent, for my bodily strength would have increased, and I should have been weaned from animal food, so as never to touch it but once a week; and there can be no shadow of a doubt that an acre and a half of land, divided properly, and managed properly, would maintain a small family in _everything_ but clothes and rent. What had I to ask of my friends? Not money; for a temporary relief of my want is nothing, removes no gnawing of anxiety, and debases the dignity of man. Not their interest. What could their interest (supposing they had any) do for me? I can accept no place in state, church, or dissenting meeting. Nothing remains possible but a school, or writer to a newspaper, or my present plan. I could not love the man who advised me to keep a school, or write for a newspaper. He must have a hard heart. What then could I ask of my friends? What of Mr. Wade? Nothing. What of Mr. Cottle? Nothing.... What of Thomas Poole? O! a great deal. Instruction, daily advice, society--everything necessary to my feelings and the realization of my innocent independence. You know it would be impossible for me to learn _everything_ myself. To pass across my garden once or twice a day, for five minutes, to set me right, and cheer me with the sight of a friend’s face, would be more to me than hundreds. Your letter was not a kind one. One week only and I must leave my house, and yet in one week you advise me to alter the plan which I had been three months framing, and in which you must have known by the letters I wrote you, during my illness, that I was interested even to an excess and violence of Hope. And to abandon this plan for darkness and a renewal of anxieties which might be fatal to me! Not one word have you mentioned how I am to live, or even exist, supposing I were to go to Acton. Surely, surely, you do not advise me to lean with the whole weight of my necessities on the Press? Ghosts indeed! I should be haunted with ghosts enough--the ghosts of Otway and Chatterton, and the phantasms of a wife broken-hearted, and a hunger-bitten baby! O Thomas Poole! Thomas Poole! if you did but know what a Father and a Husband must feel who toils with his brain for uncertain bread! I dare not think of it. The evil face of Frenzy looks at me. The husbandman puts his seed in the ground, and the goodness, power, and wisdom of God have pledged themselves that he shall have bread, and health, and quietness in return for industry, and simplicity of wants and innocence. The AUTHOR scatters his seed--with aching head, and wasted health, and all the heart-leapings of anxiety; and the follies, the vices, and the fickleness of man promise him printers’ bills and the Debtors’ Side of Newgate as full and sufficient payment.

Charles Lloyd is at Birmingham. I hear from him daily. In his yesterday’s letter he says: “My dearest friend, everything seems clearing around me. My friends enter fully into my views. They seem altogether to have abandoned any ambitious views on my account. My health has been very good since I left you; and I own I look forward with more pleasure than ever to a permanent connection with you. Hitherto I could only look forward to the pleasures of a year. All beyond was dark and uncertain. My father now completely acquiesces in my abandoning the prospect of any profession or trade. If God grant me health, there now remains no obstacle to a completion of my most sanguine wishes.” Charles Lloyd will furnish his own room, and feels it his duty to be in all things his own servant. He will put up a press-bed, so that one room will be his bedchamber and parlour; and I shall settle with him the hours and seasons of our being together, and the hours and seasons of our being apart. But I shall rely on him for nothing except his own maintenance.

As to the poems, they are Cottle’s property, not mine. There is no obstacle from me--no new poems intended to be put in the volume, except the “Visions of the Maid of Orleans.”... But literature, though I shall never abandon it, will always be a secondary object with me. My poetic vanity and my political _furor_ have been exhaled; and I would rather be an expert, self-maintaining gardener than a Milton, if I could not unite both.

My _friend_, wherein I have written impetuously, pardon me! and consider what I have suffered, and still am suffering, in consequence of your letter....

_Finally, my Friend! if your opinion of me and your attachment to me remain unaltered, and if you have assigned the true reasons which urged you to dissuade me from a settlement at Stowey, and if indeed (provided such settlement were consistent with my good and happiness), it would give you unmixed pleasure, I adhere to Stowey, and consider the time from last evening as a distempered dream. But if any circumstances have occurred that have lessened your love or esteem or confidence; or if there be objections to my settling in Stowey on your own account, or any other objections than what you have urged, I doubt not you will declare them openly and unreservedly to me, in your answer to this_, which I shall expect with a total incapability of doing or thinking of anything, till I have received it. Indeed, indeed, I am very miserable. God bless you and your affectionate

S. T. COLERIDGE.

Tuesday, December 13, 1796.

LXVIII. TO JOHN THELWALL.

December 17, 1796.

MY DEAR THELWALL,--I should have written you long ere this, had not the settlement of my affairs previous to my leaving Bristol and the organization of my _new plan_ occupied me with bulky anxieties that almost excluded everything but self from my thoughts. And, besides, my health has been very bad, and remains so. A nervous affection from my right temple to the extremity of my right shoulder almost distracted me, and made the frequent use of laudanum absolutely necessary. And, since I have subdued this, a rheumatic complaint in the back of my head and shoulders, accompanied with sore throat and depression of the animal spirits, has convinced me that a man may change bad lodgers without bettering himself. I write these things, not so much to apologise for my silence, or for the pleasure of complaining, as that you may know the reason why I have not given you a “strict account” how I have disposed of your books. This I will shortly do, with all the veracity which that solemn incantation, “_upon your honour_,” must necessarily have conjured up.

Your second and third part promise great things. I have counted the subjects, and by a nice calculation find that eighteen Scotch doctors would write fifty-four quarto volumes, each choosing his thesis out of your syllabus. May you do good by them, and moreover enable yourself to do more good, I _should_ say, to continue to do good. _My farm_ will be a garden of one acre and a half, in which I mean to raise vegetables and corn enough for myself and wife, and feed a couple of snouted and grunting cousins from the refuse. My evenings I shall devote to literature; and, by reviews, the magazine, and the other shilling-scavenger employments, shall probably gain forty pounds a year; which economy and self-denial, gold-beaters, shall hammer till it cover my annual expenses. Now, in favour of this scheme, I shall say nothing, for the more vehement my ratiocinations were, previous to the experiment, the more ridiculous my failure would appear; and if the scheme deserve the said ratiocinations I shall live down all your objections. I doubt not that the time will come when all our utilities will be directed in one simple path. That time, however, is not come; and imperious circumstances point out to each one his particular road. Much good may be done in all. I am not _fit_ for _public_ life; yet the light shall stream to a far distance from my cottage window. Meantime, _do you_ uplift the _torch_ dreadlessly, and show to mankind the face of that idol which they have worshipped in darkness! And now, my dear fellow, for a little sparring about poetry. My first _sonnet[133] is obscure_; but you ought to distinguish between obscurity residing in the uncommonness of the thought, and that which proceeds from thoughts unconnected and language not adapted to the expression of them. Where you do find out the meaning of my poetry, can you (in general, I mean) alter the language so as to make it more perspicuous--the thought remaining the same? By “dreamy semblance” I _did_ mean semblance of some unknown past, like to a dream, and not “a semblance _presented_ in a dream.” I meant to express that ofttimes, for a second or two, it flashed upon my mind that the then company, conversation, and everything, had occurred before with all the precise circumstances; so as to make reality appear a semblance, and the present like a dream in sleep. Now this thought is obscure; because few persons have experienced the same feeling. Yet several have; and they were proportionably delighted with the lines, as expressing some strange sensations, which they themselves had never ventured to communicate, much less had ever seen developed in poetry. The lines I have altered to,--

Oft o’er my brain does that strange rapture roll Which makes the present (while its brief fit last) Seem a mere semblance of some unknown past, Mixed with such feelings as distress the soul When dreaming that she dreams.[134]

Next as to “mystical.” Now that the thinking part of man, that is, the soul, existed previously to its appearance in its present body may be very wild philosophy, but it is very intelligible poetry; inasmuch as “soul” is an orthodox word in all our poets, they meaning by “soul” a being inhabiting our body, and playing upon it, like a musician enclosed in an organ whose keys were placed inwards. Now this opinion I do not hold; not that I am a materialist, but because I am a Berkleyan. Yet as you, who are not a Christian, wished you were, that we might meet in heaven, so I, who did not believe in this descending and incarcerated soul, yet said if my baby had died before I had seen him I should have _struggled_ to believe it. Bless me! a commentary of thirty-five lines in defence of a sonnet! and I do not like the sonnet much myself. In some (indeed, in many of my poems) there is a garishness and swell of diction which I hope that my poems in future, if I write any, will be clean of, but seldom, I think, any _conceits_. In the second edition, now printing, I have swept the book with the expurgation-besom to a fine tune, having omitted nearly one third. As to Bowles, I affirm that the manner of his accentuation in the words “brōad dāylīght” (three long syllables) is a beauty, as it admirably expresses the captive’s dwelling on the sight of noon with rapture and a kind of wonder.

The common sun, the air, the skies To him are opening paradise. GRAY.

But supposing my defence not tenable; yet how a blunder in metre stamps a man Italian or Della Cruscan I cannot perceive. As to my own poetry, I do confess that it frequently, both in thought and language, deviates from “nature and simplicity.” But that Bowles, the most tender, and, with the exception of Burns, the only _always natural_ in our language, that _he_ should not escape the charge of Della Cruscanism,--this cuts the skin and surface of my heart. “Poetry to have its highest relish must be impassioned.” True. But, firstly, poetry ought not always to have its _highest_ relish; and, secondly, judging of the cause from its effect, poetry, though treating on lofty and abstract truths, ought to be deemed _impassioned_ by him who reads it with impassioned feelings. Now Collins’s “Ode on the Poetical Character,”--that part of it, I should say, beginning with “The band (as faery legends say) Was wove on that creating day,”--has inspired and whirled _me_ along with greater agitations of enthusiasm than any the most _impassioned_ scene in Schiller or Shakespeare, using “impassioned” in its confined sense, for writing in which the human passions of pity, fear, anger, revenge, jealousy, or love are brought into view with their workings. Yet I consider the latter poetry as more valuable, because it gives _more general_ pleasure, and I judge of all things by their utility. I feel strongly and I think strongly, but I seldom feel without thinking or think without feeling. Hence, though my poetry has in general a hue of tenderness or passion over it, yet it seldom exhibits unmixed and simple tenderness or passion. My philosophical opinions are blended with or deduced from my feelings, and this, I think, peculiarises my style of writing, and, like everything else, it is sometimes a beauty and sometimes a fault. But do not let us introduce an Act of Uniformity against Poets. I have room enough in _my_ brain to admire, aye, and almost equally, the _head_ and fancy of Akenside, and the heart and fancy of Bowles, the solemn lordliness of Milton, and the divine chit-chat of Cowper.[135] And whatever a man’s excellence is, that will be likewise his fault.

There were some verses of yours in the last “Monthly Magazine” with which I was much pleased--calm good sense combined with _feeling_, and conveyed in harmonious verse and a chaste and pleasing imagery. I wish much, very much, to see your other poem. As to your Poems which you informed me in the accompanying letter that you had sent in the same parcel with the pamphlets, whether or no your verses had more than their _proper number of feet_ I cannot say; but certain it is, that somehow or other they _marched off_. No “Poems by John Thelwall” could I find. When I charged you with anti-religious bigotry, I did not allude to your pamphlet, but to passages in your letters to me, and to a circumstance which Southey, I _think_, once mentioned, that you had asserted that the name of _God_ ought never to be produced in poetry.[136] Which, to be sure, was carrying hatred _to your Creator very far indeed_.

My dear Thelwall! “It is the principal felicity of life and the chief glory of manhood to speak out fully on all subjects.” I will avail myself of it. I will express _all_ my feelings, but will previously take care to make my feelings benevolent. Contempt is hatred without fear; anger, hatred accompanied with apprehension. But because hatred is always evil, contempt must be always evil, and a good man ought to speak _contemptuously_ of nothing. I am sure a wise man will not of opinions which have been held by men, in _other_ respects at least, confessed of more powerful intellect than himself. ’Tis an assumption of _infallibility_; for if a man were wakefully mindful that what he now thinks foolish he may himself hereafter think wise, it is not in nature that he should _despise_ those who now believe what it is possible he may himself hereafter believe; and if he deny the possibility he must _on that point_ deem himself infallible and immutable. Now, in your letter of yesterday, you speak with _contempt_ of two things: old age and the Christian religion; though religion was believed by Newton, Locke, and Hartley, after intense investigation, which in each had been preceded by unbelief. This does not prove its truth, but it should save its followers from _contempt_, even though through the infirmities of mortality they should have _lost their teeth_. I call that man a bigot, Thelwall, whose intemperate zeal, for or against any opinions, leads him to contradict himself in the space of half a dozen lines. Now this you appear to me to have done. I will write fully to you now, because I shall never renew the subject. I shall not be idle in defence of the religion I profess, and my books will be the place, not my letters. You say the Christian is a _mean_ religion. Now the religion which Christ taught is simply, first, that there is an omnipresent Father of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness, in whom we all of us move and have our being; and, secondly, that when we appear to men to die we do not utterly perish, but after this life shall continue to enjoy or suffer the consequences and natural effects of the habits we have formed here, whether good or evil. This is the Christian _religion_, and all of the Christian _religion_. That there is no _fancy_ in it I readily grant, but that it is mean and deficient in _mind_ and _energy_ it were impossible for me to admit, unless I admitted that there _could be_ no dignity, intellect, or force in anything but _atheism_. But though it appeal not itself to the fancy, the truths which it teaches admit the highest exercise of it. Are the “innumerable multitude of angels and archangels” less splendid beings than the countless gods and goddesses of Rome and Greece? And can you seriously think that Mercury from Jove equals in poetic sublimity “the mighty angel that came down from heaven, whose face was as it were the sun and his feet as pillars of fire: who set his right foot on the sea, and his left foot on the earth. And he sent forth a loud voice; and when he had sent it forth, seven thunders uttered their voices: and when the seven thunders had uttered their voices, the mighty Angel[137] lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by Him that liveth for ever and ever that _Time_ was no more”? Is not Milton a sublimer poet than Homer or Virgil? Are not his personages more sublimely clothed, and do you not know that there is not perhaps _one page_ in _Milton’s_ Paradise Lost in which he has not borrowed his imagery from the _Scriptures_? I allow and rejoice that _Christ_ appealed only to the understanding and the affections; but I affirm that after reading Isaiah, or St. Paul’s “Epistle to the Hebrews,” Homer and Virgil are disgustingly _tame_ to me, and Milton himself barely tolerable. You and I are very differently organized if you think that the following (putting serious belief out of the question) is a mean flight of impassioned eloquence in which the Apostle marks the difference between the Mosaic and Christian Dispensation: “For ye are not come unto the mount that might be touched” (that is, a material and earthly place) “and that burned with fire, nor unto blackness, and tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and the voice of words; which voice they that heard entreated that the word should not be spoken to them any more. But ye are come unto Mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, to an innumerable company of angels, to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect.”[138] _You_ may prefer to all this the quarrels of Jupiter and Juno, the whimpering of wounded Venus, and the jokes of the celestials on the lameness of Vulcan. Be it so (the difference in our tastes it would not be difficult to account for from the different feelings which we have associated with these ideas); I shall continue with Milton to say that

“Zion Hill Delights me more, and Siloa’s brook that flow’d Fast by the oracle of God!”

“Visions fit for slobberers!” If infidelity do not lead to sensuality, which in every case except yours I have observed it to do, it always takes away all respect for those who become unpleasant from the infirmities of disease or decaying nature. _Exempli gratiâ_, “the aged are _slobberers_.”[139] The only vision which Christianity holds forth is indeed peculiarly adapted to these _slobberers_. Yes, to these lowly and despised and perishing slobberers it proclaims that their “corruptible shall put on _incorruption_, and their mortal put on _immortality_.”

“Morals to the Magdalen and Botany Bay.” Now, Thelwall, I presume that to preach morals to the virtuous is not quite so requisite as to preach them to the vicious. “The sick need a physician.” Are morals which would make a prostitute a wife and a sister, which would restore her to inward peace and purity; are morals which would make drunkards sober, the ferocious benevolent, and thieves honest, _mean morals_? Is it a despicable trait in our religion, that its professed object is to heal the broken-hearted and give wisdom to the poor man? It preaches _repentance_. What repentance? Tears and sorrow and a repetition of the same crimes? No, a “repentance unto good works;” a repentance that completely does away all superstitious terrors by teaching that the past is nothing in itself, that, if the mind _is_ good, that it _was_ bad imports nothing. “It is a religion for democrats.” It certainly teaches in the most explicit terms the rights of man, his right to wisdom, his right to an equal share in all the blessings of nature; it commands its disciples to go everywhere, and everywhere to preach these rights; it commands them never to use the arm of flesh, to be perfectly non-resistant; yet to hold the promulgation of _truth_ to be a law above law, and in the performance of this office to defy “wickedness in high places,” and cheerfully to endure ignominy, and wretchedness, and torments, and death, rather than _intermit_ the performance of it; yet, while enduring ignominy, and wretchedness, and torments, and death, to feel nothing but sorrow, and pity, and love for those who inflicted them; wishing their oppressors to be altogether such as they, “excepting these bonds.” Here is _truth_ in theory and in practice, a union of energetic _action_ and more energetic _suffering_. For activity amuses; but he who can _endure_ calmly must possess the seeds of true greatness. For all his animal spirits will of necessity fail him; and he has only his mind to trust to. These doubtless are morals for all the lovers of mankind, who wish to _act_ as well as _speculate_; and that you should allow this, and yet, not three lines before call the same _morals mean_, appears to me a gross self-contradiction symptomatic of bigotry. I write freely, Thelwall; for, though _personally_ unknown, I really love you, and can count but few human beings whose hand I would welcome with a more hearty grasp of friendship. I suspect, Thelwall, that you never read your Testament, since your understanding was matured, without carelessness, and previous contempt, and a somewhat like hatred. Christianity regards morality as a process. It finds a man vicious and unsusceptible of noble motives and gradually leads him, at least desires to lead him, to the height of disinterested virtue; till, in relation and proportion to his faculties and power, he is perfect “even as our Father in heaven is perfect.” There is no resting-place for morality. Now I will make one other appeal, and have done forever with the subject. There is a passage in Scripture which comprises the whole process, and each component part, of Christian morals. Previously let me explain the word faith. By faith I understand, first, a deduction from experiments in favour of the existence of something not experienced, and, secondly, the motives which attend such a deduction. Now motives, being selfish, are only the beginning and the _foundation_, necessary and of first-rate importance, yet made of vile materials, and hidden beneath the splendid superstructure.

“Now giving all diligence, add to your faith _fortitude_, and to _fortitude knowledge_, and to knowledge purity, and to purity patience,[140] and to patience godliness,[141] and to godliness brotherly-kindness, and to brotherly-kindness universal love.”[142]

I hope, whatever you may think of godliness, you will like the _note_ on it. I need not tell you, that godliness is God-_like_ness, and is paraphrased by Peter “that ye may be partakers of the divine nature,” that is, act from a love of order and happiness, not from any self-respecting motive; from the excellency into which you have exalted your _nature_, not from the _keenness_ of mere _prudence_. “Add to your faith fortitude, and to fortitude knowledge, and to knowledge purity, and to purity patience, and to patience godliness, and to godliness brotherly-kindness, and to brotherly-kindness universal love.” Now, Thelwall, putting _faith_ out of the question (which, by the bye, is not mentioned as a virtue, but as the leader to them), can you mention a virtue which is not here enjoined? and supposing the precepts embodied in the practice of any one human being, would not perfection be personified? I write these things not with any expectation of making you a Christian. I should smile at my own folly, if I conceived it even in a friendly day-dream.

* * * * *

“The ardour of undisciplined benevolence seduces us into malignity,” and, while you accustom yourself to speak so _contemptuously_ of doctrines you do not accede to, and persons with whom you do not accord, I must doubt whether even your _brotherly-kindness_ might not be made more perfect. That is surely _fit_ for a man which his mind after sincere examination approves, which animates his conduct, soothes his sorrows, and heightens his pleasures. Every good and earnest Christian declares that all this is true of the _visions_ (as you please to style them, God knows why) of Christianity. Every earnest Christian, therefore, is on a level with slobberers. Do not charge me with dwelling on one expression. These expressions are always indicative of the habit of feeling. You possess fortitude and purity, and a large portion of brotherly-kindness and universal love; drink with unquenchable thirst of the two latter virtues, and acquire _patience_; and then, Thelwall, should _your_ system be true, all that can be said is that (if both our systems should be found to increase our own and our fellow-creatures’ happiness), “Here lie and did lie the _all_ of John Thelwall and S. T. Coleridge. They were both humane, and happy, but the former was the more knowing;” and if my system should prove true, we, I doubt not, shall both meet in the kingdom of heaven, and I, with transport in my eye, shall say, “I _told_ you so, my _dear_ fellow.” But seriously, the faulty habit of feeling, which I have endeavoured to point out in you, I have detected in at least as great degree in my own practice, and am struggling to subdue it. I rejoice that the bankrupt honesty of the public has paid even the small dividend you mentioned. As to your second part, I will write you about it in a day or two, when I give you an account how I have disposed of your first. My dear little baby! and my wife thinks that he already begins to flutter the callow wings of his intellect. Oh, the wise heart and foolish head of a mother! Kiss your little girl for me, and tell her if I knew her I would love her; and then I hope in your next letter you will convey _her love_ to me and my Sara. Your dear boy, I trust, will return with rosy cheeks. Don’t you suspect, Thelwall, that the little atheist Madam Stella has an abominable _Christian_ kind of _heart_? My Sara is much interested about her; and I should not wonder if they were to be sworn sister-seraphs in the heavenly Jerusalem. Give my love to her.

I have sent you some loose sheets which Charles Lloyd and I printed together, intending to make a volume, but I gave it up and cancelled them.[143] Item, Joan of Arc, with only the passage of my writing cut out for the printers, as I am printing it in my second edition, with very great alterations and an addition of four hundred lines, so as to make it a complete and independent poem, entitled, “The Progress of Liberty,” or “The Visions of the Maid of Orleans.” Item, a sheet of sonnets[144] collected by me for the use of a few friends, who paid the printing. There you will see my opinion of sonnets. Item, Poem by C. Lloyd[145] on the death of one of your “slobberers,” a very venerable old lady, and a Quaker. The book is dressed like a rich Quaker, in costly raiment but unornamented. The loss of her almost killed my poor young friend; for he doted on her from his infancy. Item, a poem of mine on Burns[146] which was printed to be dispersed among friends. It was addressed to Charles Lamb. Item, (Shall I give it thee, blasphemer? No! I won’t, but) to thy Stella I do present the poems of my youth for a keepsake. Of this parcel I do entreat thy acceptance. I have another Joan of Arc, so you have a _right_ to the one enclosed. Postscript. Item, a humorous “Droll” on S. Ireland, of which I have likewise another. Item, a strange poem written by an astrologer here, who _was_ a man of fine genius, which, at intervals, he still discovers. But, ah me! Madness smote with her hand and stamped with her feet and swore that he should be hers, and hers he is. He is a man of fluent eloquence and general knowledge, gentle in his manners, warm in his affections; but unfortunately he has received a few rays of supernatural light through a crack in his upper story. I _express_ myself unfeelingly; but indeed my heart always aches when I think of him. Item, some verses of Robert Southey to a college cat.[147] And, finally, the following lines by thy affectionate friend,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

TO A YOUNG MAN

WHO ABANDONED HIMSELF TO A CAUSELESS AND INDOLENT MELANCHOLY.[148]

Hence that fantastic wantonness of woe, O youth to partial Fortune vainly dear! To plunder’d Want’s half-sheltered hovel go, Go, and some hunger-bitten infant hear Moan haply in a dying mother’s ear.

Or seek some _widow’s_ grave; whose dearer part Was slaughtered, where o’er his uncoffin’d limbs The flocking flesh-birds scream’d! Then, while thy heart Groans, and thine eyes a fiercer sorrow dims, Know (and the truth shall kindle thy young mind), What Nature makes thee mourn she bids thee heal. O abject! if, to sickly dreams resign’d, All effortless thou leave Earth’s common weal A prey to the thron’d Murderess of Mankind!

After the first five lines these two followed:--

Or when the cold and dismal fog-damps brood O’er the rank church-yard with sere elm-leaves strew’d, Pace round some _widow’s_ grave, etc.

These they rightly omitted. I love sonnets; but _upon my honour_ I do not love _my_ sonnets.

N. B.--Direct your letters, S. T. Coleridge, Mr. Cottle’s, High Street, Bristol.

LXIX. TO THOMAS POOLE.

Sunday morning [? December 18, 1796.]

MY DEAR POOLE,--I wrote to you with improper impetuosity; but I had been dwelling so long on the circumstance of living near you, that my mind was thrown by your letter into the feelings of those distressful dreams[149] where we imagine ourselves falling from precipices. I seemed falling from the summit of my fondest desires, whirled from the height just as I had reached it.

We shall want none of the Woman’s furniture; we have enough for ourselves. What with boxes of books, and chests of drawers, and kitchen furniture, and chairs, and our bed and bed-linen, etc., we shall have enough to fill a small waggon, and to-day I shall make enquiry among my trading acquaintance, whether it would be cheaper to hire a waggon to take them straight to Stowey, than to put them in the Bridgwater waggon. Taking in the double trouble and expense of putting them in the drays to carry them to the public waggon, and then seeing them packed again, and again to be unpacked and packed at Bridgwater, I much question whether our goods would be good for anything. I am very poorly, not to say ill. My face monstrously swollen--my recondite eye sits distent quaintly, behind the flesh-hill, and looks as little as a tomtit’s. And I have a sore throat that prevents my eating aught but spoon-meat without great pain. And I have a rheumatic complaint in the back part of my head and shoulders. Now all this demands a small portion of Christian patience, taking in our present circumstances. My apothecary says it will be madness for me to walk to Stowey on Tuesday, as, in the furious zeal of a new convert to economy, I had resolved to do. My wife will stay a week or fortnight after me; I think it not improbable that the weather may break up by that time. However, if I do not get worse, I will be with you by Wednesday or Thursday at the furthest, so as to be there before the waggon. Is there any grate in the house? I should think we might Rumfordize one of the chimneys. I shall bring down with me a dozen yards of green list. I can endure cold, but not a cold room. If we can but contrive to make two rooms _warm_ and _wholesome_, we will laugh in the faces of gloom and ill-lookingness.

I shall lose the post if I say a word more. You thoroughly and in every nook and corner of your heart forgive me for my letters? Indeed, indeed, Poole, I know no one whom I esteem more--no one friend whom I love so much. But bear with my infirmities! God bless you, and your grateful and affectionate

S. T. COLERIDGE.

LXX. TO JOHN THELWALL.

December 31, 1796.

Enough, my dear Thelwall, of theology. In my book on Godwin, I compare the two systems, his and Jesus’, and that book I am sure you will read with attention. I entirely accord with your opinion of Southey’s “Joan.” The ninth book is execrable, and the poem, though it frequently reach the _sentimental_, does not display the _poetical-sublime_. In language at once natural, perspicuous, and dignified in manly pathos, in soothing and sonnet-like description, and, above all, in character and _dramatic_ dialogue, Southey is unrivalled; but as certainly he does not possess opulence of imaginative lofty-paced harmony, or that toil of thinking which is necessary in order to plan a _whole_. Dismissing mock humility, and hanging your mind as a looking-glass over my idea-pot, so as to image on the said mind all the bubbles that boil in the said idea-pot (there’s a damned long-winded metaphor for you), I think that an admirable poet might be made by _amalgamating him_ and _me_. I _think_ too much for a _poet_, he too little for a _great_ poet. But he abjures _feeling_. Now (as you say) they must go together. Between ourselves the _enthusiasm_ of friendship is not with S. and me. We quarrelled and the quarrel lasted for a twelvemonth. We are now reconciled; but the cause of the difference was solemn, and “the blasted oak puts not forth its buds anew.” We are _acquaintances_, and feel _kindliness_ towards each other, but I do not _esteem_ or _love_ Southey, as I must esteem and love the man whom I dared call by the holy name of _friend_: and vice versâ Southey of me. I say no more. It is a painful subject, and do you say nothing. I mention this for obvious reasons, but let it go no farther. It is a painful subject. Southey’s direction at present is R. Southey, No. 8 West-gate Buildings, Bath, but he leaves Bath for London in the course of a week. You imagine that I know Bowles personally. I never saw him but once, and when I was a boy and in Salisbury market-place.

The passage in your letter respecting your mother affected me greatly. Well, true or false, heaven is a less gloomy idea than annihilation. Dr. Beddoes and Dr. Darwin think that _Life_ is utterly inexplicable, writing as materialists. You, I understand, have adopted the idea that it is the result of organised matter acted on by external stimuli. As likely as any other system, but you assume the thing to be proved. The “capability of being stimulated into sensation” ... is my definition of _animal life_. Monro believes in a plastic, immaterial nature, all-pervading.

And what if all of animated nature Be but organic harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps Plastic and vast, etc.

(By the bye, that is the favourite of _my_ poems; do you like it?) Hunter says that the _blood_ is the life, which is saying nothing at all; for, if the blood were _life_, it could never be otherwise than life, and to say it is _alive_ is saying nothing; and Ferriar believes in a _soul_, like an orthodox churchman. So much for physicians and surgeons! Now as to the metaphysicians. Plato says it is _harmony_. He might as well have said a fiddlestick’s end; but I love Plato, his dear, _gorgeous_ nonsense; and I, _though last not least_, _I_ do not know what to think about it. On the whole, I have rather made up my mind that I am a mere _apparition_, a naked spirit, and that life is, I myself I; which is a mighty clear account of it. Now I have written all this, not to express my ignorance (that is an accidental effect, not the final cause), but to shew you that I want to see your essay on “Animal Vitality,” of which Bowles the surgeon spoke in high terms. Yet _he_ believes in a _body_ and a _soul_. Any book may be left at Robinson’s for _me_, “to be put into the next parcel, to be sent to ‘Joseph Cottle, bookseller, Bristol.’” Have you received an “Ode”[150] of mine from Parsons? In your next letter tell me what you think of the _scattered_ poems I sent you. Send me any poems, and I will be minute in criticism. For, O Thelwall, even a long-winded abuse is more consolatory to an _author’s_ feelings than a short-breathed, asthma-lunged panegyric. Joking apart, I would to God we could sit by a fireside and joke _vivâ voce_, face to face--Stella and Sara, Jack Thelwall and I. As I once wrote to my dear friend, T. Poole, “repeating--

‘Such verse as Bowles, heart-honour’d poet, sang, That wakes the Tear, yet steals away the Pang, Then, or with Berkeley or with Hobbes romance it, Dissecting Truth with metaphysic lancet. Or, drawn from up those dark unfathom’d wells, In wiser folly clink the Cap and Bells. How many tales we told! what jokes we made! Conundrum, Crambo, Rebus, or Charade; Ænigmas that had driven the Theban[151] mad, And Puns, then best when exquisitely bad; And I, if aught of archer vein I hit With my own laughter stifled my own wit.’”[152]

## CHAPTER III THE STOWEY PERIOD

1797-1798

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