The Project Gutenberg eBook of Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 2 (of 2)

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Title: Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 2 (of 2)

Author: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Editor: Ernest Hartley Coleridge

Release date: January 1, 2014 [eBook #44554]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

Credits: E-text prepared by the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org)

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

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LETTERS OF
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

LETTERS

OF

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

EDITED BY
ERNEST HARTLEY COLERIDGE

IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. II

LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
1895
[All rights reserved.]

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

CONTENTS OF VOLUME II

| Page
CHAPTER VII. A LONG ABSENCE, 1804-1806.
CXLIV. | Richard Sharp, January 15, 1804. (Life of Wordsworth, 1889, ii. 9) | 447
CXLV. | Thomas Poole, January 15, 1804. (Forty lines published, Thomas Poole and his Friends, 1887, ii. 122) | 452
CXLVI. | Thomas Poole [January 26, 1804] | 454
CXLVII. | The Wordsworth Family, February 8, 1804. (Life of Wordsworth, 1889, ii. 12) | 456
CXLVIII. | Mrs. S. T. Coleridge, February 19, 1804 | 460
CXLIX. | Robert Southey, February 20, 1804 | 464
CL. | Mrs. S. T. Coleridge, April 1, 1804 | 467
CLI. | Robert Southey, April 16, 1804 | 469
CLII. | Daniel Stuart, April 21, 1804. (Privately printed, Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 33) | 475
CLIII. | Mrs. S. T. Coleridge, June, 1804 | 480
CLIV. | Daniel Stuart, October 22, 1804. (Privately printed, Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 45) | 485
CLV. | Robert Southey, February 2, 1805 | 487
CLVI. | Daniel Stuart, April 20, 1805. (Privately printed, Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 46) | 493
CLVII. | Mrs. S. T. Coleridge, July 21, 1805 | 496
CLVIII. | Washington Allston, June 17, 1806. (Scribner’s Magazine, January, 1892) | 498
CLIX. | Daniel Stuart, August 18, 1806. (Privately printed, Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 54) | 501
CHAPTER VIII. HOME AND NO HOME, 1806-1807.
CLX. | Daniel Stuart, September 15, 1806. (Privately printed, Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 60) | 505
CLXI. | Mrs. S. T. Coleridge, September 16 [1806] | 507
CLXII. | Mrs. S. T. Coleridge, December 25, 1806 | 509
CLXIII. | Hartley Coleridge, April 3, 1807 | 511
CLXIV. | Sir H. Davy, September 11, 1807. (Fragmentary Remains, 1858, p. 99) | 514
CHAPTER IX. A PUBLIC LECTURER, 1807-1808.
CLXV. | The Morgan Family [November 23, 1807] | 519
CLXVI. | Robert Southey [December 14, 1807] | 520
CLXVII. | Mrs. Morgan, January 25, 1808 | 524
CLXVIII. | Francis Jeffrey, May 23, 1808 | 527
CLXIX. | Francis Jeffrey, July 20, 1808 | 528
CHAPTER X. GRASMERE AND THE FRIEND, 1808-1810.
CLXX. | Daniel Stuart [December 9, 1808]. (Privately printed, Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 93) | 533
CLXXI. | Francis Jeffrey, December 14, 1808. (Illustrated London News, June 10, 1893) | 534
CLXXII. | Thomas Wilkinson, December 31, 1808. (Friends’ Quarterly Magazine, June, 1893) | 538
CLXXIII. | Thomas Poole, February 3, 1809. (Fifteen lines published, Thomas Poole and his Friends, 1887, ii. 228) | 541
CLXXIV. | Daniel Stuart, March 31, 1809. (Privately printed, Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 136) | 545
CLXXV. | Daniel Stuart, June 13, 1809. (Privately printed, Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 165) | 547
CLXXVI. | Thomas Poole, October 9, 1809. (Thomas Poole and his Friends, 1887, ii. 233) | 550
CLXXVII. | Robert Southey, December, 1809 | 554
CLXXVIII. | Thomas Poole, January 28, 1810 | 556
CHAPTER XI. A JOURNALIST, A LECTURER, A PLAYWRIGHT, 1810-1813.
CLXXIX. | Mrs. S. T. Coleridge, Spring, 1810 | 563
CLXXX. | The Morgans, December 21, 1810 | 564
CLXXXI. | W. Godwin, March 15, 1811. (William Godwin, by C. Kegan Paul, ii. 222) | 565
CLXXXII. | Daniel Stuart, June 4, 1811. (Gentleman’s Magazine, 1838) | 566
CLXXXIII. | Sir G. Beaumont, December 7, 1811. (Memorials of Coleorton, 1887, ii. 158) | 570
CLXXXIV. | J. J. Morgan, February 28, 1812 | 575
CLXXXV. | Mrs. S. T. Coleridge, April 21, 1812 | 579
CLXXXVI. | Mrs. S. T. Coleridge, April 24, 1812 | 583
CLXXXVII. | Charles Lamb, May 2, 1812 | 586
CLXXXVIII. | William Wordsworth, May 4, 1812 | 588
CLXXXIX. | Daniel Stuart, May 8, 1812. (Privately printed, Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 211) | 595
CXC. | William Wordsworth, May 11, 1812. (Life of Wordsworth, 1889, ii. 180) | 596
CXCI. | Robert Southey [May 12, 1812] | 597
CXCII. | William Wordsworth, December 7, 1812. (Life of Wordsworth, 1889, ii. 181) | 599
CXCIII. | Mrs. S. T. Coleridge [January 20, 1813] | 602
CXCIV. | Robert Southey, February 8, 1813. (Illustrated London News, June 24, 1894) | 605
CXCV. | Thomas Poole, February 13, 1813. (Six lines published, Thomas Poole and his Friends, 1887, ii. 244) | 609
CHAPTER XII. A MELANCHOLY EXILE, 1813-1815.
CXCVI. | Daniel Stuart, September 25, 1813. (Privately printed, Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 219). | 615
CXCVII. | Joseph Cottle, April 26, 1814. (Early Recollections, 1837, ii. 155) | 616
CXCVIII. | Joseph Cottle, May 27, 1814. (Early Recollections, 1837, ii. 165) | 619
CXCIX. | Charles Mathews, May 30, 1814. (Memoir of C. Mathews, 1838, ii. 257) | 621
CC. | Josiah Wade, June 26, 1814. (Early Recollections, 1837, ii. 185) | 623
CCI. | John Murray, August 23, 1814. (Memoir of John Murray, 1890, i. 297) | 624
CCII. | Daniel Stuart, September 12, 1814. (Privately printed, Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 221) | 627
CCIII. | Daniel Stuart, October 30, 1814. (Privately printed, Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 248) | 634
CCIV. | John Kenyon, November 3 [1814] | 639
CCV. | Lady Beaumont, April 3, 1815. (Memorials of Coleorton, 1887, ii. 175) | 641
CCVI. | William Wordsworth, May 30, 1815. (Life of Wordsworth, 1889, ii. 255) | 643
CCVII. | Rev. W. Money, 1815 | 651
CHAPTER XIII. NEW LIFE AND NEW FRIENDS, 1816-1821.
CCVIII. | James Gillman [April 13, 1816]. (Life of Coleridge, 1838, p. 273) | 657
CCIX. | Daniel Stuart, May 8, 1816. (Privately printed, Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 255) | 660
CCX. | Daniel Stuart, May 13, 1816. (Privately printed, Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 262) | 663
CCXI. | John Murray, February 27, 1817 | 665
CCXII. | Robert Southey [May, 1817] | 670
CCXIII. | H. C. Robinson, June, 1817. (Diary of H. C. Robinson, 1869, ii. 57) | 671
CCXIV. | Thomas Poole [July 22, 1817]. (Thomas Poole and his Friends, 1887, ii. 255) | 673
CCXV. | Rev. H. F. Cary, October 29, 1817 | 676
CCXVI. | Rev. H. F. Cary, November 6, 1817 | 677
CCXVII. | Joseph Henry Green, November 14, 1817 | 679
CCXVIII. | Joseph Henry Green [December 13, 1817] | 680
CCXIX. | Charles Augustus Tulk, 1818 | 684
CCXX. | Joseph Henry Green, May 2, 1818 | 688
CCXXI. | Mrs. Gillman, July 19, 1818 | 690
CCXXII. | W. Collins, A. R. A., December, 1818. (Memoirs of W. Collins, 1848, i. 146) | 693
CCXXIII. | Thomas Allsop, December 2, 1818. (Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge, 1836, i. 5) | 695
CCXXIV. | Joseph Henry Green, January 16, 1819 | 699
CCXXV. | James Gillman, August 20, 1819 | 700
CCXXVI. | Mrs. Aders [?], October 28, 1819 | 701
CCXXVII. | Joseph Henry Green [January 14, 1820] | 704
CCXXVIII. | Joseph Henry Green, May 25, 1820 | 706
CCXXIX. | Charles Augustus Tulk, February 12, 1821 | 712
CHAPTER XIV. THE PHILOSOPHER AND DIVINE, 1822-1832.
CCXXX. | John Murray, January 18, 1822 | 717
CCXXXI. | James Gillman, October 28, 1822. (Life of Coleridge, 1838, p. 344) | 721
CCXXXII. | Miss Brent, July 7, 1823 | 722
CCXXXIII. | Rev. Edward Coleridge, July 23, 1823 | 724
CCXXXIV. | Joseph Henry Green, February 15, 1824 | 726
CCXXXV. | Joseph Henry Green, May 19, 1824 | 728
CCXXXVI. | James Gillman, November 2, 1824 | 729
CCXXXVII. | Rev. H. F. Cary, December 14, 1824 | 731
CCXXXVIII. | William Wordsworth [? 1825]. (Fifteen lines published, Life of Wordsworth, 1889, ii. 305) | 733
CCXXXIX. | John Taylor Coleridge, April 8, 1825 | 734
CCXL. | Rev. Edward Coleridge, May 19, 1825 | 738
CCXLI. | Daniel Stuart, July 9, 1825. (Privately printed, Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 286) | 740
CCXLII. | James Gillman, October 10, 1825 | 742
CCXLIII. | Rev. Edward Coleridge, December 9, 1825 | 744
CCXLIV. | Mrs. Gillman, May 3, 1827 | 745
CCXLV. | Rev. George May Coleridge, January 14, 1828 | 746
CCXLVI. | George Dyer, June 6, 1828. (The Mirror, xxxviii. 1841, p. 282) | 748
CCXLVII. | George Cattermole, August 14, 1828 | 750
CCXLVIII. | Joseph Henry Green, June 1, 1830 | 751
CCXLIX. | Thomas Poole, 1830 | 753
CCL. | Mrs. Gillman, 1830 | 754
CCLI. | Joseph Henry Green, December 15, 1831 | 754
CCLII. | H. N. Coleridge, February 24, 1832 | 756
CCLIII. | Miss Lawrence, March 22, 1832 | 758
CCLIV. | Rev. H. F. Cary, April 22, 1832. (Memoir of H. F. Cary, 1847, ii. 194) | 760
CCLV. | John Peirse Kennard, August 13, 1832 | 762
CHAPTER XV. THE BEGINNING OF THE END, 1833-1834.
CCLVI. | Joseph Henry Green, April 8, 1833 | 767
CCLVII. | Mrs. Aders [1833] | 769
CCLVIII. | John Sterling, October 30, 1833 | 771
CCLIX. | Miss Eliza Nixon, July 9, 1834 | 773
CCLX. | Adam Steinmetz Kennard, July 13, 1834. (Early Recollections, 1837, ii. 193) | 775

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Page

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, aged sixty-one. From a pencil-sketch by J. Kayser, of Kaserworth,
now in the possession of the editor
Frontispiece

Mrs. Wilson. From a pencil-sketch by Edward Nash, 1816, now in the possession of the editor
460

Hartley Coleridge, aged ten. After a painting by Sir David Wilkie, R. A., now in the
possession of Sir George Beaumont, Bart.
510

The Room in Mr. Gillman’s House, The Grove, Highgate, which served as study and
bedroom for the poet, and in which he died. From a water-colour drawing now in the
possession of Miss Christabel Coleridge, of Cheyne, Torquay
616

Derwent Coleridge, aged nineteen. From a pencil-sketch by Edward Nash, now in the
possession of the editor
704

The Reverend George Coleridge. From an oil painting now in the possession of the
Right Honourable Lord Coleridge
746

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, aged (about) fifty-six. From an oil painting (taken at the
Argyll Baths), now in the possession of the editor
758

CHAPTER VII
A LONG ABSENCE
1804-1806

CHAPTER VII
A LONG ABSENCE
1804-1806

CXLIV. TO RICHARD SHARP.[1]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S. T. Coleridge.

CXLV. TO THOMAS POOLE.

Kendal, Sunday, January 15, 1804.

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

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

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

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

God bless you, and

S. T. Coleridge.

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

CXLVI. TO THE SAME.

[January 26, 1804.]

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

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

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

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

S. T. Coleridge.

T. Poole, Esq., Parliament Office.

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

CXLVII. TO THE WORDSWORTHS.

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

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

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

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

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

S. T. Coleridge.

CXLVIII. TO HIS WIFE.

February 19, 1804.

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

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

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

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

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

[No signature.]

CXLIX. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

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

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

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

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

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

God bless you and

S. T. Coleridge.

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

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

CL. TO HIS WIFE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S. T. Coleridge.

I mourn for poor Mary.

CLI. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

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

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

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

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

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

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

God bless you all and

S. T. Coleridge.

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

CLII. TO DANIEL STUART.

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

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

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

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

S. T. Coleridge.

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

CLIII. TO HIS WIFE.

[Malta,] June, 1804.

[My dear Sara,]—[I wrote] to Southey from Gibraltar, directing you to open the letter in case Southey should be in town. You received it, I trust, and learnt from it that I had been pretty well, and that we had had a famous quick passage. At Gibraltar we stayed five days, and so lost our fair wind, and [during our] after-voyage to Malta [there] was [a] storm, that carried away our main yard, etc., long dead calms, every rope of the whole ship reflected in the bright, soft blue sea, and light winds, often varying every quarter of an hour, and more often against us than for us. We were the best sailing vessel in the whole convoy; but every day we had to lie by and wait for the laggards. This is very disheartening; likewise the frequent danger in light winds or calms, or in foggy weather of running foul of each other is another heavy inconvenience of convoy, and, in case of a deep calm in a narrow sea, as in the Gut of Gibraltar and in the Archipelago, etc., where calms are most common, a privateering or piratical row-boat might board you and make slaves of you under the very nose of the man-of-war, which would lie a lifeless hulk on the smooth water. For these row-boats, mounting from one to four or five guns, would instantly sink a man-of-war’s boat, and one of them, last war, had very nearly made a British frigate strike. I mention these facts because it is a common notion that going under convoy you are “as snug as a bug in a rug.” If I had gone without convoy on board the Speedwell, we should have reached Malta in twenty days from the day I left Portsmouth, but, however, we were congratulated on having had a very good passage for the time of the year, having been only forty days including our stay at Gibraltar; and if there be inconvenience in a convoy, I have reason to know and to be grateful for its advantages. The whole of the voyage from Gibraltar to Malta, excepting the four or five last days, I was wretchedly unwell.... The harbour at Valetta is narrow as the neck of a bottle in the entrance; but instantly opens out into a lake with tongues of land, capes, one little island, etc., etc., where the whole navy of England might lie as in a dock in the worst of weather. All around its banks, in the form of an amphitheatre, rise the magnificent houses of Valetta, and its two over-the-water towns, Burmola and Flavia (which are to Valetta what the Borough is to London). The houses are all lofty and built of fine white freestone, something like Bath, only still whiter and newer looking, yet the windows, from the prodigious thickness of the walls, being all out of sight, the whole appeared to me as Carthage to Æneas, a proud city, well nigh but not quite finished. I walked up a long street of good breadth, all a flight of stairs (no place for beast or carriage, each broad stair composed of a cement-sand of terra pozzolana, hard and smooth as the hardest pavement of smooth rock by the seaside and very like it). I soon found out Dr. Stoddart’s house, which seemed a large pile of building. He was not at home, but I stayed for him, and in about two hours he came, and received me with an explosion of surprise and welcome—more fun than affection in the manner, but just as I wished it.... Yesterday and to-day I have been pretty well. In a hot climate, now that the glass is high as 80 in the shade, the healthiest persons are liable to fever on the least disagreement of food with the first passages, and my general health is, I would fain believe, better on the whole.... I will try the most scrupulous regimen of diet and exercise; and I rejoice to find that the heat, great as it is, does not at all annoy me. In about a fortnight I shall probably take a trip into Sicily, and spend the next two or three months in some cooler and less dreary place, and return in September. For eight months in the year the climate of Malta is delightful, but a drearier place eye never saw. No stream in the whole island, only one place of springs, which are conveyed by aqueducts and supply the island with about one third of its water; the other two thirds they depend for upon the rain. And the reservoirs under the houses, walls, etc., to preserve the rain are stupendous! The tops of all the houses are flat, and covered with that smooth, hard composition, and on these and everywhere where rain can fall are channels and pipes to conduct it to the reservoirs. Malta is about twenty miles by twelve—a mere rock of freestone. In digging out this they find large quantities of vegetable soil. They separate it, and with the stones they build their houses and garden and field walls, all of an enormous thickness. The fields are seldom so much as half an acre one above another in that form, so that everything grows as in huge garden pots. The whole island looks like one monstrous fortification. Nothing green meets your eye—one dreary, grey-white,—and all the country towns from the retirement and invisibility of the windows look like towns burnt out and desolate. Yet the fertility is marvellous. You almost see things grow, and the population is, I suppose, unexampled. The town of Valetta itself contains about one hundred and ten streets, all at right angles to each other, each having from twelve to fifty houses; but many of them very steep—a few staired all across, and almost all, in some part or other, if not the whole, having the footway on each side so staired. The houses lofty, all looking new. The good houses are built with a court in the centre, and the rooms large and lofty, from sixteen to twenty feet high, and walls enormously thick, all necessary for coolness. The fortifications of Valetta are endless. When I first walked about them, I was struck all of a heap with their strangeness, and when I came to understand a little of their purpose, I was overwhelmed with wonder. Such vast masses—bulky mountain-breasted heights; gardens with pomegranate trees—the prickly pears in the fosses, and the caper (the most beautiful of flowers) growing profusely in the interstices of the high walls and on the battlements. The Maltese are a dark, light-limbed people. Of the women five tenths are ugly; of the remainder, four fifths would be ordinary but that they look so quaint, and one tenth, perhaps, may be called quaint-pretty. The prettiest resemble pretty Jewesses in England. They are the noisiest race[21] under heaven, and Valetta the noisiest place. The sudden shot-up, explosive bellows-cries you ever heard in London would give you the faintest idea of it. Even when you pass by a fruit stall the fellow will put his hand like a speaking trumpet to his mouth and shoot such a thunderbolt of sound full at you. Then the endless jangling of those cursed bells, etc. Sir Alexander Ball and General Valette (the civil and military commanders) have been marvellously attentive—Sir A. B. even friendly and confidential to me.

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

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

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

S. T. Coleridge.

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

CLIV. TO DANIEL STUART.

Syracuse,[22] October 22, 1804.

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

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

S. T. Coleridge.

CLV. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

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

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

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

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

CLVI. TO DANIEL STUART.

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

Malta, April 20, 1805.

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

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

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

S. T. Coleridge.

April 20, 1805.

CLVII. TO HIS WIFE.

Malta, July 21, 1805.

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

S. T. Coleridge.

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

(Signed with seal, ΕΣΤΗΣΕ.)

For England.
Mrs. Coleridge, Keswick, Cumberland.

Postmark, Sept. 8, 1805.

CLVIII. TO WASHINGTON ALLSTON.

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

Tuesday, June 17, 1806.[31]

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

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

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

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

S. T. Coleridge.

CLIX. TO DANIEL STUART.

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

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

S. T. Coleridge.

CHAPTER VIII
HOME AND NO HOME
1806-1807

CHAPTER VIII
HOME AND NO HOME
1806-1807

CLX. TO DANIEL STUART.

Monday, (?) September 15, 1806.

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

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

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

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

S. T. Coleridge.

CLXI. TO HIS WIFE.

September 16, [1806.]

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

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

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

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

S. T. Coleridge.

CLXII. TO THE SAME.

[Farmhouse near Coleorton,]
December 25, 1806.

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

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

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

The post boy waits.

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

Your sincere friend
S. T. Coleridge.

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

April 3, 1807.

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

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

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

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

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

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

S. T. Coleridge.

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

Hartley Coleridge, Coleorton, Leicestershire.

CLXIV. TO SIR H. DAVY.

September 11, 1807.

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

········

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

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

S. T. Coleridge.

CHAPTER IX
A PUBLIC LECTURER
1807-1808

CHAPTER IX
PUBLIC LECTURER
1807-1808

CLXV. TO THE MORGAN FAMILY.

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

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

S. T. Coleridge.

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

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

CLXVI. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

[Postmark, December 14, 1807.]

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

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

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

S. T. C.

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

CLXVII. TO MRS. MORGAN.

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

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

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

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

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

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

S. T. Coleridge?

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

To be read after the other.

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

CLXVIII. TO FRANCIS JEFFREY.

348 Strand, May 23, 1808.

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

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

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

CLXIX. TO THE SAME.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yours, dear sir, sincerely,

S. T. Coleridge.

CHAPTER X
GRASMERE AND THE FRIEND
1808-1810

CHAPTER X
GRASMERE AND THE FRIEND
1808-1810

CLXX. TO DANIEL STUART.

[December 9, 1808.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

S. T. Coleridge.

CLXXI. TO FRANCIS JEFFREY.

Grasmere, December 14, 1808.

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

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

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

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

S. T. Coleridge.

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

CLXXII. TO THOMAS WILKINSON.[51]

Grasmere, December 31, 1808.

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

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

S. T. Coleridge. See P. S.

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

CLXXIII. TO THOMAS POOLE.

Grasmere, Kendal, February 3, 1809.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S. T. Coleridge.

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

CLXXIV. TO DANIEL STUART.

Posted March 31, 1809.

My dear Friend,—I have been severely indisposed, knocked up indeed, with a complaint of a contagious nature called the Mumps;[56] preceded by most distressing low spirits, or rather absence of all spirits; and accompanied with deafness and stupefying perpetual echo in the ear. But it is going off. Little John Wordsworth was attacked with it last year when I was in London, and from the stupor with which it suffuses the eyes and look, it was cruelly mistaken for water on the brain. It has been brought here a second time by some miners, and is a disease with little danger and no remedy.

I attributed your silence to its right cause, and I assure you when I was at Penrith and Kendal it was very pleasant to me to hear how universally the conduct of the “Courier” was extolled; indeed, you have behaved most nobly, and it is impossible but that you must have had a great weight in the displacing of that prime grievance of grievances. Among many reflections that kept crowding on my mind during the trial,[57] this was perhaps the chief—What if, after a long, long reign, some titled sycophant should whisper to Majesty, “By what means do your Ministers manage the Legislature?” “By the distribution of patronage, according to the influence of individuals who claim it.” “Do this yourself, or by your own family, and you become independent of parties, and your Ministers are your servants. The Army under a favourite son, the Church with a wife, etc., etc.” Good heavens! the very essence of the Constitution is unmoulded, and the venerable motto of our liberty, “The king can do no wrong,” becomes nonsense and blasphemy. As soon as ever my mind is a little at ease, I will put together the fragments I have written on this subject, and if Wordsworth have not anticipated me, add to it some thoughts on the effect of the military principle. We owe something to Whitbread for his quenching at the first smell a possible fire. How is it possible that a man apparently so honest can talk and think as he does respecting France, peace, and Buonaparte?...

On Thursday Wordsworth, Southey, and myself, with the printer and publisher, go to Appleby to sign and seal, which paper, etc., will of course be immediately dispatched to London. I doubt not but that the £60 will be now paid at the “Courier” office in a few days; and as soon as you will let me know whether the stamped paper is to be paid for necessarily in ready money, or with what credit, I shall instantly write to some of my friends to advance me what is absolutely necessary. I can only say I am ready and eager to commence, and that I earnestly hope to see “The Friend” advertised shortly for the first of May. As to the Paper, how and from whom, and what and in what quantity, I must again leave to your judgment, and recommend to your affection for me. I have reason to believe that I shall commence with 500 names.

I write from Keswick. Mrs. Southey was delivered yester-morning of a girl.[58] I forgot to say, that I have been obliged to purchase, and have paid for, a font of types of small pica, the same with the London Prospectus, from Wilsons of Glasgow. I was assured they would cost only from £25 to £28, instead of which, £38 odd.

God bless you and

S. T. Coleridge.

CLXXV. TO THE SAME.

Grasmere, Kendal, June 13, 1809.

Dear Stuart,—I left Penrith Monday noon, and, prevented by the heavy rain from crossing Grisedale Tarn (near the summit of Helvellyn, and our most perilous and difficult Alpine Pass), the same day I slept at Luff’s, and crossed it yester-morning, and arrived here by breakfast time. I was sadly grieved at Wordsworth’s account of your late sorrows and troubles....

I cannot adequately express how much I am concerned lest anything I wrote in my last letter (though God knows under the influence of no one feeling which you would not wish me to have) should chance to have given you any additional unpleasantness, however small. Would that I had worthier means than words and professions of proving to you what my heart is....

I rise every morning at five, and work three hours before breakfast, either in letter-writing or serious composition....

I take for granted that more than the poor £60 has been expended in the paper I have received. But I have written to Mr. Clarkson to see what can be done; for it would be a sad thing to give it all up now I am going on so well merely for want of means to provide the first twenty weeks paper. My present stock will not quite suffice for three numbers. I printed 620 of No. 1, and 650 of No. 2, and so many more are called for that I shall be forced to reprint both as soon as I hear from Clarkson. The proof sheet of No. 3 goes back to-day, and with it the copy of No. 4, so that henceforth we shall be secure of regularity; indeed it was not all my fault before, but the printer’s inexperience and the multitude of errors, though from a very decent copy, which took him a full day and more in correcting. I had altered my plan for the Introductory Essays after my arrival at Penrith, which cost me exceeding trouble; but the numbers to come are in a very superior style of polish and easy intelligibility. The only thing at present which I am under the necessity of applying to you for respects Clement. It may be his interest to sell “The Friend” at his shop, and a certain number will always be sent; but I am quite in the dark as to what profits he expects. Surely not book-profits for a newspaper that can circulate by the post? And it is certainly neither my interest, nor that of the regular purchasers of “The Friend,” to have it bought at a shop, instead of receiving it as a franked letter. All I want to know is his terms, for I have quite a horror of booksellers, whose mode of carrying on trade in London is absolute rapacity....

On this ruinous plan poor Southey has been toiling for years, with an industry honourable to human nature, and must starve upon it were it not for the more profitable employment of reviewing; a task unworthy of him, or even of a man with not one half of his honour and honesty.

I have just read Wordsworth’s pamphlet, and more than fear that your friendly expectations of its sale and influence have been too sanguine. Had I not known the author I would willingly have travelled from St. Michael’s Mount to Johnny Groat’s House on a pilgrimage to see and reverence him. But from the public I am apprehensive, first, that it will be impossible to rekindle an exhausted interest respecting the Cintra Convention, and therefore that the long porch may prevent readers from entering the Temple. Secondly, that, partly from Wordsworth’s own style, which represents the chain of his thoughts and the movements of his heart, admirably for me and a few others, but I fear does not possess the more profitable excellence of translating these down into that style which might easily convey them to the understandings of common readers, and partly from Mr. De Quincey’s strange and most mistaken system of punctuation—(The periods are often alarmingly long, perforce of their construction, but De Quincey’s punctuation has made several of them immeasurable, and perplexed half the rest. Never was a stranger whim than the notion that , ; : and . could be made logical symbols, expressing all the diversities of logical connection)—but, lastly, I fear that readers, even of judgement, may complain of a want of shade and background; that it is all foreground, all in hot tints; that the first note is pitched at the height of the instrument, and never suffered to sink; that such depth of feeling is so incorporated with depth of thought, that the attention is kept throughout at its utmost strain and stretch; and—but this for my own feeling. I could not help feeling that a considerable part is almost a self-robbery from some great philosophical poem, of which it would form an appropriate part, and be fitlier attuned to the high dogmatic eloquence, the oracular [tone] of impassioned blank verse. In short, cold readers, conceited of their supposed judgement, on the score of their possessing nothing else, and for that reason only, taking for granted that they must have judgement, will abuse the book as positive, violent, and “in a mad passion;” and readers of sense and feeling will have no other dread, than that the Work (if it should die) would die of a plethora of the highest qualities of combined philosophic and poetic genius. The Apple Pie they may say is made all of Quinces. I much admired our young friend’s note on Sir John Moore and his despatch;[59] it was excellently arranged and urged. I have had no opportunity, as yet, to speak a word to Wordsworth himself about it; I wrote to you as usual in full confidence.

I shall not be a little anxious to have your opinion of my third number. Lord Lonsdale blames me for excluding party politics and the events of the day from my plan. I exclude both the one and the other, only as far as they are merely party, i. e. personal and temporal interests, or merely events of To-day, that are defunct in the To-morrow. I flatter myself that I have been the first, who will have given a calm, disinterested account of our Constitution as it really is and how it is so, and that I have, more radically than has been done before, shown the unstable and boggy grounds on which all systematic reformers hitherto have stood. But be assured that I shall give up this opinion with joy, and consider a truer view of the question a more than recompense for the necessity of retracting what I have written.

God bless you! Do, pray, let me hear from you, though only three lines.

S. T. Coleridge.

CLXXVI. TO THOMAS POOLE.

October 9, 1809.

My dear Poole,—I received yours late last night, and sincerely thank you for the contents. The whole shall be arranged as you have recommended. Yet if I know my own wishes, I would far rather you had refused me, and said you should have an opportunity in a few days of explaining your motives in person, for oh, the autumn is divine here. You never beheld, I will answer for it, such combinations of exquisite beauty with sufficient grandeur of elevation, even in Switzerland. Besides, I sorely want to talk with you on many points.

All the defects you have mentioned I am perfectly aware of, and am anxiously endeavouring to avoid. There is too often an entortillage in the sentences and even in the thought (which nothing can justify), and, always almost, a stately piling up of story on story in one architectural period, which is not suited to a periodical essay or to essays at all (Lord Bacon, whose style mine more nearly resembles than any other, in his greater works, thought Seneca a better model for his Essays), but least of all suited to the present illogical age, which has, in imitation of the French, rejected all the cements of language, so that a popular book is now a mere bag of marbles, that is, aphorisms and epigrams on one subject. But be assured that the numbers will improve; indeed, I hope that if the dire stoppage have not prevented it, you will have seen proof of improvement already in the seventh and eighth numbers,—still more in the ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth numbers. Strange! but the “Three Graves” is the only thing I have yet heard generally praised and inquired after!! Remember how many different guests I have at my Round Table. I groan beneath the Errata, but I am thirty miles cross-post from my printer and publisher, and Southey, who has been my corrector, has been strangely oscitant, or, which I believe is sometimes the case, has not understood the sentences, and thought they might have a meaning for me though they had not for him. There was one direful one,[60] No. 5, p. 80, lines 3 and 4. Read,—“its functions being to take up the passive affections of the senses into distinct thoughts and judgements, according to its own essential forms, formæ formantes in the language of Lord Bacon in contradistinction to the formæ formatæ.”

My greatest difficulty will be to avoid that grievous defect of running one number into another, I not being present at the printing. To really cut down or stretch out every subject to the Procrustes-Bed of sixteen pages is not possible without a sacrifice of my whole plan, but most often I will divide them polypus-wise, so that the first half should get itself a new tail of its own, and the latter a new head, and always take care to leave off at a paragraph. With my best endeavours I am baffled in respect of making one Essay fill one number. The tenth number is, W. thinks, the most interesting, “On the Errors of both Parties,” or “Extremes Meet;” and, do what I would, it stretched to seven or eight pages more; but I have endeavoured to take your advice in toto, and shall announce to the public that, with the exception of my volume of Political Essays and State Memorials, and some technical works of Logic and Grammar, I shall consider “The Friend” as both the reservoir and the living fountain of all my mind, that is, of both my powers and my attainments, and shall therefore publish all my poems in “The Friend,” as occasion rises. I shall begin with the “Fears in Solitude,” and the “Ode on France,” which will fill up the remainder of No. 11; so that my next Essay on vulgar Errors concerning Taxation, in which I have alluded to a conversation with you, will just fill No. 12 by itself.

I have been much affected by your efforts respecting poor Blake. Cannot you with propriety give me that narrative? But, above all, if you have no particular objection, no very particular and insurmountable reason against it, do, do let me have that divine narrative of John Walford,[61] which of itself stamps you a poet of the first class in the pathetic, and the painting of poetry so very rarely combined.

As to politics, I am sad at the very best. Two cabinet ministers duelling on Cabinet measures like drunken Irishmen. O heaven, Poole! this is wringing the dregs in order to drink the last drops of degradation. Such base insensibility to the awfulness of their situation and the majesty of the country! As soon as I can get them transcribed, I will send you some most interesting letters from the ablest soldier I ever met with (extra aide-de-camp to Sir J. Moore, and shot through the body at Flushing, but still alive); they will serve as a key to more than one woe-trumpet in the Apocalypse of national calamity. But the truth is, that to combine a government every way fitted as ours is for quiet, justice, freedom, and commercial activity at home, with the conditions of raising up that individual greatness, and of securing in every department the very man for the very place, which are requisite for maintaining the safety of our Empire and the Majesty of our power abroad, is a state-riddle which yet remains to be solved. I have thought myself as well employed as a private citizen can be, in drawing off well-intentioned patriots from the wrong scent and pointing out what the true evils are and why, and the exceeding difficulty of removing them without hazarding worse.... I was asked for a motto for a market clock. I uttered the following literally, without a moment’s premeditation:—

What now, O man! thou dost or mean’st to do
Will help to give thee peace, or make thee rue,
When hovering o’er the Dot this hand shall tell
The moment that secures thee Heaven or Hell.[62]

May God bless you! My kindest remembrances to Mr. Chubb, and to Ward. Pray remember me when you write to your sister and Mr. King. Oh, but Poole! do stretch a point and come. If the F. rises to a 1,000 I will frank you. Do come; never will you have layed out money better.

CLXXVII. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

December, 1809.

My dear Southey,—I suspect you have misunderstood me, and applied to the Maltese Regiment what I said of the Corsican Rangers. Both are bad enough, but of the former I know little, of course, as I was away from Malta before the regiment had left the island. But in the Essays (2 or 3) which I am now writing on Sir A. Ball, I shall mention it as an exemplification among many others of his foresight. It was a job, I have no doubt, merely to get General Valette a lucrative regiment; but G. V. is dead, and it was not such a job as that of the Corsican Rangers, which can be made appear glaring. The long and short of the story is, that the men were four fifths married, would have fought as well as the best, at home and behind their own walls, but could not be expected to fight abroad, where they had no interest. Besides, it was cruel, shameful to take 1,500 men as soldiers for any part of our enormous Empire, out of a population, man, woman, and child, not at that time more than 100,000. There were two Maltese Militia Regiments officered by their own Maltese nobility—these against the entreaties and tears of the men and officers (I myself saw them weeping), against the remonstrances and memorial (written by myself) of Sir A. B., were melted into one large one, officered by English officers, and a general affront given to the island, because General Valette had great friends at the War Office, Duke of York, etc.! This is the whole, but do not either expose yourself or me to judicial inquiries. It is one thing to know a thing, and another to be able to prove it in a law court. This remark applies to the damnable treatment of the prisoners of war at Malta.

I should have thought your facts, with which I am familiar, a confirmation of Miss Schöning.[63] Be that as it may, take my word for it, that in substance the story is as certain as that Dr. Dodd was hung. To mention one proof only, Von Hess,[64] the celebrated historian of Hamburg, and, since Lessing, the best German prosist, went himself to Nuremberg, examined into the facts officially and personally, and it was on him that I relied, though if you knew the government of Nuremberg, you would see that the first account could not have been published as it was, if it had not been too notorious even for concealment to be hoped for. After I left Germany, Von Hess had a public controversy that threatened to become a Diet concern with the magistrates of Nuremberg, for some other bitter charges against them. I have their defence of themselves, but they do not even attempt to deny the fact of Harlin and Schöning. But, indeed, Southey! it is almost as bad as if I could have mistaken e converso Patch’s trial for a novel.

Your remark on the voice is most just, but that was my purpose. Not only so, but the whole passage was inserted, and intertruded after the rest was written, reluctante amanuensi meâ, in order to unrealize it even at the expense of disnaturalizing it. Lady B. therefore pleased me by saying, “never was the golden tint of the poet more judiciously employed,” etc. For this reason, too, I introduced the simile of the leaf, etc., etc. I not only thought the “voice” part out of place, but in bad taste per se.

May God bless you all.

S. T. Coleridge.

CLXXVIII. TO THOMAS POOLE.

Grasmere, Kendal, January 28, 1810.

My dear Friend,—My “mantraps and spring guns in this garden” have hitherto existed only in the painted board, in terrorem. Of course, I have received and thank you for both your letters. What Wordsworth may do I do not know, but I think it highly probable that I shall settle in or near London. Of the fate of “The Friend” I remain in the same ignorance nearly as at the publication of the 20th November. It would make you sick were I to waste my paper by detailing the numerous instances of meanness in the mode of payment and discontinuance, especially among the Quakers. So just was the answer I once made in the presence of some “Friends” to the query: What is genuine Quakerism? Answer, The antithesis of the present Quakers. I have received this evening together with yours, one as a specimen. (N. B. Three days after the publication of the 21st Number, and sixteen days after the publication of the “Supernumerary” [number of “The Friend,” January 11, 1810], a bill upon a postmaster, an order of discontinuance, and information that any others that may come will not be paid for, as if I had been gifted with prophecy. And this precious epistle directed, “To Thomas Coleridge, of Grazemar”! And yet this Mr. —— would think himself libelled, if he were called a dishonest man.)... We will take for granted that “The Friend” can be continued. On this supposition I have lately studied “The Spectator,” and with increasing pleasure and admiration. Yet it must be evident to you that there is a class of thoughts and feelings, and these, too, the most important, even practically, which it would be impossible to convey in the manner of Addison, and which, if Addison had possessed, he would not have been Addison. Read, for instance, Milton’s prose tracts, and only try to conceive them translated into the style of “The Spectator,” or the finest part of Wordsworth’s pamphlet. It would be less absurd to wish that the serious Odes of Horace had been written in the same style as his Satires and Epistles. Consider, too, the very different objects of “The Friend,” and of “The Spectator,” and above all do not forget, that these are AWEFUL TIMES! that the love of reading as a refined pleasure, weaning the mind from GROSSER enjoyments, which it was one of “The Spectator’s” chief objects to awaken, has by that work, and those that followed (Connoisseur, World, Mirror, etc.), but still more, by Newspapers, Magazines, and Novels, been carried into excess: and “The Spectator” itself has innocently contributed to the general taste for unconnected writing, just as if “Reading made easy” should act to give men an aversion to words of more than two syllables, instead of drawing them through those words into the power of reading books in general. In the present age, whatever flatters the mind in its ignorance of its ignorance, tends to aggravate that ignorance, and, I apprehend, does on the whole do more harm than good. Have you read the debate on the Address? What a melancholy picture of the intellectual feebleness of the country! So much on the one side of the question. On the other (1) I will, preparatory to writing on any chosen subject, consider whether it can be treated popularly, and with that lightness and variety of illustration which form the charms of “The Spectator.” If it can, I will do my best. If not, next, whether yet there may not be furnished by the results of such an Essay thoughts and truths that may be so treated, and form a second Essay. (2) I shall always, besides this, have at least one number in four of rational entertainment, such as “Satyrane’s Letters,” as instructive as I can, but yet making entertainment the chief object in my own mind. But, lastly, in the Supplement of “The Friend” I shall endeavour to include whatever of higher and more abstruse meditation may be needed as the foundations of all the work after it; and the difference between those who will read and master that Supplement, and those who decline the toil, will be simply this, that what to the former will be demonstrated conclusions, the latter must start from as from postulates, and (to all whose minds have not been sophisticated by a half-philosophy) axioms. For no two things, that are yet different, can be in closer harmony than the deductions of a profound philosophy, and the dictates of plain common sense. Whatever tenets are obscure in the one, and requiring the greatest powers of abstraction to reconcile, are the same which are held in manifest contradiction by the common sense, and yet held and firmly believed, without sacrificing A to —A, or —A to A.... After this work I shall endeavour to pitch my note to the idea of a common, well-educated, thoughtful man, of ordinary talents; and the exceptions to this rule shall not form more than one fifth of the work. If with all this it will not do, well! And well it will be, in its noblest sense: for I shall have done my best. Of parentheses I may be too fond, and will be on my guard in this respect. But I am certain that no work of impassioned and eloquent reasoning ever did or could subsist without them. They are the drama of reason, and present the thought growing, instead of a mere Hortus siccus. The aversion to them is one of the numberless symptoms of a feeble Frenchified Public. One other observation: I have reason to hope for contributions from strangers. Some from you I rely on, and these will give a variety which is highly desirable—so much so, that it would weigh with me even to the admission of many things from unknown correspondents, though but little above mediocrity, if they were proportionately short, and on subjects which I should not myself treat....

May God bless you, and your affectionate

S. T. Coleridge.

CHAPTER XI
A JOURNALIST, A LECTURER, A PLAYWRIGHT
1810-1813

CHAPTER XI
A JOURNALIST, A LECTURER, A PLAYWRIGHT
1810-1813

CLXXIX. TO HIS WIFE.

Spring, 1810.

My dear Love,—I understand that Mr. De Quincey is going to Keswick to-morrow; though between ourselves he is as great a to-morrower to the full as your poor husband, and without his excuses of anxiety from latent disease and external pressure.

Now as Lieutenant Southey is with you, I fear that you could not find a bed for me if I came in on Monday or Tuesday. I not only am desirous to be with you and Sara for a while, but it would be of great importance to me to be within a post of Penrith for the next fortnight or three weeks. How long Mr. De Quincey may stay I cannot guess. He (Miss Wordsworth says) talks of a week, but Lloyd of a month! However, put yourself to no violence of inconvenience, only be sure to write to me (N. B.—to me) by the carrier to-morrow.

I am middling, but the state of my spirit of itself requires a change of scene. Catherine W. [the Wordsworths’ little daughter] has not recovered the use of her arm, etc., but is evidently recovering it, and in all other respects in better health than before,—indeed, so much better as to confirm my former opinion that nature was weak in her, and can more easily supply vital power for two thirds of her nervous system than for the whole.

May God bless you, my dear! and

S. T. Coleridge.

Hartley looks and behaves all that the fondest parent could wish. He is really handsome; at least as handsome as a face so original and intellectual can be. And Derwent is “a nice little fellow,” and no lack-wit either. I read to Hartley out of the German a series of very masterly arguments concerning the startling gross improbabilities of Esther (fourteen improbabilities are stated). It really surprised me, the acuteness and steadiness of judgment with which he answered more than half, weakened many, and at last determined that two only were not to be got over. I then read for myself and afterwards to him Eichhorn’s solution of the fourteen, and the coincidences were surprising. Indeed, Eichhorn, after a lame attempt, was obliged to give up the two which H. had declared as desperate.

CLXXX. TO THE MORGANS.

December 21, “1810.”

My dear Friends,—I am at present at Brown’s Coffee House, Mitre Court, Fleet Street. My objects are to settle something by which I can secure a certain sum weekly, sufficient for lodging, maintenance, and physician’s fees, and in the mean time to look out for a suitable place near Gray’s Inn. My immediate plan is not to trouble myself further about any introduction to Abernethy, but to write a plain, honest, and full account of my state, its history, causes, and occasions, and to send it to him with two or three pounds enclosed, and asking him to take me under his further care. If I have raised the money for the enclosure, this I shall do to-morrow. For, indeed, it is not only useless but unkind and ungrateful to you and all who love me, to trifle on any longer, depressing your spirits, and, spite of myself, gradually alienating your esteem and chilling your affection toward me. As soon as I have heard from Abernethy, I will walk over to you, and spend a few days before I enter into my lodging, and on my dread ordeal—as some kind-hearted Catholics have taught, that the soul is carried slowly along close by the walls of Paradise on its way to Purgatory, and permitted to breathe in some snatches of blissful airs, in order to strengthen its endurance during its fiery trial by the foretaste of what awaits it at the conclusion and final gaol-delivery.

I pray you, therefore, send me immediately all my books and papers with such of my linen as may be clean, in my box, by the errand cart, directed—“Mr. Coleridge, Brown’s Coffee House, Mitre Court, Fleet Street.” A couple of nails and a rope will sufficiently secure the box.

Dear, dear Mary! Dearest Charlotte! I entreat you to believe me, that if at any time my manner toward you has appeared unlike myself, this has arisen wholly either from a sense of self-dissatisfaction or from apprehension of having given you offence; for at no time and on no occasion did I ever see or imagine anything in your behaviour which did not awaken the purest and most affectionate esteem, and (if I do not grossly deceive myself) the sincerest gratitude. Indeed, indeed, my affection is both deep and strong toward you, and such too that I am proud of it.

“And looking towards the Heaven that bends above you,
Full oft I bless the lot that made me love you!”

Again and again and for ever may God bless you, and love you.

S. T. Coleridge.

J. J. Morgan, Esq., No. 7, Portland Place, Hammersmith.

CLXXXI. TO W. GODWIN.

March 15, 1811.

My dear Godwin,—I receive twice the pleasure from my recovery that it would have otherwise afforded, as it enables me to accept your kind invitation, which in this instance I might with perfect propriety and manliness thank you for, as an honour done to me. To sit at the same table with Grattan, who would not think it a memorable honour, a red letter day in the almanac of his life? No one certainly who is in any degree worthy of it. Rather than not be in the same room, I could be well content to wait at the table at which I was not permitted to sit, and this not merely for Grattan’s undoubted great talents, and still less from any entire accordance with his political opinions, but because his great talents are the tools and vehicles of his genius, and all his speeches are attested by that constant accompaniment of true genius, a certain moral bearing, a moral dignity. His love of liberty has no snatch of the mob in it.

Assure Mrs. Godwin of my anxious wishes respecting her health. The scholar Salernitanus[65] says:—

“Si tibi deficiant medici, medici tibi fiant
Hæc tria: mens hilaris, requies, moderata diæta.”

The regulated diet she already has, and now she must contrive to call in the two other doctors. God bless you.

S. T. Coleridge.

CLXXXII. TO DANIEL STUART.

Tuesday, June 4, 1811.

Dear Stuart,—I brought your umbrella in with me yester-morning, but, having forgotten it at leaving Portland Place, sent the coachman back for it, who brought what appeared to me not the same. On returning, however, with it, I could find no other, and it is certainly as good or better, but looks to me as if it were not equally new, and as if it had far more silk in it. I will, however, leave it at Brompton, and if by any inexplicable circumstance it should not prove the same, you must be content with the substitute. The family at Portland Place caught at my doubts as to the identity of it. I had hoped to have seen you this morning, it being a leisurely time in respect of fresh tidings, to have submitted to you two Essays,[66] one on the Catholic Question, and the other on Parliamentary Reform, addressed as a letter (from a correspondent) to the noblemen and members of Parliament who had associated for this purpose. The former does not exceed two columns; the latter is somewhat longer. But after the middle of this month it is probable that the Paper will be more open to a series of Articles on less momentary, though still contemporary, interests. Mr. Street seems highly pleased with what I have written this morning on the battle[67] of the 16th (May), though I apprehend the whole cannot be inserted. I am as I ought to be, most cautious and shy in recommending anything; otherwise, I should have requested Mr. Street to give insertion to the paragraphs respecting Holland, and the nature of Buonaparte’s resources, ending with the necessity of ever re-fuelling the moral feelings of the people, as to the monstrosity of the giant fiend that menaces them; [with an] allusion to Judge Grose’s opinion[68] on Drakard[69] before the occasion had passed away from the public memory. So, too, if the Duke’s return is to be discussed at all, the Article should be published before Lord Milton’s motion.[70] For though in a complex and widely controverted question, where hundreds rush into the field of combat, it is wise to defer it till the Debates in Parliament have shown what the arguments are on which most stress is laid by men in common, as in the Bullion Dispute; yet, generally, it is a great honour to the London papers, that for one argument they borrow from the parliamentary speakers, the latter borrow two from them, at all events are anticipated by them. But the true prudential rule is, to defer only when any effect of freshness or novelty is impracticable; but in most other cases to consider freshness of effect as the point which belongs to a Newspaper and distinguishes it from a library book; the former being the Zenith, and the latter the Nadir, with a number of intermediate degrees, occupied by pamphlets, magazines, reviews, satirical and occasional poems, etc., etc. Besides, in a daily newspaper, with advertisements proportioned to its sale, what is deferred must, four times in five, be extinguished. A newspaper is a market for flowers and vegetables, rather than a granary or conservatory; and the drawer of its editor, a common burial ground, not a catacomb for embalmed mummies, in which the defunct are preserved to serve in after times as medicines for the living. To turn from the Paper to myself, as candidate for the place of auxiliary to it. I drew, with Mr. Street’s consent and order, ten pounds, which I shall repay during the week as soon as I can see Mr. Monkhouse of Budge Row, who has collected that sum for me. This, therefore, I put wholly aside, and indeed expect to replace it with Mr. Green to-morrow morning. Besides this I have had five pounds from Mr. Green,[71] chiefly for the purposes of coach hire. All at once I could not venture to walk in the heat and other accidents of weather from Hammersmith to the Office; but hereafter I intend, if I continue here, to return on foot, which will reduce my coach hire for the week from eighteen shillings to nine shillings. But to walk in, I know, would take off all the blossom and fresh fruits of my spirits. I trust that I need not say, how pleasant it would be to me, if it were in my power to consider everything I could do for the “Courier,” as a mere return for the pecuniary, as well as other obligations I am under to you; in short as working off old scores. But you know how I am situated; and that by the daily labour of the brain I must acquire the daily demands of the other parts of the body. And it now becomes necessary that I should form some settled system for my support in London, and of course know what my weekly or monthly means may be. Respecting the “Courier,” I consider you not merely as a private friend, but as the Co-proprietor of a large concern, in which it is your duty to regulate yourself with relation to the interests of that concern, and of your partner in it; and so take for granted, and, indeed, wish no other, than that you and he should weigh whether or no I can be of any material use to a Paper already so flourishing, and an Evening Paper. For, all mock humility out of the question (and when I write to you, every other sort of insincerity), I see that such services as I might be able to afford, would be more important to a rising than to a risen Paper; to a morning, perhaps, more than to an evening one. You will however decide, after the experience hitherto afforded, and modifying it by the temporary circumstances of debates, press of foreign news, etc.; how far I can be of actual use by my attendance, in order to help in the things of the day, as are the paragraphs, which I have for the most part hitherto been called [upon] to contribute; and, by my efforts, to sustain the literary character of the Paper, by large articles, on open days, and [at] more leisure times.

My dear Stuart! knowing the foolish mental cowardice with which I slink off from all pecuniary subjects, and the particular weight I must feel from the sense of existing obligations to you, you will be convinced that my only motive is the desire of settling with others such a plan for myself, as may, by setting my mind at rest, enable me to realize whatever powers I possess, to as much satisfaction to those who employ them, and to my own sense of duty, as possible. If Mr. Street should think that the “Courier” does not require any auxiliary, I shall then rely on your kindness, for putting me in the way of some other paper, the principles of which are sufficiently in accordance with my own; for while cabbage stalks rot on dung hills, I will never write what, or for what, I do not think right. All that prudence can justify is NOT to write what at certain times one may yet think. God bless you and

S. T. Coleridge.

CLXXXIII. TO SIR G. BEAUMONT.

J. J. Morgan’s, Esq., 7, Portland Place, Hammersmith,
Saturday morning, December 7, 1811.

Dear Sir George,—On Wednesday night I slept in town in order to have a mask[72] taken, from which, or rather with which, Allston means to model a bust of me. I did not, therefore, receive your letter and the enclosed till Thursday night, eleven o’clock, on my return from the lecture; and early on Friday morning, I was roused from my first sleep by an agony of toothache, which continued almost without intermission the whole day, and has left my head and the whole of my trunk, “not a man but a bruise.”[73] What can I say more, my dear Sir George, than that I deeply feel the proof of your continued friendship, and pray from my inmost soul that more perseverance in efforts of duty may render me more worthy of your kindness than I at present am? Ingratitude, like all crimes that are at the same time vices—bad as malady, and worse as symptom—is of so detestable a nature that an honest man will mourn in silence under real injuries, [rather] than hazard the very suspicion of it, and will be slow to avail himself of Lord Bacon’s remark[74] (much as he may admire its profundity),—“Crimen ingrati animi, quod magnis ingeniis haud raro objicitur, sæpius nil aliud est quam perspicacia quædam in causam beneficii collati.” Yet that man has assuredly tenfold reason to be grateful who can be so, both head and heart, who, at once served and honoured, knows himself more delighted by the motive that influenced his friend than by the benefit received by himself; were it only perhaps for this cause—that the consciousness of always repaying the former in kind takes away all regret that he is incapable of returning the latter.

Mr. Dawe, Royal Associate, who plastered my face for me, says that he never saw so excellent a mask, and so unaffected by any expression of pain or uneasiness. On Tuesday, at the farthest, a cast will be finished, which I was vain enough to desire to be packed up and sent to Dunmow. With it you will find a chalk drawing of my face,[75] which I think far more like than any former attempt, excepting Allston’s full-length portrait of me,[76] which, with all his casts, etc., two or three valuable works of the Venetian school, and his Jason—almost finished, and on which he had employed eighteen months without intermission—are lying at Leghorn, with no chance of procuring them. There will likewise be an epistolary essay for Lady Beaumont on the subject of religion in reference to my own faith; it was too long to send by the post.

Dawe is engaged on a picture (the figures about four feet) from my poem of Love.

She leaned beside the armed man,
The statue of the armed knight;
She stood and listened to my harp
Amid the lingering light.
His dying words—but when I reached, etc.
All impulses of soul and sense, etc.

His sketch is very beautiful, and has more expression than I ever found in his former productions—excepting, indeed, his Imogen.

Allston is hard at work on a large Scripture piece—the dead man recalled to life by touching the bones of the Prophet. He models every figure. Dawe, who was delighted with the Cupid and Psyche, seemed quite astonished at the facility and exquisiteness with which Allston modelled. Canova at Rome expressed himself to me in very warm terms of admiration on the same subject. He means to exhibit but two or at the most three pictures, all poetical or history painting, in part by my advice. It seemed to me impolitic to appear to be trying in half a dozen ways, as if his mind had not yet discovered its main current. The longer I live the more deeply am I convinced of the high importance, as a symptom, of the love of beauty in a young painter. It is neither honourable to a young man’s heart or head to attach himself year after year to old or deformed objects, comparatively too so easy, especially if bad drawing and worse colouring leaves the spectator’s imagination at lawless liberty, and he cries out, “How very like!” just as he would at a coal in the centre of the fire, or at a frost-figure on a window pane. It is on this, added to his quiet unenvious spirit, to his lofty feelings concerning his art, and to the religious purity of his moral character, that I chiefly rest my hopes of Allston’s future fame. His best productions seem to please him principally because he sees and has learnt something which enables him to promise himself, “I shall do better in my next.”

I have not been at the “Courier” office for some months past. I detest writing politics, even on the right side, and when I discovered that the “Courier” was not the independent paper I had been led to believe, and had myself over and over again asserted, I wrote no more for it. Greatly, indeed, do I prefer the present Ministers to the leaders of any other party, but indiscriminate support of any class of men I dare not give, especially when there is so easy and honourable an alternative as not to write politics at all, which, henceforth, nothing but blank necessity shall compel me to do. I will write for the Permanent, or not at all. “The Comet” therefore I have never seen or heard of it, yet most true it is that I myself have composed some verses on the comet, but I am quite certain that no one ever saw them, for the best of all reasons, that my own brain is the only substance on which they have been recorded. I will, however, consign them to paper, and send them to you with the “Courier” poem as soon as I can procure it, for the curiosity of the thing....

My most affectionate respects to Lady Beaumont, and believe me, dear Sir George, with heartfelt regard,

Your obliged and grateful friend,
S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. Were you in town, I should be very sorry, indeed, to see you in Fetter Lane.[77] The lectures were meant for the young men of the City. Several of my friends join to take notes, and if I can correct what they can shape out of them into any tolerable form, I will send them to you. On Monday I lecture on “Love and the Female Character as displayed by Shakespeare.” Good Dr. Bell is in town. He came from Keswick, all delight with my little Sara, and quite enchanted with Southey. Some flights of admiration in the form of questions to me (“Did you ever see anything so finely conceived? so profoundly thought? as this passage in his review on the Methodists? or on the Education?” etc.) embarrassed me in a very ridiculous way; and, I verily believe, that my odd way of hesitating left on Bell’s mind some shade of a suspicion, as if I did not like to hear my friend so highly extolled. Half a dozen words from Southey would have precluded this, without diminution to his own fame—I mean, in conversation with Dr. Bell.

CLXXXIV. TO J. J. MORGAN.

Keswick,[78] Sunday, February 28, 1812.

My dear Morgan,—I stayed a day in Kendal in order to collect the reprint of “The Friend,” and reached Keswick on Tuesday last before dinner, having taken Hartley and Derwent with me from Ambleside. Of course the first evening was devoted Laribus domesticis, to Southey and his and my children. My own are all the fondest father could pray for; and little Sara does honour to her mother’s anxieties, reads French tolerably, and Italian fluently, and I was astonished at her acquaintance with her native language. The word “hostile” occurring in what she read to me, I asked her what “hostile” meant? and she answered at once, “Why! inimical; only that ‘inimical’ is more often used for things and measures and not, as ‘hostile’ is, to persons and nations.” If I had dared, I should have urged Mrs. C. to let me take her to London for four or five months, and return with Southey, but I feared it might be inconvenient to you, and I knew it would be presumptuous in me to bring her to you. But she is such a sweet-tempered, meek, blue-eyed fairy and so affectionate, trustworthy, and really serviceable! Derwent is the self-same, fond, small, Samuel Taylor Coleridge as ever. When I went for them from Mr. Dawes,[79] he came in dancing for joy, while Hartley turned pale[80] and trembled all over,—then after he had taken some cold water, instantly asked me some questions about the connection of the Greek with the Latin, which latter he has just begun to learn. Poor Derwent, who has by no means strong health (having inherited his poor father’s tenderness of bowels and stomach, and consequently capriciousness of animal spirits), has complained to me (having no other possible grievance) “that Mr. Dawes does not love him, because he can’t help crying when he is scolded, and because he ain’t such a genius as Hartley—and that though Hartley should have done the same thing, yet all the others are punished, and Mr. Dawes only looks at Hartley and never scolds him, and that all the boys think it very unfair—he is a genius.” This was uttered in low spirits and a tenderness brought on by my petting, for he adores his brother. Indeed, God be praised, they all love each other. I was delighted that Derwent, of his own accord, asked me about little Miss Brent that used to play with him at Mr. and Mrs. Morgan’s, adding that he had almost forgot what sort of a lady she was, “only she was littler,—less I mean—(this was said hastily and laughing at his blunder) than Mama.” A gentleman who took a third of the chaise with me from Ambleside, and whom I found a well-informed and thinking man, said after two hours’ knowledge of us, that the two boys united would be a perfect representation of myself.

I trust I need not say that I should have written on the second day if nothing had happened; but from the dreadful dampness of the house, worse than it was in the rudest state when I first lived in it, and the weather, too, all storm and rain, I caught a violent cold which almost blinded me by inflammation of both my eyes, and for three days bore all the symptoms of an ague or intermittent fever. Knowing I had no time to lose, I took the most Herculean remedies, among others a solution of arsenic, and am now as well as when I left you, and see no reason to fear a relapse. I passed through Grasmere; but did not call on Wordsworth. I hear from Mrs. C. that he treats the affair as a trifle, and only wonders at my resenting it, and that Dorothy Wordsworth before my arrival expressed her confident hope that I should come to them at once! I who “for years past had been an ABSOLUTE NUISANCE in the family.” This illness has thrown me behindhand; so that I cannot quit Keswick till the end of the week. On Friday I shall return by way of Ambleside, probably spend a day with Charles Lloyd.... It will not surprise you that the statements respecting me and Montagu and Wordsworth have been grossly perverted: and yet, spite of all this, there is not a friend of Wordsworth’s, I understand, who does not severely blame him, though they execrate the Montagus yet more heavily. But the tenth part of the truth is not known. Would you believe it possible that Wordsworth himself stated my wearing powder as a proof positive that I never could have suffered any pain of mind from the affair, and that it was all pretence!! God forgive him! At Liverpool I shall either give lectures, if I can secure a hundred pounds for them, or return immediately to you. At all events, I shall not remain there beyond a fortnight, so that I shall be with you before you have changed houses. Mrs. Coleridge seems quite satisfied with my plans, and abundantly convinced of my obligations to your and Mary’s kindness to me. Nothing (she said) but the circumstance of my residing with you could reconcile her to my living in London. Southey is the semper idem. It is impossible for a good heart not to esteem and to love him; but yet the love is one fourth, the esteem all the remainder. His children are, 1. Edith, seven years; 2. Herbert, five; 3. Bertha, four; 4. Catharine, a year and a half.

I had hoped to have heard from you by this time. I wrote from Slough, from Liverpool, and from Kendal. Why need I send my kindest love to Mary and Charlotte? I would not return if I had a doubt that they believed me to be in the very inmost of my being their and your affectionate and grateful and constant friend,

S. T. Coleridge.

CLXXXV. TO HIS WIFE.

71, Berners Street, Tuesday, April 21, 1812.

My dear Love,—Everything is going on so very well, so much beyond my expectation, that I will not revert to anything unpleasant to damp good news with. The last receipt for the insurance is now before me, the date the 4th of May. Be assured that before April is past, you shall receive both receipts, this and the one for the present year, in a frank.

In the first place, my health, spirits, and disposition to activity have continued such since my arrival in town, that every one has been struck with the change, and the Morgans say they had never before seen me myself. I feel myself an altered man, and dare promise you that you shall never have to complain of, or to apprehend, my not opening and reading your letters. Ever since I have been in town, I have never taken any stimulus of any kind, till the moment of my getting into bed, except a glass of British white wine after dinner, and from three to four glasses of port, when I have dined out. Secondly, my lectures have been taken up most warmly and zealously by Sir Thomas Bernard,[81] Sir George Beaumont, Mr. Sotheby, etc., and in a few days, I trust that you will be agreeably surprised with the mode in which Sir T. B. hopes and will use his best exertions to have them announced. Thirdly, Gale and Curtis are in high spirits and confident respecting the sale of “The Friend,”[82] and the call for a second edition, after the complemental numbers have been printed, and not less so respecting the success of the other work, the Propædia (or Propaideia) Cyclica, and are desirous to have the terms properly ratified, and signed as soon as possible. Nothing intervenes to overgloom my mind, but the sad state of health of Mr. Morgan, a more faithful and zealous friend than whom no man ever possessed. Thank God! my safe arrival, the improvement of my health and spirits, and my smiling prospects have already exerted a favourable influence on him. Yet I dare not disguise from myself that there is cause for alarm to those who love and value him. But do not allude to this subject in your letters, for to be thought ill or to have his state of health spoken of, agitates and depresses him.

As soon as ever I have settled the lecture room, which perhaps will be Willis’s in Hanover Square, the price of which is at present ten guineas a time, I will the very first thing pay the insurance and send off a parcel of books for Hartley, Derwent, and dear Sara, whom I kissed seven times in the shape of her pretty letterlet.

My poor darling Derwent! I shall be most anxious to receive a letter from you, or from himself, about him.

In giving my love to Mrs. Lovell, tell her that I have not since the day after my arrival been able to go into the city, my business having employed me wholly either in writing or in traversing the West End of the town. I dined with Lady Beaumont and her sister on Saturday, for Sir George was engaged to Sir T. Bernard. He however came and sat with us to the very last moment, and I dine with him to-day, and Allston is to be of the party. The bust and the picture from Genevieve are at the Royal Academy, and already are talked of. Dawe and I will be of mutual service to each other. As soon as the pictures are settled, that is, in the first week of May, he means to treat himself with a fortnight’s relaxation at the Lakes. He is a very modest man, his manners not over polished, and his worst point is that he is (at least, I have found him so) a fearful questionist, whenever he thinks he can pick up any information, or ideas, poetical, historical, topographical, or artistical, that he can make bear on his profession. But he is sincere, friendly, strictly moral in every respect, I firmly believe even to innocence, and in point of cheerful indefatigableness of industry, in regularity, and temperance—in short, in a glad, yet quiet, devotion of his whole being to the art he has made choice of, he is the only man I ever knew who goes near to rival Southey—gentlemanly address, person, physiognomy, knowledge, learning, and genius being of course wholly excluded from the comparison. God knows my heart! and that it is my full belief and conviction, that taking all together, there does not exist the man who could without flattery or delusion be called Southey’s equal. It is quite delightful to hear how he is spoken of by all good people. Dawe will doubtless take him. Were S. and I rich men, we would have ourselves and all of you, short and tall, in one family picture. Pray receive Dawe as a friend. I called on Murray, who complained that by Dr. Bell’s delays and irresolutions and scruples, the book “On the Origin,”[83] etc., instead of 3,000 in three weeks, which he has no doubt would have been the sale had it been brought out at the fit time, will not now sell 300. I told him that I believed otherwise, but much would depend on the circumstance whether temper or prudence would have most influence on the Athenian critic and his friend Brougham. If, as I hoped, the former, and the work should be reviewed in the “Edinburgh Review,” if they took up the gauntlet thrown at them, then there was no doubt but that a strong tide of sale would set in. Though verily this gauntlet was of weighty metal, though of polished steel, and being thrown at rather than down, it was challenging a man to fight by a blow that threatened to brain him. I have seen Dr. Bell and shall dine with him at Sir T. Bernard’s on Monday next. The venerable Bishop of Durham[84] has sent me a very kind message, that though he cannot himself appear in a hired lecture room, yet he will be not only my subscriber but use his best influence with his acquaintance. I am very anxious that my books should be sent forward as soon as possible. They may be sent at three different times, with a week’s intervention. But there is one, scarcely a book, but a collection of loose sheets tied up together at Grasmere, which I want immediately, and, if possible, would have sent up by the coach from Kendal or Penrith. It is a German Romance with some name beginning with an A, followed by “oder Die Glückliche Inseln.” It makes two volumes, but several of the sheets are missing, at least were so when I put them together. If sent off immediately, it would be of serious benefit to me in my lectures. Miss Hutchinson knows them, and will probably recollect the sheets I allude to, and these are what I especially want.

One pair only of breeches were in the parcel, and I am sadly off for stockings, but the white and under ones I can buy here cheap, but if young Mr. White could procure half a dozen or even a dozen pair of black silk made as stout and weighty as possible, I would not mind giving seventeen shillings per pair, if only they can be relied on, which one cannot do in London. A double knock. I meant to read over your letter again, lest I should have forgot anything. If I have, I will answer it in my next.

God bless you and your affectionate husband,

S. T. Coleridge.

Has Southey read “Childe Harold”? All the world is talking of it. I have not, but from what I hear it is exactly on the plan that I myself had not only conceived six years ago, but have the whole scheme drawn out in one of my old memorandum books. My dear Edith, and my dear Moon![85] Though I have scarce room to write it, yet I love you very much.

CLXXXVI. TO THE SAME.

71, Berners Street, April 24, 1812.

My dear Sara,—Give my kind love to Southey, and inform him that I have, egomet his ipsis meis oculis, seen Nobs, alive, well, and in full fleece; that after the death of Dr. Samuel Dove,[86] of Doncaster, who did not survive the loss of his faithful wife, Mrs. Dorothy Dove, more than eleven months, Nobs was disposed of by his executors to Longman and Clements, Musical Instrument Manufacturers, whose grand pianoforte hearses he now draws in the streets of London. The carter was astonished at the enthusiasm with which I intreated him to stop for half a minute, and the embrace I gave to Nobs, who evidently understood me, and wistfully with such a sad expression in his eye, seemed to say, “Ah, my kind old master, Doctor Daniel, and ah! my mild mistress, his dear duteous Dolly Dove, my gratitude lies deeper than my obligation; it is not merely skin-deep! Ah, what I have been! Oh, what I am! his naked, neighing, night-wandering, new-skinned, nibbling, noblenursling, Nobs!”

His legs and hoofs are more than half sheepified, and his fleece richer than one ever sees in the Leicester breed, but not so fine as might have been the case had the merino cross been introduced before the surprising accident and more surprising remedy took place. More surprising I say, because the first happened to St. Bartholomew (for there were skinners even in the days of St. Bartholomew), but the other never before there was no Dr. Daniel Dove. I trust that Southey will now not hesitate to record and transmit to posterity so remarkable a fact. I am delighted, for now malice itself will not dare to attribute the story to my invention. If I can procure the money, I will attempt to purchase Nobs, and send him down to Keswick by short journeys for Herbert and Derwent to ride upon, provided you can get the field next us.

I have not been able to procure a frank, but I daresay you will be glad to receive the enclosed receipt even with the drawback of postage.

Everything, my dear, goes on as prosperously as you could yourself wish. Sir T. Bernard has taken Willis’s Rooms, King Street, St. James’s, for me, at only four guineas a week, fires, benches, etc., included, and I expect the lectures to commence on the first Tuesday in May. But at the present moment I need both the advice and the aid of Southey. The “Friends” have arrived in town. I am at work on the Supplemental Numbers, and it is of the last importance that they should be brought out as quickly as possible during the flush and fresh breeze of my popularity; but this I cannot do without knowing whether Mr. Wordsworth will transmit to me the two finishing Essays on Epitaphs.[87] It is, I know and feel, a very delicate business; yet I wish Southey would immediately write to Wordsworth and urge him to send them by the coach, either to J. J. Morgan, Esq., 71, Berners Street, or to Messrs. Gale and Curtis, Booksellers, Paternoster Row, with as little delay as possible, or if he decline it, that Southey should apprize me as soon as possible.

S. T. Coleridge.

The Morgans desire to be kindly remembered, and Charlotte Brent (tell Derwent) hopes he has not forgot his old playfellow.

CLXXXVII. TO CHARLES LAMB.

May 2, 1812.

My dear Charles,—I should almost deserve what I have suffered, if I refused even to put my life in hazard in defence of my own honour and veracity, and in satisfaction of the honour of a friend. I say honour, in the latter instance, singly, because I never felt as a matter of serious complaint, what was stated to have been said (for this, though painfully aggravated, was yet substantially true)—but by WHOM it was said, and to whom, and how and when. Grievously unseasonable therefore as it is, that I should again be overtaken and hurried back by the surge, just as I had begun to feel the firm ground under my feet—just as I had flattered myself, and given reason to my hospitable friends to flatter themselves, that I had regained tranquillity, and had become quite myself—at the time, too, when every thought should be given to my lectures, on the success or failure of my efforts in which no small part of my reputation and future prospects will depend—yet if Wordsworth, upon reflection, adheres to the plan proposed, I will not draw back. It is right, however, that I should state one or two things. First, that it has been my constant desire that evil should not propagate evil—or the unhappy accident become the means of spreading dissension. (2) That I never quarrelled with Mr. Montagu—say rather, for that is the real truth, that Mr. Montagu never was, or appeared to be, a man with whom I could, without self-contempt, allow myself to quarrel—and lastly, that in the present business there are but three possible cases—either (1) Mr. Wordsworth said what I solemnly aver that I most distinctly recollect Mr. Montagu’s representing him as having said, and which I understood, not merely as great unkindness and even cruelty, but as an intentional means of putting an end to our long friendship, or to the terms at least, under which it had for so long a period subsisted—or (2), Mr. Montagu has grossly misrepresented Wordsworth, and most cruelly and wantonly injured me—or (3), I have wantonly invented and deliberately persevered in atrocious falsehoods, which place me in the same relation to Mr. Montagu as (in the second case) Mr. Montagu would stand in to me. If, therefore, Mr. Montagu declares to my face that he did not say what I solemnly aver that he did—what must be the consequence, unless I am a more abject coward than I have hitherto suspected, I need not say. Be the consequences what they may, however, I will not shrink from doing my duty; but previously to the meeting I should very much wish to transmit to Wordsworth a statement which I long ago began, with the intention of sending it to Mrs. Wordsworth’s sister,—but desisted in consequence of understanding that she had already decided the matter against me. My reason for wishing this is that I think it right that Wordsworth should know, and have the means of ascertaining, some conversations which yet I could not publicly bring forward without hazarding great disquiet in a family known (though slightly) to Wordsworth—(2) Because common humanity would embarrass me in stating before a man what I and others think of his wife—and lastly, certain other points which my own delicacy and that due to Wordsworth himself and his family, preclude from being talked of. For Wordsworth ought not to forget that, whatever influence old associations may have on his mind respecting Montagu, yet that I never respected or liked him—for if I had ever in a common degree done so, I should have quarrelled with him long before we arrived in London. Yet all these facts ought to be known—because supposing Montagu to affirm what I am led to suppose he has—then nothing remains but the comparative probability of our two accounts, and for this the state of my feelings towards Wordsworth and his family, my opinion of Mr. and Mrs. Montagu, and my previous intention not to lodge with them in town, are important documents as far as they do not rely on my own present assertions. Woe is me, that a friendship of fifteen years should come to this! and such a friendship, in which I call God Almighty to be my witness, as I ever thought it no more than my duty, so did I ever feel a readiness to prefer him to myself, yea, even if life and outward reputation itself had been the pledge required. But this is now vain talking. Be it, however, remembered that I have never wandered beyond the one single complaint, that I had been cruelly and unkindly treated—that I made no charge against my friend’s veracity, even in respect to his charges against me—that I have explained the circumstance to those only who had already more or less perfectly become acquainted with our difference, or were certain to hear of it from others, and that except on this one point, no word of reproach, or even of subtraction from his good name, as a good man, or from his merits as a great man, ever escaped me. May God bless you, my dear Charles.

S. T. Coleridge.

CLXXXVIII. TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

71, Berners Street. Monday, May 4, 1812.

I will divide my statement, which I will endeavour to send you to-morrow, into two parts, in separate letters. The latter, commencing from the Sunday night, 28 October, 1810, that is, that on which the communication was made to me, and which will contain my solemn avowal of what was said by Mr. and Mrs. Montagu, you will make what use of you please—but the former I write to you, and in confidence—yet only as far as to your own heart it shall appear evident, that in desiring it I am actuated by no wish to shrink personally from any test, not involving an acknowledgement of my own degradation, and so become a false witness against myself, but only by delicacy towards the feelings of others, and the dread of spreading the curse of dissension. But, Wordsworth! the very message you sent by Lamb and which Lamb did not deliver to me from the anxiety not to add fuel to the flame, sufficiently proves what I had learnt on my first arrival at Keswick, and which alone prevented my going to Grasmere—namely, that you had prejudged the case. As soon as I was informed that you had denied having used certain expressions, I did not hesitate a moment (nor was it in my power to do so) to give you my fullest faith, and approve to my own consciousness the truth of my declaration, that I should have felt it as a blessing, though my life had the same instant been hazarded as the pledge, could I with firm conviction have given Montagu the lie, at the conclusion of his story, even as, at the very first sentence, I exclaimed—“Impossible! It is impossible!” The expressions denied were indeed only the most offensive part to the feelings—but at the same time I learnt that you did not hesitate instantly to express your conviction that Montagu never said those words and that I had invented them—or (to use your own words) “had forgotten myself.” Grievously indeed, if I know aught of my nature, must I have forgotten both myself and common honesty, could I have been villain enough to have invented and persevered in such atrocious falsehoods. Your message was that “if I declined an explanation, you begged I would no longer continue to talk about the affair.” When, Wordsworth, did I ever decline an explanation? From you I expected one, and had a right to expect it—for let Montagu have added what he may, still that which remained was most unkind and what I had little deserved from you, who might by a single question have learnt from me that I never made up my mind to lodge with Montagu and had tacitly acquiesced in it at Keswick to tranquillise Mrs. Coleridge, to whom Mrs. Montagu had made the earnest professions of watching and nursing me, and for whom this and her extreme repugnance to my original, and much wiser, resolution of going to Edinburgh and placing myself in the house, and under the constant eye, of some medical man, were the sole grounds of her assent that I should leave the North at all. Yet at least a score of times have I begun to write a detailed account, to Wales[88] and afterwards to Grasmere, and gave it up from excess of agitation,—till finally I learnt that all of your family had decided against me unheard—and that [you begged] I would no longer talk about it. If, Wordsworth, you had but done me the common justice of asking those with whom I have been most intimate and confidential since my first arrival in Town in Oct., 1810, you would have received other negative or positive proofs how little I needed the admonition or deserve the sarcasm. Talk about it? O God! it has been talked about! and that it had, was the sole occasion of my disclosing it even to Mary Lamb, the first person who heard of it from me and that not voluntarily—but that morning a friend met me, and communicated what so agitated me that then having previously meant to call at Lamb’s I was compelled to do so from faintness and universal trembling, in order to sit down. Even to her I did not intend to mention it; but alarmed by the wildness and paleness of my countenance and agitation I had no power to conceal, she entreated me to tell her what was the matter. In the first attempt to speak, my feelings overpowered me; an agony of weeping followed, and then, alarmed at my own imprudence and conscious of the possible effect on her health and mind if I left her in that state of suspense, I brought out convulsively some such words as—“Wordsworth, Wordsworth has given me up. He has no hope of me—I have been an absolute nuisance[89] in his family”—and when long weeping had relieved me, and I was able to relate the occurrence connectedly, she can bear witness for me that, disgraceful as it was that I should be made the topic of vulgar gossip, yet that “had the whole and ten times more been proclaimed by a speaking-trumpet from the chimneys, I should have smiled at it—or indulged indignation only as far as it excited me to pleasurable activity—but that you had said it, this and this only, was the sting! the scorpion-tooth!” Mr. Morgan and afterwards his wife and her sister were made acquainted with the whole case—and why? Not merely that I owed it to their ardent friendship, which has continued to be mainly my comfort and my only support, but because they had already heard of it, in part—because a most intimate and dear friend of Mr. and Mrs. Montagu’s had urged Mr. Morgan to call at the Montagus in order to be put on his guard against me. He came to me instantly, told me that I had enemies at work against my character, and pressed me to leave the hotel and to come home with him—with whom I have been ever since, with the exception of a few intervals when, from the bitter consciousness of my own infirmities and increasing irregularity of temper, I took lodgings, against his will, and was always by his zealous friendship brought back again. If it be allowed to call any one on earth Saviour, Morgan and his family have been my Saviours, body and soul. For my moral will was, and I fear is, so weakened relatively to my duties to myself, that I cannot act, as I ought to do, except under the influencing knowledge of its effects on those I love and believe myself loved by. To him likewise I explained the affair; but neither from him or his family has one word ever escaped me concerning it. Last autumn Mr. and Mrs. Southey came to town, and at Mr. Ray’s at Richmond, as we were walking alone in the garden, the subject was introduced, and it became my duty to state the whole affair to them, even as the means of transmitting it to you. With these exceptions I do not remember ever to have made any one my confidant—though in two or three instances I have alluded to the suspension of our familiar intercourse without explanation, but even here only where I knew or fully believed the persons to have already heard of it. Such was Mrs. Clarkson, who wrote to me in consequence of one sentence in a letter to her; yet even to her I entered into no detail, and disclosed nothing that was not necessary to my own defence in not continuing my former correspondence. In short, the one only thing which I have to blame in myself was that in my first letter to Sir G. Beaumont I had concluded with a desponding remark allusive to the breach between us, not in the slightest degree suspecting that he was ignorant of it. In the letters, which followed, I was compelled to say more (though I never detailed the words which had been uttered to me) in consequence of Lady Beaumont’s expressed apprehension and alarm lest in the advertisement for my lectures the sentence “concerning the Living Poets” contained an intention on my part to attack your literary merits. The very thought, that I could be imagined capable of feeling vindictively toward you at all, much more of gratifying the passion in so despicable as well as detestable manner, agitated me. I sent her Ladyship the verses composed after your recitation of the great Poem at Coleorton, and desired her to judge whether it was possible that a man, who had written that poem, could be capable of such an act, and in a letter to Sir G. B., anxious to remove from his mind the assumption that I had been agitated by the disclosure of any till then unknown actions of mine or parts of conduct, I endeavoured to impress him with the real truth that not the facts disclosed, but the manner and time and the person by whom and the person to whom they had been disclosed, formed the whole ground of the breach. And writing in great agitation I once again used the same words which had venially burst from me the moment Montagu had ended his account. “And this is cruel! this is base!” I did not reflect on it till it was irrevocable—and for that one word, the only word of positive reproach that ever escaped from me, I feel sorrow—and assure you, that there is no permanent feeling in my heart which corresponds to it. Talk about it? Those who have seen me and been with me, day by day, for so many many months could have told you, how anxiously every allusion to the subject was avoided—and with abundant reason—for immediate and palpable derangement of body as well as spirits regularly followed it. Besides, had there not existed in your mind—let me rather say, if ever there had existed any portion of esteem and regard for me since the autumn of 1810, would it have been possible that your quick and powerful judgement could have overlooked the gross improbability, that I should first invent and then scatter abroad for talk at public tables the phrases which (Mr. Robinson yesterday informed me) Mr. Sharon Turner was indelicate enough to trumpet abroad at Longman’s table? I at least will call on Mr. Sharon and demand his authority. It is my full conviction, that in no one of the hundred tables at which any particulars of our breach have been mentioned, could the authority be traced back to those who had received the account from myself.

It seemed unnatural to me, nay, it was unnatural to me to write to you or to any of your family with a cold exclusion of the feelings which almost overpower me even at this moment, and I therefore write this preparatory letter to disburthen my heart, as it were, before I sit down to detail my recollections simply, and unmixed with the anguish which, spite of my best efforts, accompany them.

But one thing more, the last complaint that you will hear from me, perhaps. When without my knowledge dear Mary Lamb, just then on the very verge of a relapse, wrote to Grasmere, was it kind or even humane to have returned such an answer, as Lamb deemed it unadvisable to shew me; but which I learnt from the only other person, who saw the answer, amounted in substance to a sneer on my reported high spirits and my wearing powder? When and to whom did I ever make a merit of my sufferings? Is it consistent now to charge me with going about complaining to everybody, and now with my high spirits? Was I to carry a gloomy face into every society? or ought I not rather to be grateful that in the natural activity of my intellect God had given me a counteracting principle to the intensity of my feelings, and a means of escaping from a part of the pressure? But for this I had been driven mad, and yet for how many months was there a continual brooding and going on of the one gnawing recollection behind the curtain of my outward being, even when I was most exerting myself, and exerting myself more in order the more to benumb it! I might have truly said with Desdemona:—

“I am not merry, but I do beguile
The Thing I am, by seeming otherwise.”

And as to the powder, it was first put in to prevent my taking cold after my hair had been thinned, and I was advised to continue it till I became wholly grey, as in its then state it looked as if I had dirty powder in my hair, and even when known to be only the everywhere-mixed-grey, yet contrasting with a face even younger than my real age it gave a queer and contradictory character to my whole appearance. Whatever be the result of this long-delayed explanation, I have loved you and yours too long and too deeply to have it in my own power to cease to do so.

S. T. Coleridge.

CLXXXIX. TO DANIEL STUART.

May 8, 1812.

My dear Stuart,—I send you seven or eight tickets,[90] entreating you, if pre-engagements or your health does not preclude it, to bring a group with you; as many ladies as possible; but gentlemen if you cannot muster ladies—for else I shall not only have been left in the lurch as to the actual receipts by my great patrons (the five hundred half-promised are likely to shrink below fifty) but shall absolutely make a ridiculous appearance. The tickets are transferable. If you can find occasion for more, pray send for them to me, as (what it really will be) a favour done to myself.

I am anxious to see you, and to learn how far Bath has improved or (to use a fashionable slang phrase) disimproved your health.

Sir James and Lady Mackintosh are I hear at Bath Hotel, Jermyn Street. Do you think it will be taken amiss if I enclosed two or three tickets and cards with my respectful congratulations on his safe return.[91] I abhor the doing anything that could be even interpreted into servility, and yet feel increasingly the necessity of not neglecting the courtesies of life....

God bless you, my dear sir, and your obliged and affectionate friend,

S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. Mr. Morgan has left his card for you.

CXC. TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

71, Berners Street,
Monday afternoon, 3 o’clock, May 11, 1812.

My dear Wordsworth,—I declare before God Almighty that at no time, even in my sorest affliction, did even the possibility occur to me of ever doubting your word. I never ceased for a moment to have faith in you, to love and revere you; though I was unable to explain an unkindness, which seemed anomalous in your character. Doubtless it would have been better, wiser, and more worthy of my relation to you, had I immediately written to you a full account of what had happened—especially as the person’s language concerning your family was such as nothing but the wild general counter-panegyric of the same person almost in the same breath of yourself—as a converser, etc.,—could have justified me in not resenting to the uttermost....[92] All these, added to what I mentioned in my letter to you, may not justify, but yet must palliate, the only offence I ever committed against you in deed or word or thought—that is, the not writing to you and trusting instead to our common friends. Since I left you my pocket books have been my only full confidants,[93]—and though instructed by prudence to write so as to be intelligible to no being on earth but yourself and your family, they for eighteen months together would furnish proof that in anguish or induration I yet never ceased both to honour and love you.

S. T. Coleridge.

I need not say, of course, that your presence at the Lectures, or anywhere else, will be gratifying to me.

CXCI. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

[May 12, 1812.]

My dear Southey,—The awful event of yester-afternoon has forced me to defer my Lectures to Tuesday, the 19th, by advice of all my patrons. The same thought struck us all at the same moment, so that our letters might be said to meet each other. I write now to urge you, if it be in your power, to give one day or two of your time to write something in your impressive way on that theme which no one I meet seems to feel as they ought to do,—which, I find scarcely any but ourselves estimate according to its true gigantic magnitude—I mean the sinking down of Jacobinism below the middle and tolerably educated classes into the readers and all-swallowing auditors in tap-rooms, etc.; and the [political sentiments in the] “Statesman,” “Examiner,” etc. I have ascertained that throughout the great manufacturing counties, Whitbread’s, Burdett’s, and Waithman’s speeches and the leading articles of the “Statesman” and “Examiner” are printed in ballad [shape] and sold at a halfpenny or a penny each. I was turned numb, and then sick, and then into a convulsive state of weeping on the first tidings—just as if Perceval[94] had been my near and personal friend. But good God! the atrocious sentiments universal among the populace, and even the lower order of householders. On my return from the “Courier,” where I had been to offer my services if I could do anything for them on this occasion, I was faint from the heat and much walking, and took that opportunity of going into the tap-room of a large public house frequented about one o’clock by the lower orders. It was really shocking, nothing but exultation! Burdett’s health drank with a clatter of pots and a sentiment given to at least fifty men and women—“May Burdett soon be the man to have sway over us!” These were the very words. “This is but the beginning.” “More of these damned scoundrels must go the same way, and then poor people may live.” “Every man might maintain his family decent and comfortable, if the money were not picked out of our pockets by these damned placemen.” “God is above the devil, I say, and down to Hell with him and all his brood, the Ministers, men of Parliament fellows.” “They won’t hear Burdett; no! he is a Christian man and speaks for the poor,” etc., etc. I do not think I have altered a word.

My love to Sara, and I have received everything right. The plate will go as desired, and among it a present to Sariola and Edith from good old Mr. Brent, who had great delight in hearing them talked of. It was wholly the old gentleman’s own thought. Bless them both!

The affair between Wordsworth and me seems settled, much against my first expectation from the message I received from him and his refusal to open a letter from me. I have not yet seen him, but an explanation has taken place. I sent by Robinson an attested, avowed statement of what Mr. and Mrs. Montagu told me, and Wordsworth has sent me an unequivocal denial of the whole in spirit and of the most offensive passages in letter as well as spirit, and I instantly informed him that were ten thousand Montagus to swear against it, I should take his word, not ostensibly only, but with inward faith!

To-morrow I will write out the passage from “Apuleius,” and send the letter to Rickman. It is seldom that want of leisure can be fairly stated as an excuse for not writing; but really for the last ten days I can honestly do it, if you will but allow a due portion to agitated feelings. The subscription is languid indeed compared with the expectations. Sir T. Bernard almost pledged himself for my success. However, he has done his best, and so has Lady Beaumont, who herself procured me near thirty names. I should have done better by myself for the present, but in the future perhaps it will be better as it is.

CXCII. TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.[95]

71, Berners Street,
Monday noon, December 7, 1812.

Write? My dear Friend! Oh that it were in my power to be with you myself instead of my letter. The Lectures I could give up; but the rehearsal of my Play commences this week, and upon this depends my best hopes of leaving town after Christmas, and living among you as long as I live. Strange, strange are the coincidences of things! Yesterday Martha Fricker dined here, and after tea I had asked question after question respecting your children, first one, then the other; but, more than all, concerning Thomas, till at length Mrs. Morgan said, “What ails you, Coleridge? Why don’t you talk about Hartley, Derwent, and Sara?” And not two hours ago (for the whole family were late from bed) I was asked what was the matter with my eyes? I told the fact, that I had awoke three times during the night and morning, and at each time found my face and part of the pillow wet with tears. “Were you dreaming of the Wordsworths?” she asked.—“Of the children?” I said, “No! not so much of them, but of Mrs. W. and Miss Hutchinson, and yourself and sister.”

Mrs. Morgan and her sister are come in, and I have been relieved by tears. The sharp, sharp pang at the heart needed it, when they reminded me of my words the very yester-night: “It is not possible that I should do otherwise than love Wordsworth’s children, all of them; but Tom is nearest my heart—I so often have him before my eyes, sitting on the little stool by my side, while I was writing my essays; and how quiet and happy the affectionate little fellow would be if he could but touch one, and now and then be looked at.”

O dearest friend! what comfort can I afford you? What comfort ought I not to afford, who have given you so much pain? Sympathy deep, of my whole being.... In grief, and in joy, in the anguish of perplexity, and in the fulness and overflow of confidence, it has been ever what it is! There is a sense of the word, Love, in which I never felt it but to you and one of your household! I am distant from you some hundred miles, but glad I am that I am no longer distant in spirit, and have faith, that as it has happened but once, so it never can happen again. An awful truth it seems to me, and prophetic of our future, as well as declarative of our present real nature, that one mere thought, one feeling of suspicion, jealousy, or resentment can remove two human beings farther from each other than winds or seas can separate their bodies.

The words “religious fortitude” occasion me to add that my faith in our progressive nature, and in all the doctrinal facts of Christianity, is become habitual in my understanding, no less than in my feelings. More cheering illustrations of our survival I have never received, than from the recent study of the instincts of animals, their clear heterogeneity from the reason and moral essence of man and yet the beautiful analogy. Especially, on the death of children, and of the mind in childhood, altogether, many thoughts have accumulated, from which I hope to derive consolation from that most oppressive feeling which hurries in upon the first anguish of such tidings as I have received; the sense of uncertainty, the fear of enjoyment, the pale and deathy gleam thrown over the countenances of the living, whom we love.... But this is bad comforting. Your own virtues, your own love itself, must give it. Mr. De Quincey has left town, and will by this time have arrived at Grasmere. On Sunday last I gave him a letter for you; but he (I have heard) did not leave town till Thursday night, by what accidents prevented I know not. In the oppression of spirits under which I wrote that letter, I did not make it clear that it was only Mr. Josiah’s half of the annuity[96] that was withdrawn from me. My answer, of course, breathed nothing but gratitude for the past.

I will write in a few days again to you. To-morrow is my lecture night, “On the human causes of the spread of Christianity, and its effects after the establishment of Christendom.” Dear Mary! dear Dorothy! dearest Sara! Oh, be assured, no thought relative to myself has half the influence in inspiring the wish and effort to appear and to act what I always in my will and heart have been, as the knowledge that few things could more console you than to see me healthy, and worthy of myself! Again and again, my dearest Wordsworth!!! I am affectionately and truly yours,

S. T. Coleridge.

CXCIII. TO HIS WIFE.

Wednesday afternoon [January 20,] 18[13].

My dear Sara,—Hitherto the “Remorse” has met with unexampled applause, but whether it will continue to fill the house, that is quite another question, and of this, my friends are, in my opinion, far, far too sanguine. I have disposed not of the copyright but of edition by edition to Mr. Pople, on terms advantageous to me as an author and honourable to him as a publisher. The expenses of printing and paper (at the trade-price) advertising, etc., are to be deducted from the total produce, and the net profits to be divided into three equal parts, of which Pople is to have one, and I the other two. And at any future time, I may publish it in any volume of my poems collectively. Mr. Arnold (the manager) has just left me. He called to urge me to exert myself a little with regard to the daily press, and brought with him “The Times”[97] of Monday as a specimen of the infernal lies of which a newspaper scribe can be capable. Not only is not one sentence in it true; but every one is in the direct face of a palpable truth. The misrepresentations must have been wilful. I must now, therefore, write to “The Times,” and if Walter refuses to insert, I will then, recording the circumstance, publish it in the “Morning Post,” “Morning Chronicle,” and “The Courier.” The dirty malice of Antony Pasquin[98] in the “Morning Herald” is below notice. This, however, will explain to you why the shortness of this letter, the main business of which is to desire you to draw upon Brent and Co., No. 103 Bishopsgate Street Within, for an hundred pounds, at a month’s date from the drawing, or, if that be objected to, for three weeks, only let me know which. In the course of a month I have no hesitation in promising you another hundred, and I hope likewise before Midsummer, if God grant me life, to repay you whatever you have expended for the children.

My wishes and purposes concerning Hartley and Derwent I will communicate as soon as this bustle and endless rat-a-tat-tat at our door is somewhat over. I concluded my Lectures last night most triumphantly, with loud, long, and enthusiastic applauses at my entrance, and ditto in yet fuller chorus as, and for some minutes after I had retired. It was lucky that (as I never once thought of the Lecture till I had entered the Lecture Box), the two last were the most impressive and really the best. I suppose that no dramatic author ever had so large a number of unsolicited, unknown yet predetermined plauditors in the theatre, as I had on Saturday night. One of the malignant papers asserted that I had collected all the saints from Mile End turnpike to Tyburn Bar. With so many warm friends, it is impossible, in the present state of human nature, that I should not have many unprovoked and unknown enemies. You will have heard that on my entering the box on Saturday night, I was discovered by the pit, and that they all turned their faces towards our box, and gave a treble cheer of claps.

I mention these things because it will please Southey to hear that there is a large number of persons in London who hail with enthusiasm my prospect of the stage’s being purified and rendered classical. My success, if I succeed (of which I assure you I entertain doubts in my opinion well founded, both from the want of a prominent actor for Ordonio, and from the want of vulgar pathos in the play itself—nay, there is not enough even of true dramatic pathos), but if I succeed, I succeed for others as well as myself....

S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. I pray you, my dear Sara! do take on yourself the charge of instantly sending off by the waggon Mr. Sotheby’s folio edition of all Petrarch’s Works, which I left at Grasmere. (I am ashamed to meet Sotheby till I have returned it.) At the same time my quarto MS. Book with the German Musical Play in it,[99] and the two folio volumes of the Greek Poets may go. For I want them hourly and I must try to imitate W. Scott in making hay while the sun shines.

Kisses and heartfelt loves for my sweet Sara, and scarce less for dear little Herbert and Edith.

CXCIV. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

71, Berners Street, Tuesday, February 8, 1813.

My dear Southey,—It is seldom that a man can with literal truth apologise for delay in writing; but for the last three weeks I have had more upon my hands and spirits than my health was equal to.

The first copy I can procure of the second edition (of the play) I will do my best to get franked to you. You will, I hope, think it much improved as a poem. Dr. Bell, who is all kindness and goodness, came to me in no small bustle this morning in consequence of “a censure passed on the ‘Remorse’ by a man of great talents, both in prose and verse, who was impartial, and thought highly of the work on the whole.” What was it, think you? There were many unequal lines in the Play, but which he did not choose to specify. Dr. Bell would not mention the critic’s name, but was very earnest with me to procure some indifferent person of good sense to read it over, by way of spectacles to an author’s own dim judgement. Soon after he left me I discovered that the critic was Gifford, who had said good-naturedly that I ought to be whipt for leaving so many weak and slovenly lines in so fine a poem. What the lines were he would not say and I do not care. Inequalities have every poem, even an Epic—much more a Dramatic Poem must have and ought to have. The question is, are they in their own place dissonances? If so I am the last man to stickle for them, who am nicknamed in the Green Room the “anomalous author,” from my utter indifference or prompt facility in sanctioning every omission that was suggested. That paragraph in the “Quarterly Review”[100] respecting me, as ridiculed in “Rejected Addresses,” was surely unworthy of a man of sense like Gifford. What reason could he have to suppose me a man so childishly irritable as to be provoked by a trifle so contemptible? If he had, how could he think it a parody at all? But the noise which the “Rejected Addresses” made, the notice taken of Smith the author by Lord Holland, Byron, etc., give a melancholy confirmation of my assertion in “The Friend” that “we worship the vilest reptile if only the brainless head be expiated by the sting of personal malignity in the tail.” I wish I could procure for you the “Examiner” and Drakard’s London Paper. They were forced to affect admiration of the Tragedy, but yet abuse me they must, and so comes the old infamous crambe bis millies cocta of the “sentimentalities, puerilities, whinings, and meannesses, both of style and thought,” in my former writings, but without (which is worth notice both in these gentlemen and in all our former Zoili), without one single quotation or reference in proof or exemplification. No wonder! for excepting the “Three Graves,” which was announced as not meant for poetry, and the poem on the Tethered Ass, with the motto Sermoni propriora,[101] and which, like your “Dancing Bear,” might be called a ludicro-splenetic copy of verses, with the diction purposely appropriate, they might (as at the first appearance of my poems they did) find, indeed, all the opposite vices. But if it had not been for the Preface to W.’s “Lyrical Ballads,” they would never themselves have dreamt of affected simplicity and meanness of thought and diction. This slang has gone on for fourteen or fifteen years against us, and really deserves to be exposed. As far as my judgement goes, the two best qualities of the tragedy are, first, the simplicity and unity of the plot, in respect of that which, of all the unities, is the only one founded on good sense—the presence of a one all-pervading, all-combining Principle. By Remorse I mean the anguish and disquietude arising from the self-contradiction introduced into the soul by guilt, a feeling which is good or bad according as the will makes use of it. This is expressed in the lines chosen as the motto:—

Remorse is as the heart in which it grows:
If that be gentle, it drops balmy dews
Of true repentance; but if proud and gloomy,
It is a poison tree that, pierced to the inmost,
Weeps only tears of poison!
Act i. sc. 1.

And Remorse is everywhere distinguished from virtuous penitence. To excite a sanative remorse Alvar returns, the Passion is put in motion at Ordonio’s first entrance by the appearance of Isidore’s wife, etc.; it is carried still higher by the narration of Isidore, Act ii. sc. 1; higher still by the interview with the supposed wizard; and to its acme by the Incantation Scene and Picture. Now, then, we are to see its effects and to exemplify the second part of the motto, “but if proud and gloomy, It is a poison tree,” etc. Ordonio, too proud to look steadily into himself, catches a false scent, plans the murder of Isidore and the poisoning of the Sorcerer, perpetrates the one, and, attempting the other, is driven by Remorse and the discovery of Alvar to a temporary distraction; and, finally, falling a victim to the only crime that had been realized, by the hand of Alhadra, breathes his last in a pang of pride: “O couldst thou forget me!” As from a circumference to a centre, every ray in the tragedy converges to Ordonio. Spite of wretched acting, the passage told wonderfully in which, as in a struggle between two unequal Panathlists or wrestlers, the weaker had for a moment got uppermost, and Ordonio, with unfeigned love, and genuine repentance, says, “I will kneel to thee, my Brother! Forgive me, Alvar!” till the Pride, like the bottom-swell on our lake, gusts up again in “Curse me with forgiveness!” The second good quality is, I think, the variety of metres according as the speeches are merely transitive, or narrative, or passionate, or (as in the Incantation) deliberate and formal poetry. It is true they are all, or almost all, Iambic blank verse, but under that form there are five or six perfectly distinct metres. As to the outcry that the “Remorse” is not pathetic (meaning such pathos as convulses in “Isabella” or “The Gamester”) the answer is easy. True! the poet never meant that it should be. It is as pathetic as the “Hamlet” or the “Julius Cæsar.” He woo’d the feelings of the audience, as my wretched epilogue said:—

With no TOO real Woes that make you groan
(At home-bred, kindred grief, perhaps your own),
Yet with no image compensate the mind,
Nor leave one joy for memory behind.

As to my thefts from the “Wallenstein,” they came on compulsion from the necessity of haste, and do not lie on my conscience, being partly thefts from myself, and because I gave Schiller twenty for one I have taken, and in the mean time I hope they will lie snug. “The obscurest Haunt of all our mountains,”[102] I did not recognize as Wordsworth till after the play was all printed. I must write again to-morrow on other subjects.

The House was crowded again last night, and the Manager told me that they lost £200 by suspending it on [the] Saturday night that Jack Bannister came out.

(No signature.)

CXCV. TO THOMAS POOLE.

February 13, 1813.

Dear Poole,—Love so deep and so domesticated with the whole being, as mine was to you, can never cease to be. To quote the best and sweetest lines I ever wrote:[103]—

Alas! they had been Friends in Youth!
But whisp’ring Tongues can poison Truth;
And Constancy lives in Realms above;
And Life is thorny; and Youth is vain;
And to be wroth with one we love
Doth work, like Madness, in the Brain!
And so it chanced (as I divine)
With Roland and Sir Leoline.
Each spake words of high Disdain
And Insult to his heart’s best Brother:
They parted—ne’er to meet again!
But never either found another
To free the hollow Heart from Paining—
They stood aloof, the Scars remaining,
Like Cliffs, which had been rent asunder,
A dreary Sea now flows between!—
But neither Frost, nor Heat, nor Thunder,
Shall wholly do away, I ween,
The marks of that which once hath been!

Stung as I have been with your unkindness to me, in my sore adversity, yet the receipt of your two heart-engendered lines was sweeter than an unexpected strain of sweetest music, or, in humbler phrase, it was the only pleasurable sensation which the success of the “Remorse” has given me. I have read of, or perhaps only imagined, a punishment in Arabia, in which the culprit was so bricked up as to be unable to turn his eyes to the right or the left, while in front was placed a high heap of barren sand glittering under the vertical sun. Some slight analogue of this, I have myself suffered from the mere unusualness of having my attention forcibly directed to a subject which permitted neither sequence of imagery, or series of reasoning. No grocer’s apprentice, after his first month’s permitted riot, was ever sicker of figs and raisins than I of hearing about the “Remorse.” The endless rat-a-tat-tat at our black-and-blue-bruised door, and my three master-fiends, proof sheets, letters (for I have a raging epistolophobia), and worse than these—invitations to large dinners, which I cannot refuse without offence and imputation of pride, or accept without disturbance of temper the day before, and a sick, aching stomach for two days after, so that my spirits quite sink under it.

From what I myself saw, and from what an intelligent friend, more solicitous about it than myself, has told me, the “Remorse” has succeeded in spite of bad scenes, execrable acting, and newspaper calumny. In my compliments to the actors, I endeavoured (such is the lot of this world, in which our best qualities tilt against each other, ex. gr., our good nature against our veracity) to make a lie edge round the truth as nearly as possible. Poor Rae (why poor? for Ordonio has almost made his fortune) did the best in his power, and is a good man ... a moral and affectionate husband and father. But nature has denied him person and all volume and depth of voice; so that the blundering coxcomb Elliston, by mere dint of voice and self-conceit, out-dazzled him. It has been a good thing for the theatre. They will get £8,000 or £10,000, and I shall get more than all my literary labours put together; nay, thrice as much, subtracting my heavy losses in the “Watchman” and “Friend,”—£400 including the copyright.

You will have heard that, previous to the acceptance of “Remorse,” Mr. Jos. Wedgwood had withdrawn from his share of the annuity![104] Well, yes, it is well!—for I can now be sure that I loved him, revered him, and was grateful to him from no selfish feeling. For equally (and may these words be my final condemnation at the last awful day, if I speak not the whole truth), equally do I at this moment love him, and with the same reverential gratitude! To Mr. Thomas Wedgwood I felt, doubtless, love; but it was mingled with fear, and constant apprehension of his too exquisite taste in morals. But Josiah! Oh, I ever did, and ever shall, love him, as a being so beautifully balanced in mind and heart deserves to be!

’Tis well, too, because it has given me the strongest impulse, the most imperious motive I have experienced, to prove to him that his past munificence has not been wasted!

You perhaps may likewise have heard (in the Whispering Gallery of the World) of the year-long difference between me and Wordsworth (compared with the sufferings of which all the former afflictions of my life were less than flea-bites), occasioned (in great part) by the wicked folly of the arch-fool Montagu.

A reconciliation has taken place, but the feeling, which I had previous to that moment, when the (three-fourth) calumny burst, like a thunderstorm from a blue sky, on my soul, after fifteen years of such religious, almost superstitious idolatry and self-sacrifice. Oh, no! no! that, I fear, never can return. All outward actions, all inward wishes, all thoughts and admirations will be the same—are the same, but—aye, there remains an immedicable But. Had W. said (what he acknowledges to have said) to you, I should have thought it unkind, and have had a right to say, “Why, why am I, whose whole being has been like a glass beehive before you for five years, why do I hear this from a third person for the first time?” But to such ... as Montagu! just when W. himself had forewarned me! Oh! it cut me to the heart’s core.

S. T. Coleridge.

CHAPTER XII
A MELANCHOLY EXILE
1813-1815

CHAPTER XII
A MELANCHOLY EXILE
1813-1815

CXCVI. TO DANIEL STUART.

September 25, 1813.

Dear Stuart,—I forgot to ask you by what address a letter would best reach you! Whether Kilburn House, Kilburn? I shall therefore send it, or leave it at the “Courier” office. I found Southey so chevaux-de-frized and pallisadoed by preëngagements that I could not reach at him till Sunday sennight, that is, Sunday, October 3, when, if convenient, we should be happy to wait on you. Southey will be in town till Monday evening, and you have his brother’s address, should you wish to write to him (Dr. Southey,[105] 28, Little Queen Anne Street, Cavendish Square).

A curious paragraph in the “Morning Chronicle” of this morning, asserting with its usual comfortable anti-patriotism the determination of the Emperor of Austria to persevere in the terms[106] offered to his son-in-law, in his frenzy of power, even though he should be beaten to the dust. Methinks there ought to be good authority before a journalist dares prophesy folly and knavery in union of our Imperial Ally. An excellent article ought to be written on this subject. In the same paper there is what I should have called a masterly essay on the causes of the downfall of the Comic Drama, if I was not perplexed by the distinct recollection of having conversed the greater part of it at Lamb’s. I wish you would read it, and tell me what you think; for I seem to remember a conversation with you in which you asserted the very contrary; that comic genius was the thing wanting, and not comic subjects—that the watering places, or rather the characters presented at them, had never been adequately managed, etc.

Might I request you to present my best respects to Mrs. Stuart as those of an old acquaintance of yours, and, as far as I am myself conscious of, at all times with hearty affection, your sincere friend,

S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. There are some half dozen more books of mine left at the “Courier” office, Ben Jonson and sundry German volumes. As I am compelled to sell my library,[107] you would oblige me by ordering the porter to take them to 19, London Street, Fitzroy Square; whom I will remunerate for his trouble. I should not take this liberty, but that I had in vain written to Mr. Street, requesting the same favour, which in his hurry of business I do not wonder that he forgot.

CXCVII. TO JOSEPH COTTLE.[108]

April 26, 1814.

You have poured oil in the raw and festering wound of an old friend’s conscience, Cottle! but it is oil of vitriol! I but barely glanced at the middle of the first page of your letter, and have seen no more of it—not from resentment (God forbid!), but from the state of my bodily and mental sufferings, that scarcely permitted human fortitude to let in a new visitor of affliction.

The object of my present reply is to state the case just as it is. First, that for ten years the anguish of my spirit has been indescribable, the sense of my danger staring, but the consciousness of my GUILT worse, far worse than all. I have prayed, with drops of agony on my brow, trembling not only before the justice of my Maker, but even before the mercy of my Redeemer. “I gave thee so many talents, what hast thou done with them?” Secondly, overwhelmed as I am with a sense of my direful infirmity, I have never attempted to disguise or conceal the cause. On the contrary, not only to friends have I stated the whole case with tears and the very bitterness of shame, but in two instances I have warned young men, mere acquaintances, who had spoken of having taken laudanum, of the direful consequences, by an awful exposition of the tremendous effects on myself.

Thirdly, though before God I cannot lift up my eyelids, and only do not despair of His mercy, because to despair would be adding crime to crime, yet to my fellow-men I may say that I was seduced into the ACCURSED habit ignorantly. I had been almost bed-ridden for many months with swellings in my knees. In a medical journal, I unhappily met with an account of a cure performed in a similar case (or what appeared to me so), by rubbing in of laudanum, at the same time taking a given dose internally. It acted like a charm, like a miracle! I recovered the use of my limbs, of my appetite, of my spirits, and this continued for near a fortnight. At length the unusual stimulus subsided, the complaint returned, the supposed remedy was recurred to—but I cannot go through the dreary history.

Suffice it to say, that effects were produced which acted on me by terror and cowardice, of pain and sudden death, not (so help me God!) by any temptation of pleasure, or expectation, or desire of exciting pleasurable sensations. On the very contrary, Mrs. Morgan and her sister will bear witness, so far as to say, that the longer I abstained the higher my spirits were, the keener my enjoyment—till the moment, the direful moment, arrived when my pulse began to fluctuate, my heart to palpitate, and such a dreadful falling abroad, as it were, of my whole frame, such intolerable restlessness, and incipient bewilderment, that in the last of my several attempts to abandon the dire poison, I exclaimed in agony, which I now repeat in seriousness and solemnity, “I am too poor to hazard this.” Had I but a few hundred pounds, but £200—half to send to Mrs. Coleridge, and half to place myself in a private madhouse, where I could procure nothing but what a physician thought proper, and where a medical attendant could be constantly with me for two or three months (in less than that time life or death would be determined), then there might be hope. Now there is none!! O God! how willingly would I place myself under Dr. Fox, in his establishment; for my case is a species of madness, only that it is a derangement, an utter impotence of the volition, and not of the intellectual faculties. You bid me rouse myself: go bid a man paralytic in both arms, to rub them briskly together, and that will cure him. “Alas!” he would reply, “that I cannot move my arms is my complaint and my misery.”

May God bless you, and your affectionate, but most afflicted,

S. T. Coleridge.

CXCVIII. TO THE SAME.

Friday, May 27, 1814.

My dear Cottle,—Gladness be with you, for your convalescence, and equally so, at the hope which has sustained and tranquillised you through your imminent peril. Far otherwise is, and hath been, my state; yet I too am grateful; yet I cannot rejoice. I feel, with an intensity unfathomable by words, my utter nothingness, impotence, and worthlessness, in and for myself. I have learned what a sin is, against an infinite imperishable being, such as is the soul of man!

I have had more than a glimpse of what is meant by death and outer darkness, and the worm that dieth not—and that all the hell of the reprobate is no more inconsistent with the love of God, than the blindness of one who has occasioned loathsome and guilty diseases, to eat out his eyes, is inconsistent with the light of the sun. But the consolations, at least, the sensible sweetness of hope, I do not possess. On the contrary, the temptation which I have constantly to fight up against is a fear, that if annihilation and the possibility of heaven were offered to my choice, I should choose the former.

This is, perhaps, in part, a constitutional idiosyncrasy, for when a mere boy I wrote these lines:—

O, what a wonder seems the fear of death,
Seeing how gladly we all sink to sleep,
Babes, children, youths, and men,
Night following night, for three-score years and ten![109]

And in my early manhood, in lines descriptive of a gloomy solitude, I disguised my own sensations in the following words:—

Here wisdom might abide, and here remorse!
Here, too, the woe-worn man, who, weak in soul,
And of this busy human heart aweary,
Worships the spirit of unconscious life
In tree or wild-flower. Gentle lunatic!
If so he might not wholly cease to BE,
He would far rather not be what he is;
But would be something that he knows not of,
In woods or waters, or among the rocks.[110]

My main comfort, therefore, consists in what the divines call the faith of adherence, and no spiritual effort appears to benefit me so much as the one earnest, importunate, and often for hours, momently repeated prayers: “I believe! Lord, help my unbelief! Give me faith, but as a mustard seed, and I shall remove this mountain! Faith! faith! faith! I believe. Oh, give me faith! Oh, for my Redeemer’s sake, give me faith in my Redeemer.”

In all this I justify God, for I was accustomed to oppose the preaching of the terrors of the gospel, and to represent it as debasing virtue by the admixture of slavish selfishness.

I now see that what is spiritual can only be spiritually apprehended. Comprehended it cannot.

Mr. Eden gave you a too flattering account of me. It is true, I am restored as much beyond my expectations almost as my deserts; but I am exceedingly weak. I need for myself solace and refocillation of animal spirits, instead of being in a condition of offering it to others. Yet as soon as I may see you, I will call upon you.

S. T. Coleridge.

CXCIX. TO CHARLES MATHEWS.

2, Queen’s Square, Bristol, May 30, 1814.

Dear Sir,—Unusual as this liberty may be, yet as it is a friendly one, you will pardon it, especially from one who has had already some connection with the stage, and may have more. But I was so highly gratified with my feast of this night, that I feel a sort of restless impulse to tell you what I felt and thought.

Imprimis, I grieved that you had such miserable materials to deal with as Colman’s Solomon Grundy,[111] a character which in and of itself (Mathews and his Variations ad libitum put out of the question) contains no one element of genuine comedy, no, nor even of fun or drollery. The play is assuredly the very sediment, the dregs of a noble cask of wine; for such was, yes, in many instances was and has been, and in many more might have been, Colman’s dramatic genius.

A genius Colman is by nature. What he is not, or has not been, is all of his own making. In my humble opinion, he possessed the elements of dramatic power in a far higher degree than Sheridan: or which of the two, think you, should pronounce with the deeper sigh of self-reproach, “Fuimus Troes! and what might we not have been?”

But I leave this to proceed to the really astonishing effect of your duplicate of Cook in Sir Archy McSarcasm.[112] To say that in some of your higher notes your voice was rather thinner, rather less substance and thick body than poor Cook’s, would be merely to say that A. B. is not exactly A. A. But, on the whole, it was almost illusion, and so very excellent, that if I were intimate with you, I should get angry and abuse you for not forming for yourself some original and important character. The man who could so impersonate Sir Archy McSarcasm might do anything in profound Comedy (that is, that which gives us the passions of men and their endless modifications and influences on thought, gestures, etc., modified in their turn by circumstances of rank, relations, nationality, etc., instead of mere transitory manners; in short, the inmost man represented on the superficies, instead of the superficies merely representing itself). But you will forgive a stranger for a suggestion? I cannot but think that it would answer for your still increasing fame if you were either previously to, or as an occasional diversification of Sir Archy, to study and give that one most incomparable monologue of Sir Pertinax McSycophant,[113] where he gives his son the history of his rise and progress in the world. Being in its essence a soliloquy with all the advantages of a dialogue, it would be a most happy introduction to Sir Archy McSarcasm, which, I doubt not, will call forth with good reason the Covent Garden Manager’s thanks to you next season.

I once had the presumption to address this advice to an actor on the London stage: “Think, in order that you may be able to observe! Observe, in order that you may have materials to think upon! And thirdly, keep awake ever the habit of instantly embodying and realising the results of the two; but always think!”

A great actor, comic or tragic, is not to be a mere copy, a fac simile, or but an imitation, of Nature. Now an imitation differs from a copy in this, that it of necessity implies and demands difference, whereas a copy aims at identity. What a marble peach on a mantelpiece, that you take up deluded and put down with pettish disgust, is, compared with a fruit-piece of Vanhuyser’s, even such is a mere copy of nature compared with a true histrionic imitation. A good actor is Pygmalion’s Statue, a work of exquisite art, animated and gifted with motion; but still art, still a species of poetry.

Not the least advantage which an actor gains by having secured a high reputation is this, that those who sincerely admire him may dare tell him the truth at times, and thus, if he have sensible friends, secure his progressive improvement; in other words, keep him thinking. For without thinking, nothing consummate can be effected.

Accept this, dear sir, as it is meant, a small testimony of the high gratification I have received from you and of the respectful and sincere kind wishes with which I am

Your obedient
S. T. Coleridge.

—— Mathews, Esq., to be left at the Bristol Theatre.

CC. TO JOSIAH WADE.

Bristol, June 26, 1814.

Dear Sir,—For I am unworthy to call any good man friend—much less you, whose hospitality and love I have abused; accept, however, my intreaties for your forgiveness, and for your prayers.

Conceive a poor miserable wretch, who for many years has been attempting to beat off pain, by a constant recurrence to the vice that reproduces it. Conceive a spirit in hell, employed in tracing out for others the road to that heaven, from which his crimes exclude him! In short, conceive whatever is most wretched, helpless, and hopeless, and you will form as tolerable a notion of my state, as it is possible for a good man to have.

I used to think the text in St. James that “he who offended in one point, offends in all,” very harsh; but I now feel the awful, the tremendous truth of it. In the one crime of OPIUM, what crime have I not made myself guilty of!—Ingratitude to my Maker! and to my benefactors—injustice! and unnatural cruelty to my poor children!—self-contempt for my repeated promise—breach, nay, too often, actual falsehood!

After my death, I earnestly entreat, that a full and unqualified narration of my wretchedness, and of its guilty cause, may be made public, that at least some little good may be effected by the direful example.

May God Almighty bless you, and have mercy on your still affectionate, and in his heart, grateful

S. T. Coleridge.

CCI. TO JOHN MURRAY.

Josiah Wade’s, Esq., 2, Queen’s Square, Bristol,
August 23, 1814.

Dear Sir,—I have heard, from my friend Mr. Charles Lamb, writing by desire of Mr. Robinson, that you wish to have the justly-celebrated “Faust”[114] of Goethe translated, and that some one or other of my partial friends have induced you to consider me as the man most likely to execute the work adequately, those excepted, of course, whose higher power (established by the solid and satisfactory ordeal of the wide and rapid sale of their works) it might seem profanation to employ in any other manner than in the development of their own intellectual organisation. I return my thanks to the recommender, whoever he be, and no less to you for your flattering faith in the recommendation; and thinking, as I do, that among many volumes of praiseworthy German poems, the “Louisa” of Voss, and the “Faust” of Goethe, are the two, if not the only ones, that are emphatically original in their conception, and characteristic of a new and peculiar sort of thinking and imagining, I should not be averse from exerting my best efforts in an attempt to import whatever is importable of either or of both into our own language.

But let me not be suspected of a presumption of which I am not consciously guilty, if I say that I feel two difficulties: one arising from long disuse of versification, added to what I know, better than the most hostile critic could inform me, of my comparative weakness; and the other, that any work in Poetry strikes me with more than common awe, as proposed for realization by myself, because from long habits of meditation on language, as the symbolical medium of the connection of Thought with Thought, and of Thought as affected and modified by Passion and Emotion, I should spend days in avoiding what I deemed faults, though with the full fore-knowledge that their admission would not have offended perhaps three of all my readers, and might be deemed Beauties by 300—if so many there were; and this not out of any respect for the Public (i. e. the persons who might happen to purchase and look over the Book), but from a hobby-horsical, superstitious regard to my own feelings and sense of duty. Language is the Sacred Fire in this Temple of Humanity, and the Muses are its especial and vestal Priestesses. Though I cannot prevent the vile drugs and counterfeit Frankincense, which render its flame at once pitchy, glowing, and unsteady, I would yet be no voluntary accomplice in the Sacrilege. With the commencement of a Public, commences the degradation of the Good and the Beautiful—both fade and retire before the accidentally Agreeable. “Othello” becomes a hollow lip-worship; and the “Castle Spectre” or any more peccant thing of Froth, Noise, and Impermanence, that may have overbillowed it on the restless sea of curiosity, is the true Prayer of the Praise and Admiration.

I thought it right to state to you these opinions of mine, that you might know that I think the Translation of the “Faust” a task demanding (from me, I mean) no ordinary efforts—and why? This—that it is painful, very painful, and even odious to me, to attempt anything of a literary nature, with any motive of pecuniary advantage; but that I bow to the all-wise Providence, which has made me a poor man, and therefore compelled me by other duties inspiring feelings, to bring even my Intellect to the Market. And the finale is this. I should like to attempt the Translation. If you will mention your terms, at once and irrevocably (for I am an idiot at bargaining, and shrink from the very thought), I will return an answer by the next Post, whether in my present circumstances, I can or cannot undertake it. If I do, I will do it immediately; but I must have all Goethe’s works, which I cannot procure in Bristol; for to give the “Faust” without a preliminary critical Essay would be worse than nothing, as far as regards the Public. If you were to ask me as a friend whether I think it would suit the General Taste, I should reply that I cannot calculate on caprice and accident (for instance, some fashionable man or review happening to take it up favourably), but that otherwise my fears would be stronger than my hopes. Men of genius will admire it, of necessity. Those must, who think deepest and most imaginatively. Then “Louisa” would delight all of good hearts.

I remain, dear sir, with every respect,

S. T. Coleridge.

CCII. TO DANIEL STUART.

Mr. Smith’s, Ashley, Box, near Bath,
September 12, 1814.

My dear Sir,—I wrote some time ago to Mr. Smith, earnestly requesting your address, and entreating him to inform you of the dreadful state in which I was, when your kind letter must have arrived, during your stay at Bath.... But let me not complain. I ought to be and I trust I am, grateful for what I am, having escaped with my intellectual powers, if less elastic, yet not less vigorous, and with ampler and far more solid materials to exert them on. We know nothing even of ourselves, till we know ourselves to be as nothing (a solemn truth, spite of point and antithesis, in which the thought has chanced to word itself)! From this word of truth which the sore discipline of a sick bed has compacted into an indwelling reality, from this article, formerly, of speculative belief, but which [circumstances] have actualised into practical faith, I have learned to counteract calumny by self-reproach, and not only to rejoice (as indeed from natural disposition, from the very constitution of my heart, I should have done at all periods of my life) at the temporal prosperity, and increased and increasing reputation of my old fellow-labourers in philosophical, political, and poetical literature, but to bear their neglect, and even their detraction, as if I had done nothing at all, when it would have asked no very violent strain of recollection for one or two of them to have considered, whether some part of their most successful somethings were not among the nothings of my intellectual no-doings. But all strange things are less strange than the sense of intellectual obligations. Seldom do I ever see a Review, yet almost as often as that seldomness permits have I smiled at finding myself attacked in strains of thought which would never have occurred to the writer, had he not directly or indirectly learned them from myself. This is among the salutary effects, even of the dawn of actual religion on the mind, that we begin to reflect on our duties to God and to ourselves as permanent beings, and not to flatter ourselves by a superficial auditing of our negative duties to our neighbours, or mere acts in transitu to the transitory. I have too sad an account to settle between myself that is and has been, and myself that can not cease to be, to allow me a single complaint that, for all my labours in behalf of truth against the Jacobin party, then against military despotism abroad, against weakness and despondency and faction and factious goodiness at home, I have never received from those in power even a verbal acknowledgment; though by mere reference to dates, it might be proved that no small number of fine speeches in the House of Commons, and elsewhere, originated, directly or indirectly, in my Essays and conversations.[115] I dare assert, that the science of reasoning and judging concerning the productions of literature, the characters and measures of public men, and the events of nations, by a systematic subsumption of them, under Principles, deduced from the nature of MAN, and that of prophesying concerning the future (in contradiction to the hopes or fears of the majority) by a careful cross-examination of some period, the most analogous in past history, as learnt from contemporary authorities, and the proportioning of the ultimate event to the likenesses as modified or counteracted by the differences, was as good as unknown in the public prints, before the year 1795-96. Earl Darnley, on the appearance of my letters in the “Courier” concerning the Spaniards,[116] bluntly asked me, whether I had lost my senses, and quoted Lord Grenville at me. If you should happen to cast your eye over my character of Pitt,[117] my two letters to Fox, my Essays on the French Empire under Buonaparte, compared with the Roman, under the first Emperors; that on the probability of the restoration of the Bourbons, and those on Ireland, and Catholic Emancipation (which last unfortunately remain for the greater part in manuscript, Mr. Street not relishing them), and should add to them my Essays in “The Friend” on Taxation, and the supposed effects of war on our commercial prosperity; those on international law in defence of our siege of Copenhagen; and if you had before you the long letter which I wrote to Sir G. Beaumont in 1806,[118] concerning the inevitableness of a war with America, and the specific dangers of that war, if not provided against by specific pre-arrangements; with a list of their Frigates, so called, with their size, number, and weight of metal, the characters of their commanders, and the proportion suspected of British seamen.—I have luckily a copy of it, a rare accident with me.—I dare amuse myself, I say, with the belief, that by far the better half of all these, would read to you now, AS HISTORY. And what have I got for all this? What for my first daring to blow the trumpet of sound philosophy against the Lancastrian faction? The answer is not complex. Unthanked, and left worse than defenceless, by the friends of the Government and the Establishment, to be undermined or outraged by all the malice, hatred, and calumny of its enemies; and to think and toil, with a patent for all the abuse, and a transfer to others of all the honours. In the “Quarterly” Review of the “Remorse” (delayed till it could by no possibility be of the least service to me, and the compliments in which are as senseless and silly as the censures; every fault ascribed to it, being either no improbability at all, or from the very essence and end of the drama no DRAMATIC improbability, without noticing any one of the REAL faults, and there are many glaring, and one or two DEADLY sins in the tragedy)—in this Review, I am abused, and insolently reproved as a man, with reference to my supposed private habits, for NOT PUBLISHING. Would to heaven I never had! To this very moment I am embarrassed and tormented, in consequence of the non-payment of the subscribers to “The Friend.” But I could rebut the charge; and not merely say, but prove, that there is not a man in England, whose thoughts, images, words, and erudition have been published in larger quantities than mine; though I must admit, not by, or for, myself. Believe me, if I felt any pain from these things, I should not make this exposé; for it is constitutional with me, to shrink from all talk or communication of what gnaws within me. And, if I felt any real anger, I should not do what I fully intend to do, publish two long satires, in Drydenic verse, entitled “Puff and Slander.”[119] But I seem to myself to have endured the hootings and peltings, and “Go up bald head” (2 Kings, ch. ii. vs. 23, 24) quite long enough; and shall therefore send forth my two she-bears, to tear in pieces the most obnoxious of these ragged CHILDREN in intellect; and to scare the rest of these mischievous little mud-larks back to their crevice-nests, and lurking holes. While those who know me best, spite of my many infirmities, love me best, I am determined, henceforward, to treat my unprovoked enemies in the spirit of the Tiberian adage, Oderint modo timeant.

And now, having for the very first time in my whole life opened out my whole feelings and thoughts concerning my past fates and fortunes, I will draw anew on your patience, by a detail of my present operations. My medical friend is so well satisfied of my convalescence, and that nothing now remains, but to superinduce positive health on a system from which disease and its removable causes have been driven out, that he has not merely consented to, but advised my leaving Bristol, for some rural retirement. I could indeed pursue nothing uninterruptedly in that city. Accordingly, I am now joint tenant with Mr. Morgan, of a sweet little cottage, at Ashley, half a mile from Box, on the Bath road. I breakfast every morning before nine; work till one, and walk or read till three. Thence, till tea-time, chat or read some lounge book, or correct what I have written. From six to eight work again; from eight till bed-time, play whist, or the little mock billiard called bagatelle, and then sup, and go to bed. My morning hours, as the longest and most important division, I keep sacred to my most important Work,[120] which is printing at Bristol; two of my friends having taken upon themselves the risk. It is so long since I have conversed with you, that I cannot say, whether the subject will, or will not be interesting to you. The title is “Christianity, the one true Philosophy; or, Five Treatises on the Logos, or Communicative Intelligence, natural, human, and divine.” To which is prefixed a prefatory Essay, on the laws and limits of toleration and liberality, illustrated by fragments of AUTO-biography. The first Treatise—Logos Propaidenticos, or the Science of systematic thinking in ordinary life. The second—Logos Architectonicus, or an attempt to apply the constructive or Mathematical process to Metaphysics and Natural Theology. The third—Ὁ Λόγος ὁ θεάνθρωπος (the divine logos incarnate)—a full commentary on the Gospel of St. John, in development of St. Paul’s doctrine of preaching Christ alone, and Him crucified. The fourth—on Spinoza and Spinozism, with a life of B. Spinoza. This entitled Logos Agonistes. The fifth and last, Logos Alogos (i. e., Logos Illogicus), or on modern Unitarianism, its causes and effects. The whole will be comprised in two portly octavos, and the second treatise will be the only one which will, and from the nature of the subject must, be unintelligible to the great majority even of well educated readers. The purpose of the whole is a philosophical defence of the Articles of the Church, as far as they respect doctrine, as points of faith. If originality be any merit, this Work will have that, at all events, from the first page to the last.

The evenings I have employed in composing a series of Essays on the principles of Genial Criticism concerning the fine Arts, especially those of Statuary and Painting;[121] and of these four in title, but six or more in size, have been published in “Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal;” a strange plan for such a publication; but my motive was originally to serve poor Allston, who is now exhibiting his pictures at Bristol. Oh! dear sir! do pray if you have the power or opportunity use your influence with “The Sun,” not to continue that accursed system of calumny and detraction against Allston. The articles, by whomever written, were a disgrace to human nature, and, to my positive knowledge, argued only less ignorance than malignity. Mr. Allston has been cruelly used. Good God! what did I not hear Sir George Beaumont say, with my own ears! Nay, he wrote to me after repeated examination of Allston’s great picture, declaring himself a complete convert to all my opinions of Allston’s paramount genius as a historical painter. What did I not hear Mr. West say? After a full hour’s examination of the picture, he pointed out one thing he thought out of harmony (and which against my earnest desire Allston altered and had reason to repent sorely) and then said, “I have shot my bolt. It is as near perfection as a picture can be!”...

But to return to my Essays. I shall publish no more in Bristol. What they could do, they have done. But I have carefully corrected and polished those already published, and shall carry them on to sixteen or twenty, containing animated descriptions of all the best pictures of the great masters in England, with characteristics of the great masters from Giotto to Correggio. The first three Essays were of necessity more austere; for till it could be determined what beauty was; whether it was beauty merely because it pleased, or pleased because it was beauty, it would have been as absurd to talk of general principles of taste, as of tastes. Now will this series, purified from all accidental, local, or personal references, tint or serve the “Courier” in the present dearth? I have no hesitation in declaring them the best compositions I have ever written, I could regularly supply two Essays a week, and one political Essay. Be so good as to speak to Mr. Street.[122] I could send him up eight or ten at once.

Make my best respects to Mrs. Stuart. I shall be very anxious to hear from you.

Your affectionate and grateful friend,

S. T. Coleridge.

CCIII. TO THE SAME.

“October 30, 1814.”

Dear Stuart,—After I had finished the third letter,[123] I thought it the best I had ever written; but, on re-perusal, I perfectly agree with you. It is misty, and like most misty compositions, laborious,—what the Italians call FATICOSO. I except the two last paragraphs (“In this guise my Lord,” to—“aversabitur”). These I still like. Yet what I wanted to say is very important, because it strikes at the ROOT of all LEGISLATIVE Jacobinism. The view which our laws take of robbery, and even murder, not as GUILT of which God alone is presumed to be the Judge, but as CRIMES depriving the King of one of his subjects, rendering dangerous and abating the value of the King’s Highways, etc., may suggest some notion of my meaning. Jack, Tom, and Harry have no existence in the eye of the law, except as included in some form or other of the PERMANENT PROPERTY of the realm. Just as, on the other hand, Religion has nothing to do with Ranks, Estates, or Offices; but exerts itself wholly on what is PERSONAL, viz., our souls, consciences, and the MORALITY of our actions, as opposed to mere legality. Ranks, Estates, Offices, etc., were made for persons! exclaims Major Cartwright[124] and his partizans. Yes, I reply, as far as the DIVINE administration is concerned, but human jurisprudence, wisely aware of its own weakness, and sensible how incommensurate its powers are with so vast an object as the well-being of individuals, as individuals, reverses the position, and knows nothing of persons, other than as properties, officiaries, subjects. The preambles of our old statutes concerning aliens (as foreign merchants) and Jews, are all so many illustrations of my principle; the strongest instance of opposition to which, and therefore characteristic of the present age, was the attempt to legislate for animals by Lord Erskine;[125] that is, not merely interfering with persons as persons; or with what are called by moralists the imperfect duties (a very obscure phrase for obligations of conscience, not capable of being realized (perfecta) by legal penalties), but extending PERSONALITY to things.

In saying this, I mean only to designate the general spirit of human law. Every principle, on its application to practice, must be limited and modified by circumstances; our reason by our common sense. Still, however, the PRINCIPLE is most important, as aim, rule, and guide. Guided by this spirit, our ancestors repealed the Puritan Law, by which adultery was to be punished with death, and brought it back to a civil damage. So, too, actions for seduction. Not that the Judge or Legislator did not feel the guilt of such crimes, but that the Law knows nothing about guilt. So, in the Exchequer, common debts are sued for on the plea that the creditor is less able to pay our Lord the King, etc., etc. Now, contrast with this, the preamble to the first French Constitution, and I think my meaning will become more intelligible; that the pretence of considering persons not states, happiness not property, always has ended, and always will end, in making a new STATE, or corporation, infinitely more oppressive than the former; and in which the real freedom of persons is as much less, as the things interfered with are more numerous, and more minute. Compare the duties, exacted from a United Irishman by the Confederacy, with those required of him by the law of the land. This, I think, not ill expressed, in the two last periods of the fourth paragraph. “Thus in order to sacrifice ... confederation.”

Of course I immediately recognised your hand in the Article concerning the “Edinburgh Review,” and much pleased I was with it; and equally so in finding, from your letter, that we had so completely coincided in our feelings, concerning that wicked Lord Nelson Article.[126] If there be one thing on earth that can outrage an honest man’s feelings, it is the assumption of austere morality for the purposes of personal slander. And the gross ingratitude of the attack! In the name of God what have we to do with Lord Nelson’s mistresses, or domestic quarrels? Sir A. Ball, himself exemplary in this respect, told me of his own personal knowledge Lady Nelson was enough to drive any man wild.... She had no sympathy with his acute sensibilities, and his alienation was effected, though not shown, before he knew Lady Hamilton, by being heart starved, still more than by being teased and tormented by her sullenness. Observe that Sir A. Ball detested Lady Hamilton. To the same enthusiastic sensibilities which made a fool of him with regard to his Emma, his country owed the victories of the Nile, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar, and the heroic spirit of all the officers reared under him.

When I was at Bowood there was a plan suggested between Bowles and myself, to engage among the cleverest literary characters of our knowledge, six or eight, each of whom was to engage to take some one subject of those into which the “Edinburgh Review” might be aptly divided; as Science, Classical Knowledge, Style, Taste, Philosophy, Political Economy, Morals, Religion, and Patriotism; to state the number of Essays he could write and the time at which he would deliver each; and so go through the whole of the “Review”:—to be published in the first instance in the “Courier” during the Recess of Parliament. We thought of Southey, Wordsworth, Crowe, Crabbe, Wollaston; and Bowles thought he could answer for several single Articles from persons of the highest rank in the Church and our two Universities. Such a plan, adequately executed, seven or eight years ago, would have gone near to blow up this Magazine of Mischief.

As to Ridgeway[127] and the Essays, I have not only no objection to my name being given, but I should prefer it. I have just as much right to call myself dramatically an Irish Protestant, when writing in the character of one, as Swift had to call himself a draper.[128] I have waded through as mischievous a Work, as two huge quartos, very dull, can be, by a Mr. Edward Wakefield, called an Account of Ireland. Of all scribblers these agricultural quarto-mongers are the vilest. I thought of making the affairs of Ireland, in toto, chiefly however with reference to the Catholic Question, a new series, and of republishing in the Appendix to the eight letters to Mr. Justice Fletcher, Lord Clare’s (then Chancellor Fitzgibbon’s) admirable speech, worthy of Demosthenes, of which a copy was brought me over from Dublin by Rickman, and given to Lamb. It was never printed in England, nor is it to be procured. I never met with a person who had heard of it. Except that one main point is omitted (and it is remarkable that the poet Edmund Spenser in his Dialogue on Ireland[129] is the only writer who has urged this point), viz., the forcing upon savages the laws of a comparatively civilised people, instead of adopting measures gradually to render them susceptible of those laws, this speech might be deservedly called the philosophy of the past and present history of Ireland. It makes me smile to observe, how all the mediocre men exult in a Ministry that have been so successful without any overpowering talent of eloquence, etc. It is true that a series of gigantic events like those of the last eighteen months, will lift up any cock-boat to the skies upon their billows; but no less true that, sooner or later, parliamentary talent will be found absolutely requisite for an English Ministry.

With sincere regard and esteem, your obliged

S. T. Coleridge.

CCIV. TO JOHN KENYON.[130]

Mr. B. Morgan’s, Bath, November 3 [1814].

My dear Sir,—At Binn’s, Cheap Street, I found Jeremy Taylor’s “Dissuasive from Popery,” in the largest and only complete edition of his Polemical Tracts. Mr. Binns had no objection to the paragraphs being transcribed any morning or evening at his house, and I put in a piece of paper with the words at which the transcript should begin and with which end—p. 450, l. 5, to p. 451, l. 31, I believe. But indeed I am ashamed, rather I feel awkward and uncomfortable at obtruding on you so long a task, much longer than I had imagined. I don’t like to use any words that might give you unpleasure, but I cannot help fearing that, like a child spoilt by your and Mrs. Kenyon’s great indulgence, I may have been betrayed into presuming on it more than I ought. Indeed, my dear sir! I do feel very keenly how exceeding kind you and Mrs. K. have been to me. It makes this scrawl of mine look dim in a way that was less uncommon with me formerly than it has been for the last eight or ten years.

But to return, or turn off, to the good old Bishop. It would be worth your while to read Taylor’s “Letter on Original Sin,” and what follows. I compare it to an old statue of Janus, with one of the faces, that which looks towards his opponents, the controversial phiz in highest preservation,—the force of a mighty one, all power, all life,—the face of a God rushing on to battle, and, in the same moment, enjoying at once both contest and triumph; the other, that which should have been the countenance that looks toward his followers, that with which he substitutes his own opinion, all weather eaten, dim, useless, a Ghost in marble, such as you may have seen represented in many of Piranesi’s astounding engravings from Rome and the Campus Martius. Jer. Taylor’s discursive intellect dazzle-darkened his intuition. The principle of becoming all things to all men, if by any means he might save any, with him as with Burke, thickened the protecting epidermis of the tact-nerve of truth into something like a callus. But take him all in all, such a miraculous combination of erudition, broad, deep, and omnigenous; of logic subtle as well as acute, and as robust as agile; of psychological insight, so fine yet so secure! of public prudence and practical sageness that one ray of creative Faith would have lit up and transfigured into wisdom, and of genuine imagination, with its streaming face unifying all at one moment like that of the setting sun when through an interspace of blue sky no larger than itself, it emerges from the cloud to sink behind the mountain, but a face seen only at starts, when some breeze from the higher air scatters, for a moment, the cloud of butterfly fancies, which flutter around him like a morning-garment of ten thousand colours—(now how shall I get out of this sentence? the tail is too big to be taken up into the coiler’s mouth)—well, as I was saying, I believe such a complete man hardly shall we meet again.

May God bless you and yours!

Your obliged
S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. My address after Tuesday will be (God permitting) Mr. Page’s, Surgeon, Calne.

J. Kenyon, Esq., 9, Argyle Street.

CCV. TO LADY BEAUMONT.

April 3, 1815.

Dear Madam,—Should your Ladyship still have among your papers those lines of mine to Mr. Wordsworth after his recitation of the poem on the growth of his own spirit,[131] which you honoured by wishing to take a copy, you would oblige me by enclosing them for me, addressed—“Mr. Coleridge, Calne, Wilts.” Of “The Excursion,” excluding the tale of the ruined cottage, which I have ever thought the finest poem in our language, comparing it with any of the same or similar length, I can truly say that one half the number of its beauties would make all the beauties of all his contemporary poets collectively mount to the balance:—but yet—the fault may be in my own mind—I do not think, I did not feel, it equal to the work on the growth of his own spirit. As proofs meet me in every part of “The Excursion” that the poet’s genius has not flagged, I have sometimes fancied that, having by the conjoint operation of his own experiences, feelings, and reason, himself convinced himself of truths, which the generality of persons have either taken for granted from their infancy, or, at least, adopted in early life, he has attached all their own depth and weight to doctrines and words, which come almost as truisms or commonplaces to others. From this state of mind, in which I was comparing Wordsworth with himself, I was roused by the infamous “Edinburgh” review of the poem. If ever guilt lay on a writer’s head, and if malignity, slander, hypocrisy, and self-contradictory baseness can constitute guilt, I dare openly, and openly (please God!) I will, impeach the writer of that article of it. These are awful times—a dream of dreams! To be a prophet is, and ever has been, an unthankful office. At the Illumination for the Peace I furnished a design for a friend’s transparency—a vulture, with the head of Napoleon, chained to a rock, and Britannia bending down, with one hand stretching out the wing of the vulture, and with the other clipping it with shears, on the one blade of which was written Nelson, on the other Wellington. The motto—

We’ve fought for peace, and conquer’d it at last;
The ravening Vulture’s leg is fetter’d fast.
Britons, rejoice! and yet be wary too!
The chain may break, the clipt wing sprout anew.[132]

And since I have conversed with those who first returned from France, I have weekly expected the event. Napoleon’s object at present is to embarrass the Allies, and to cool the enthusiasm of their subjects. The latter he unfortunately will be too successful in. In London, my Lady, it is scarcely possible to distinguish the opinions of the people from the ravings and railings of the mob; but in country towns we must be blind not to see the real state of the popular mind. I do not know whether your Ladyship read my letters to Judge Fletcher. I can assure you it is no exaggerated picture of the predominance of Jacobinism. In this small town of Calne five hundred volunteers were raised in the last war. I am persuaded that five could not be raised now. A considerable landowner, and a man of great observation, said to me last week, “A famine, sir, could scarce have produced more evil than the Corn Bill[133] has done under the present circumstances.” I speak nothing of the Bill itself, except that, after the closest attention and the most sedulous inquiry after facts from landowners, farmers, stewards, millers, and bakers, I am convinced that both opponents and advocates were in extremes, and that an evil produced by many causes was by many remedies to have been cured, not by the universal elixir of one sweeping law.

My poems will be put to press by the middle of June. A number adequate to one volume are already in the hands of my friends at Bristol, under conditions that they are to be published at all events, even though I should not add another volume, which I never had so little reason to doubt. Within the last two days I have composed three poems, containing 500 lines in the whole.

Mr. and Mrs. Morgan present their respective compliments to your Ladyship and Sir George.

I remain, my Lady, your Ladyship’s obliged humble servant,

S. T. Coleridge.

CCVI. TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

Calne, May 30, 1815.

My honoured Friend,—On my return from Devizes, whither I had gone to procure some vaccine matter (the small-pox having appeared in Calne, and Mrs. Morgan’s sister believing herself never to have had it), I found your letter: and I will answer it immediately, though to answer it as I could wish to do would require more recollection and arrangement of thought than is always to be commanded on the instant. But I dare not trust my own habit of procrastination, and, do what I would, it would be impossible in a single letter to give more than general convictions. But, even after a tenth or twentieth letter, I should still be disquieted as knowing how poor a substitute must letters be for a vivâ voce examination of a work with its author, line by line. It is most uncomfortable from many, many causes, to express anything but sympathy, and gratulation to an absent friend, to whom for the more substantial third of a life we have been habituated to look up: especially where a love, though increased by many and different influences, yet begun and throve and knit its joints in the perception of his superiority. It is not in written words, but by the hundred modifications that looks make and tone, and denial of the full sense of the very words used, that one can reconcile the struggle between sincerity and diffidence, between the persuasion that I am in the right, and that as deep though not so vivid conviction, that it may be the positiveness of ignorance rather than the certainty of insight. Then come the human frailties, the dread of giving pain, or exciting suspicions of alteration and dyspathy, in short, the almost inevitable insincerities between imperfect beings, however sincerely attached to each other. It is hard (and I am Protestant enough to doubt whether it is right) to confess the whole truth (even of one’s self, human nature scarce endures it, even to one’s self), but to me it is still harder to do this of and to a revered friend.

But to your letter. First, I had never determined to print the lines addressed to you. I lent them to Lady Beaumont on her promise that they should be copied, and returned; and not knowing of any copy in my own possession, I sent for them, because I was making a MS. collection of all my poems—publishable and unpublishable—and still more perhaps for the handwriting of the only perfect copy, that entrusted to her ladyship. Most assuredly, I never once thought of printing them without having consulted you, and since I lit on the first rude draught, and corrected it as well as I could, I wanted no additional reason for its not being published in my lifetime than its personality respecting myself. After the opinions I had given publicly, in the preference of “Lycidas” (moral no less than poetical) to Cowley’s Monody, I could not have printed it consistently. It is for the biographer, not the poet, to give the accidents of individual life. Whatever is not representative, generic, may be indeed most poetically expressed, but is not poetry. Otherwise, I confess, your prudential reasons would not have weighed with me, except as far as my name might haply injure your reputation, for there is nothing in the lines, as far as your powers are concerned, which I have not as fully expressed elsewhere; and I hold it a miserable cowardice to withhold a deliberate opinion only because the man is alive.

Secondly, for “The Excursion,” I feared that had I been silent concerning “The Excursion,” Lady Beaumont would have drawn some strange inference; and yet I had scarcely sent off the letter before I repented that I had not run that risk rather than have approach to dispraise communicated to you by a third person. But what did my criticism amount to, reduced to its full and naked sense? This, that comparatively with the former poem, “The Excursion,” as far as it was new to me, had disappointed my expectations; that the excellencies were so many and of so high a class that it was impossible to attribute the inferiority, if any such really existed, to any flagging of the writer’s own genius—and that I conjectured that it might have been occasioned by the influence of self-established convictions having given to certain thoughts and expressions a depth and force which they had not for readers in general. In order, therefore, to explain the disappointment, I must recall to your mind what my expectations were: and, as these again were founded on the supposition that (in whatever order it might be published) the poem on the growth of your own mind was as the ground plot and the roots, out of which “The Recluse” was to have sprung up as the tree, as far as [there was] the same sap in both, I expected them, doubtless, to have formed one complete whole; but in matter, form, and product to be different, each not only a distinct but a different work. In the first I had found “themes by thee first sung aright,”

Of smiles spontaneous and mysterious fears
(The first-born they of reason and twin-birth)
Of tides obedient to external force,
And currents self-determin’d, as might seem,
Or by some central breath; of moments awful,
Now in thy inner life, and now abroad,
When power stream’d from thee, and thy soul received
The light reflected as a light bestowed;
Of fancies fair, and milder hours of youth,
Hyblæan murmurs of poetic thought
Industrious in its joy, in vales and glens
Native or outland, lakes and famous hills!
Or on the lonely highroad, when the stars
Were rising; or by secret mountain streams,
The guides and the companions of thy way;
Of more than fancy—of the social sense
Distending wide, and man beloved as man,
Where France in all her towns lay vibrating,
Ev’n as a bark becalm’d beneath the burst
Of Heaven’s immediate thunder, when no cloud
Is visible, or shadow on the main!
For Thou wert there, thy own brows garlanded,
Amid the tremor of a realm aglow,
Amid a mighty nation jubilant,
When from the general heart of human kind
Hope sprang forth, like a full-born Deity!
Of that dear Hope afflicted, and amaz’d,
So homeward summon’d! thenceforth calm and sure
From the dread watch-tower of man’s absolute self,
With light unwaning on her eyes, to look
Far on! herself a glory to behold,
The Angel of the vision! Then (last strain)
Of duty, chosen laws controlling choice,
Action and Joy! An Orphic song indeed,
A song divine of high and passionate truths,
To their own music chaunted!

Indeed, through the whole of that Poem, με Αὔρα τις εἰσ έπνευσε μουσικωτάτη. This I considered as “The Excursion;”[134] and the second, as “The Recluse” I had (from what I had at different times gathered from your conversation on the Place [Grasmere]) anticipated as commencing with you set down and settled in an abiding home, and that with the description of that home you were to begin a philosophical poem, the result and fruits of a spirit so framed and so disciplined as had been told in the former.

Whatever in Lucretius is poetry is not philosophical, whatever is philosophical is not poetry; and in the very pride of confident hope I looked forward to “The Recluse” as the first and only true philosophical poem in existence. Of course, I expected the colours, music, imaginative life, and passion of poetry; but the matter and arrangement of philosophy; not doubting from the advantages of the subject that the totality of a system was not only capable of being harmonised with, but even calculated to aid, the unity (beginning, middle, and end) of a poem. Thus, whatever the length of the work might be, still it was a determinate length; of the subjects announced, each would have its own appointed place, and, excluding repetitions, each would relieve and rise in interest above the other. I supposed you first to have meditated the faculties of man in the abstract, in their correspondence with his sphere of action, and, first in the feeling, touch, and taste, then in the eye, and last in the ear,—to have laid a solid and immovable foundation for the edifice by removing the sandy sophisms of Locke, and the mechanic dogmatists, and demonstrating that the senses were living growths and developments of the mind and spirit, in a much juster as well as higher sense, than the mind can be said to be formed by the senses. Next, I understood that you would take the human race in the concrete, have exploded the absurd notion of Pope’s “Essay on Man,” Darwin, and all the countless believers even (strange to say) among Christians of man’s having progressed from an ourang-outang state—so contrary to all history, to all religion, nay, to all possibility—to have affirmed a Fall in some sense, as a fact, the possibility of which cannot be understood from the nature of the will, but the reality of which is attested by experience and conscience. Fallen men contemplated in the different ages of the world, and in the different states—savage, barbarous, civilised, the lonely cot, or borderer’s wigwam, the village, the manufacturing town, seaport, city, universities, and, not disguising the sore evils under which the whole creation groans, to point out, however, a manifest scheme of redemption, of reconciliation from this enmity with Nature—what are the obstacles, the Antichrist that must be and already is—and to conclude by a grand didactic swell on the necessary identity of a true philosophy with true religion, agreeing in the results and differing only as the analytic and synthetic process, as discursive from intuitive, the former chiefly useful as perfecting the latter; in short, the necessity of a general revolution in the modes of developing and disciplining the human mind by the substitution of life and intelligence (considered in its different powers from the plant up to that state in which the difference of degree becomes a new kind (man, self-consciousness), but yet not by essential opposition) for the philosophy of mechanism, which, in everything that is most worthy of the human intellect, strikes Death, and cheats itself by mistaking clear images for distinct conceptions, and which idly demands conceptions where intuitions alone are possible or adequate to the majesty of the Truth. In short, facts elevated into theory—theory into laws—and laws into living and intelligent powers—true idealism necessarily perfecting itself in realism, and realism refining itself into idealism.

Such or something like this was the plan I had supposed that you were engaged on. Your own words will therefore explain my feelings, viz., that your object “was not to convey recondite, or refined truths, but to place commonplace truths in an interesting point of view.” Now this I suppose to have been in your two volumes of poems, as far as was desirable or possible, without an insight into the whole truth. How can common truths be made permanently interesting but by being bottomed on our common nature? It is only by the profoundest insight into numbers and quantity that a sublimity and even religious wonder become attached to the simplest operations of arithmetic, the most evident properties of the circle or triangle. I have only to finish a preface, which I shall have done in two, or, at farthest, three days; and I will then, dismissing all comparison either with the poem on the growth of your own support, or with the imagined plan of “The Recluse,” state fairly my main objections to “The Excursion” as it is. But it would have been alike unjust both to you and to myself, if I had led you to suppose that any disappointment I may have felt arose wholly or chiefly from the passages I do not like, or from the poem considered irrelatively.

Allston lives at 8, Buckingham Place, Fitzroy Square. He has lost his wife, and been most unkindly treated and most unfortunate. I hope you will call on him. Good God! to think of such a grub as Dawe with more than he can do, and such a genius as Allston without a single patron!

God bless you! I am, and never have been other than your most affectionate

S. T. Coleridge.

Mr. and Mrs. Morgan desire to be affectionately remembered to you, and they would be highly gratified if you could make a little tour and spend a short time at Calne. There is an admirable collection of pictures at Corsham. Bowles left Bremhill (two miles from us, where he has a perfect paradise of a place) for town yesterday morning.

CCVII. TO THE REV. W. MONEY.[135]

Calne, Wednesday, 1815.

Dear Sir,—I have seldom made a greater sacrifice and gratification to prudence than in the determination most reluctantly formed, that the state of my health, which requires hourly regimen, joined with the uncertain state of the weather and the perilous consequences of my taking cold in the existing weakness of the viscera, renders it improper for me to hazard a night away from my home. No pleasure, however intellectual (and to all but intellectual pleasures I have long been dead, for surely the staving off of pain is no pleasure), could repay me even for the chance of being again unwell in any house but my own. I have a great, a gigantic effort to make, and I will go through with it or die. Gross have been the calumnies concerning me; but enough remains of truth to enforce the necessity of considering all other things as unimportant compared with the necessity of living them down. This letter is, of course, sacred to yourself, and a pledge of the high respect I entertain for your moral being; for you need not the feelings of friendship to feel as a friend toward every fellow Christian.

To turn to another subject, Mr. Bowles, I understand, is about to publish, at least is composing a reply to some answer to the “Velvet Cushion.”[136] I have seen neither work. But this I will venture to say, that if the respondents in favour of the Church take upon them to justify in the most absolute sense, as if Scripture were the subject of the controversy, every minute part of our admirable Liturgy, and liturgical and sacramental services, they will only furnish new triumph to ungenerous adversaries.

The Church of England has in the Articles solemnly declared that all Churches are fallible—and in another, to assert its absolute immaculateness, sounds to me a mere contradiction. No! I would first overthrow what can be fairly and to all men intelligibly overthrown in the adversaries’ objections (and of this kind the instances are as twenty to one). For the remainder I would talk like a special pleader, and from the defensive pass to the offensive, and then prove from St. Paul (for of the practice of the early Church even in its purest state, before the reign of Constantine, our opponents make no account) that errors in a Church that neither directly or indirectly injure morals or oppugn salvation are exercises for mutual charity, not excuses for schism. In short, is there or is there [not] such a condemnable thing as schism? In the proof of consequences of the affirmative lies, in my humble opinion, the complete confutation of the (so-called) Evangelical Dissenters.

I shall be most happy to converse with you on the subject. If Mr. Bowles were not employed on it, I should have had no objection to have reduced my many thoughts to order and have published them; but this might now seem invidious and like rivalry.

Present my best respects to Mrs. Money, and be so good as to make the fitting apologies for me to Mr. T. Methuen,[137] the man wise of heart! But an apology already exists for me in his own mind.

I remain, dear sir, respectfully your obliged

S. T. Coleridge.

Wednesday, Calne.

P. S. I have opened this letter to add, that the greater number, if not the whole, of the arguments used apply only to the ministers, not to the members of the Established Church. Some one of our eminent divines refused even to take the pastoral office, I believe, on account of the Funeral Service and the Absolution of the Sick; but still it remains to justify schism from Church-Membership.

To the Rev. W. Money, Whetham.

CHAPTER XIII
NEW LIFE AND NEW FRIENDS
1816-1821

CHAPTER XIII
NEW LIFE AND NEW FRIENDS
1816-1821

With Coleridge’s name and memory must ever be associated the names of James and Anne Gillman. It was beneath the shelter of their friendly roof that he spent the last eighteen years of his life, and it was to their wise and loving care that the comparative fruitfulness and well-being of those years were due. They thought themselves honoured by his presence, and he repaid their devotion with unbounded love and gratitude. Friendship and loving-kindness followed Coleridge all the days of his life. What did he not owe to Poole, to Southey for his noble protection of his family, to the Morgans for their long-tried faithfulness and devotion to himself? But to the Gillmans he owed the “crown of his cup and garnish of his dish,” a welcome which lasted till the day of his death. Doubtless there were chords in his nature which were struck for the first time by these good people, and in their presence and by their help he was a new man. But, for all that, their patience must have been inexhaustible, their loyalty unimpeachable, their love indestructible. Such friendship is rare and beautiful, and merits a most honourable remembrance.

CCVIII. TO JAMES GILLMAN.

42, Norfolk Street, Strand,
Saturday noon, [April 13, 1816.]

My dear Sir,—The very first half hour I was with you convinced me that I should owe my reception into your family exclusively to motives not less flattering to me than honourable to yourself. I trust we shall ever in matters of intellect be reciprocally serviceable to each other. Men of sense generally come to the same conclusion; but they are likely to contribute to each other’s exchangement of view, in proportion to the distance or even opposition of the points from which they set out. Travel and the strange variety of situations and employments on which chance has thrown me, in the course of my life, might have made me a mere man of observation, if pain and sorrow and self-miscomplacence had not forced my mind in on itself, and so formed habits of meditation. It is now as much my nature to evolve the fact from the law, as that of a practical man to deduce the law from the fact.

With respect to pecuniary remuneration,[138] allow me to say, I must not at least be suffered to make any addition to your family expenses—though I cannot offer anything that would be in any way adequate to my sense of the service; for that, indeed, there could not be a compensation, as it must be returned in kind, by esteem and grateful affection.

And now of myself. My ever wakeful reason, and the keenness of my moral feelings, will secure you from all unpleasant circumstances connected with me, save only one, viz., the evasion of a specific madness. You will never hear anything but truth from me:—prior habits render it out of my power to tell an untruth, but unless carefully observed, I dare not promise that I should not, with regard to this detested poison, be capable of acting one. No sixty hours have yet passed without my having taken laudanum, though for the last week [in] comparatively trifling doses. I have full belief that your anxiety need not be extended beyond the first week, and for the first week I shall not, I must not, be permitted to leave your house, unless with you. Delicately or indelicately, this must be done, and both the servants and the assistant must receive absolute commands from you. The stimulus of conversation suspends the terror that haunts my mind; but when I am alone, the horrors I have suffered from laudanum, the degradation, the blighted utility, almost overwhelm me. If (as I feel for the first time a soothing confidence it will prove) I should leave you restored to my moral and bodily health, it is not myself only that will love and honour you; every friend I have (and thank God! in spite of this wretched vice, I have many and warm ones, who were friends of my youth and have never deserted me) will thank you with reverence. I have taken no notice of your kind apologies. If I could not be comfortable in your house, and with your family, I should deserve to be miserable. If you could make it convenient I should wish to be with you by Monday evening, as it would prevent the necessity of taking fresh lodgings in town.

With respectful compliments to Mrs. Gillman and her sister, I remain, dear sir, your much obliged

S. T. Coleridge.

CCIX. TO DANIEL STUART.

James Gillman’s, Esq., Surgeon, Highgate,
Wednesday, May 8, 1816.

My dear Stuart,—Since you left me I have been reflecting a good deal on the subject of the Catholic Question, and somewhat on the “Courier” in general. With all my weight of faults (and no one is less likely to underrate them than myself) a tendency to be influenced by selfish motives in my friendships, or even in the cultivation of my acquaintances, will not, I am sure, be by you placed among them. When we first knew each other, it was perhaps the most interesting period of both our lives, at the very turn of the flood; and I can never cease to reflect with affectionate delight on the steadiness and independence of your conduct and principles; and how, for so many years, with little assistance from others, and with one main guide, a sympathising tact for the real sense, feeling, and impulses of the respectable part of the English nation, you went on so auspiciously, and likewise so effectively. It is far, very far, from being a hyperbole to affirm, that you did more against the French scheme of Continental domination, than the Duke of Wellington has done; or rather Wellington could neither have been supplied by the Ministers, nor the Ministers supported by the Nation, but for the tone first given, and then constantly kept up, by the plain, unministerial, anti-opposition, anti-jacobin, anti-gallican, anti-Napoleonic spirit of your writings, aided by the colloquial style, and evident good sense, in which as acting on an immense mass of knowledge of existing men and existing circumstances, you are superior to any man I ever met with in my lifetime. Indeed you are the only human being of whom I can say, with severe truth, that I never conversed with you for an hour, without rememberable instruction. And with the same simplicity I dare affirm my belief, that my greater knowledge of man has been useful to you; though from the nature of things, not so useful, as your knowledge of men has been to me. Now with such convictions, my dear Stuart, how is it possible that I can look back on the conduct of the “Courier,” from the period of the Duke of York’s restoration, without some pain? You cannot be seriously offended or affronted with me, if in this deep confidence, and in a letter which, or its contents, can meet no eye but your own, I venture to declare that, though since then much has been done, very much of high utility to the country by and under Mr. Street, yet the “Courier” itself has gradually lost that sanctifying spirit which was the life of its life, and without which even the best and soundest principles lose half their effect on the human mind. I mean, the faith in the faith of the person or paper which brings them forward. They are attributed to the accident of their happening to be for such a side or such a party. In short there is no longer any root in the paper, out of which all the various branches and fruits and even fluttering leaves are seen or believed to grow. But it is the old tree barked round above the root, though the circular decortication is so small, and so neatly filled up and coloured as to be scarcely visible but in its total effects. Excellent fruits still at times hang on the boughs, but they are tied on by threads and hairs.

In all this I am well aware that you are no otherwise to blame, than in permitting what, without disturbance to your health and tranquillity, you could not perhaps have prevented, or effectively modified. But the whole plan of Street’s seems to me to have been motiveless from the beginning, or at least affected by the grossest miscalculations in respect even of pecuniary interest. For had the paper maintained and asserted not only its independence but its appearance of it, it is true that Mr. Street might not have had Mr. Croker to dine with him, or received as many nods or shakes of the hand from Lord this, or that, but it is at least equally true, that the Ministry would have been far more effectually served, and that (I speak now from facts) both paper and its conductor would have been held by the adherents of Ministers in far higher respect. And after all, Ministers do not love newspapers in their hearts; not even those that support them. Indeed it seems epidemic among Parliament men in general, to affect to look down upon and to despise newspapers to which they owe ⁹⁹⁹⁄1000 their influence and character—and at least three fifths of their knowledge and phraseology. Enough! Burn this letter and forgive the writer for the purity and affectionateness of his motive.

With regard to the Catholic Question, if I write I must be allowed to express the truth and the whole truth concerning the imprudent avowal of Lord Castlereagh that it was not to be a government question. On this condition I will write immediately a tract on the question which to the best of my knowledge will be about from 120 to 140 octavo pages; but so contrived that Mr. Street may find no difficulty in dividing it into ten or twenty essays, or leading paragraphs. In my scheme I have carefully excluded every approximation to metaphysical reasoning; and set aside every thought which cannot be brought under one or the other of three heads—1. Plain evident sense. 2. Historical documental facts. 3. Existing circumstances, character, etc., of Ireland in relation to Great Britain, and to its own interests, and those of its various classes of proprietors. I shall not deliver it till it is wholly finished, and if you and Mr. Street think that such a work delivered entire will be worth fifty pounds to the paper, I will begin it immediately. Let me either see or hear from you as soon as possible. Cannot Mr. Street send me some one or other of the daily papers, without expense to you, after he has done with them? Kind respects to Mrs. Stuart.

Your affectionate and obliged friend,
S. T. Coleridge.

CCX. TO THE SAME.

Monday, May 13, 1816.

Dear Stuart,—It is among the feeblenesses of our nature, that we are often, to a certain degree, acted on by stories, gravely asserted, of which we yet do most religiously disbelieve every syllable, nay, which perhaps we know to be false. The truth is that images and thoughts possess a power in, and of themselves, independent of that act of the judgment or understanding by which we affirm or deny the existence of a reality correspondent to them. Such is the ordinary state of the mind in dreams. It is not strictly accurate to say that we believe our dreams to be actual while we are dreaming. We neither believe it, nor disbelieve it. With the will the comparing power is suspended, and without the comparing power, any act of judgment, whether affirmation or denial, is impossible. The forms and thoughts act merely by their own inherent power, and the strong feelings at times apparently connected with them are, in point of fact, bodily sensations which are the causes or occasions of the images; not (as when we are awake) the effects of them. Add to this a voluntary lending of the will to this suspension of one of its own operations (that is, that of comparison and consequent decision concerning the reality of any sensuous impression) and you have the true theory of stage illusion, equally distant from the absurd notion of the French critics, who ground their principles on the presumption of an absolute delusion, and of Dr. Johnson who would persuade us that our judgments are as broad awake during the most masterly representation of the deepest scenes of Othello, as a philosopher would be during the exhibition of a magic lanthorn with Punch and Joan and Pull Devil, Pull Baker, etc., on its painted slides. Now as extremes always meet, this dogma of our dramatic critic and soporific irenist would lead, by inevitable consequences, to that very doctrine of the unities maintained by the French Belle Lettrists, which it was the object of his strangely overrated, contradictory, and most illogical preface to Shakespeare to overthrow.

Thus, instead of troubling you with the idle assertions that have been most authoritatively uttered, concerning your being under bond and seal to the present Ministry, which I know to be (monosyllabically speaking) A LIE, and which formed, I guess, part of the impulse which occasioned my last letter, I have given you a theory which, as far as I know, is new, and which I am quite sure is most important as the ground and fundamental principle of all philosophic and of all common-sense criticisms concerning the drama and the theatre.

To put off, however, the Jack-the-Giant-Killer-seven-leagued boots, with which I am apt to run away from the main purpose of what I had to write, I owe it to myself and the truth to observe, that there was as much at least of partiality as of grief and inculpation in my remarks on the spirit of the “Courier;” and that with all its faults, I prefer it greatly to any other paper, even without reference to its being the best and most effective vehicle of what I deem most necessary and urgent truths. Be assured there was no occasion to let me know, that with regard to the proposed disquisition you were interested as a patriot and a protestant, not as a proprietor of the particular paper. Such too, Heaven knows, is my sole object! for as to the money that it may be thought worth according to the number and value of the essays, I regard it merely as enabling me to devote a given portion of time and effort to this subject, rather than to any one of the many others by which I might procure the same remuneration. From this hour I sit down to it tooth and nail, and shall not turn to the left or right till I have finished it. When I have reached the half-way house I will transmit the MSS. to you, that I may, without the necessity of dis- or re-arranging the work, be able to adopt any suggestions of yours, whether they should be additive, alterative, or emendative. One question only I have to consult you concerning—viz., the form which would be the most attractive of notice; simply essays? or letters addressed to Lord Liverpool for instance, on the supposition that he remains firm to the Perceval principle on this blind, blundering, and feverous scheme?

Mr. and Mrs. Gillman will be most happy to see you to share in a family dinner, and spend the evening with us; and if you will come early, I can show you some most delicious walks. You will like Mr. Gillman. He is a man of strong, fervid, and agile intellect, with such a master passion for truth, that his most abstracted verities assume a character of veracity. And his wife, it will be impossible not to respect, if a balance and harmony of powers and qualities, unified and spiritualized by a native feminine fineness of character, render womanhood amiable and respectable. In serious truth I have much reason to be most grateful for the choice and chance which has placed me under their hospitable roof. I have no doubt that Mr. Gillman as friend and as physician will succeed in restoring me to my natural self.

My kind respects to Mrs. Stuart. I long to see the little one.

Your obliged and sincere friend,

S. T. Coleridge.

CCXI. TO JOHN MURRAY.

Highgate, February 27, 1817.

My dear Sir,—I had a visit from Mr. Morgan yester-afternoon, and trouble you with these lines in consequence of his communications. When I stated to you the circumstances respecting the volumes of mine that have been so long printed, and the embarrassment into which the blunder of the printer had entangled me, with the sinking down of my health that made it so perplexing for me to remedy it, I did it under the belief that you were yourself very little disposed to the publication of the “Zapolya”[139] as a separate work—unless it had, in some shape or other, been brought out at the Theatre. Of this I seemed to have less and less chance. What had been declared an indispensable part, and of all the play, the most theatrical as well as dramatic, by Lord Byron, was ridiculed and thrown out of all question by Mr. Douglas Kinnaird, with no other explanation vouchsafed but that Lord Byron knew nothing about the matter—and, besides that, was in the habit of overrating my performances. These were not the words, but these words contain the purport of what he said. Meantime what Mr. D. Kinnaird most warmly approved, Mr. Harris had previously declared would convulse a house with laughter, and damn the piece beyond any possibility of a further hearing. Still I was disposed in my distressed circumstances of means, health, and spirits, to have tried the plan suggested by Mr. D. Kinnaird of turning the “Zapolya” into a melodrama by the omission of the first act. But Mr. K. was, with Lord Byron, dropped from the sub-committee, and I knew no one to whom I could apply. Mr. Dibdin, who had promised to befriend me, was likewise removed from the stage-managership. Mr. Rae did indeed promise to give me a few hours of his time repeatedly, and from my former acquaintance with him, as the Ordonio of the “Remorse,” I had some reason to be wounded by his neglect. Indeed, at Drury Lane, no one knows to whom any effective application is to be made. Mr. Kinnaird had engaged to look over the “Zapolya” with me, and appointed the time. I went accordingly and passed the whole of the fore-dinner day with him—in what? In hearing an opera of his own, and returned as wise as I came. Much is talked of the advantages of a managership of noblemen, but as far as I have seen and experienced, an author has no cause to congratulate himself on the change, either in the taste, courtesy, or reliability of his judges. Desponding concerning this (and finding that every publication with my name would be persecuted by pre-determination by the one guiding party, that I had no support to expect from the other, and that the thicker and closer the cloud of misfortunes gathered round me, the more actively and remorselessly were the poisoned arrows of wanton enmity shot through it), I sincerely believed that it would be neither to your advantage or mine that the “Zapolya” should be published singly. It appeared, at that time, that the annexing to it a collection of all my poems would enable the work to be brought out without delay,—and I therefore applied to you, offering either to repay the money received for it, or to work it out by furnishing you with miscellaneous matter for the “Quarterly,” or by sitting down to the “Rabbinical Tales”[140] as soon as ever the works now in the press were put out of my hand, that is, as far as the copy was concerned. Your answer impressed me with your full assent to the plan. Nay, however mortifying it might in ordinary circumstances have been to an author’s vanity, it was not so to me, that the “Zapolya” was a work of which you had no objection to be rid. But, if I misunderstood you, let me now be better informed, and whatever you wish shall be done. I have never knowingly or intentionally been guilty of a dishonourable transaction, but have in all things that respect my neighbour been more sinned against than sinning. Much less would I hazard the appearance of an equivocal conduct at present when I feel that I am sinking into the grave, with fainter and fainter hopes of achieving that which, God knows my inmost heart! is the sole motive for the wish to live—namely, that of preparing for the press the results of twenty-five years hard study and almost constant meditation. Reputation has no charm for me, except as a preventive of starving. Abuse and ridicule are all which I could expect for myself, if the six volumes were published which would comprise the sum total of my convictions; but, most thoroughly satisfied both of their truth and of the vital importance of these truths, convinced that of all systems that have ever been prescribed, this has the least of mysticism, the very object throughout from the first page to the last being to reconcile the dictates of common sense with the conclusions of scientific reasoning—it would assuredly be like a sudden gleam of sunshine falling on the face of a dying man, if I left the world with a knowledge that the work would have a chance of being read in better times. But of all men in the way of business, my dear sir! I should be most reluctant to give you any just cause of reproaching my integrity; because I know and feel, and have at all times and to all persons who had any literary concerns with me, acknowledged that you have acted with a friendly kindness towards me,—and if Mr. Gifford have taken a prejudice against me or my writings, I never imputed it as blame to you. Let me then know what you wish me to do, and I will do it. I ought to add, that in yielding to the proposal of annexing the “Zapolya” to the volume of poetry, provided I could procure your assent, I expressly stipulated that if, in any shape or modification, it should be represented on the stage, the copyright of it in that form would be reserved for your refusal or acceptance, and, in like manner the “Christabel” when completed, and the “Rabbinical Tales.” The second “Lay Sermon” (a most unfortunate name) will appear, I trust, next week.

I remain, my dear sir, with respect and regard, your obliged

S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. I have not seen either the “Edinburgh”[141] or the “Quarterly” last Reviews. The article against me in the former was, I am assured, written by Hazlitt. Now what can I think of Mr. Jeffrey, who knows nothing personally of me but my hospitable attentions to him, and from whom I heard nothing but very high seasoned compliments, and who yet can avail himself of such an instrument of his most unprovoked malignity towards me, an inoffensive man in distress and sickness? As soon as I have read the article (and the loan of the book is promised me), I shall make up my mind whether or not to address a letter, publicly to Mr. Jeffrey, or, in the form of an appeal, to the public, concerning his proved predetermined malice.

Mr. Murray, Bookseller, Albemarle Street, Piccadilly.

CCXII. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

[May, 1817.]

Dear Southey,—Mr. Ludwig Tieck[142] has continued to express so anxious a wish to see you, as one man of genius sees another, that he will not lose even the slight chance of possibility that you may not have quitted Paris when he arrives there. I have only therefore (should this letter be delivered to you by Mr. Tieck) to tell you—first, that Mr. Tieck is the gentleman who was so kind to me at Rome; secondly, that he is a good man, emphatically, without taint of moral or religious infidelity; thirdly, that as a poet, critic, and moralist, he stands (in reputation) next to Goethe (and I believe that this reputation will be fame); lastly, it will interest you with Bristol, Keswick, and Grasmere associations, that Mr. Tieck has had to run, and has run, as nearly the same career in Germany as yourself and Wordsworth and (by the spray of being known to be intimate with you)

Yours sincerely,
S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. Should this meet you, for God’s sake, do let me know of your arrival in London; it is so very important that I should see you.

R. Southey, Esq.
Honoured by Mr. Ludwig Tieck.

CCXIII. to H. C. Robinson.[143]

June, 1817.

My dear Robinson,—I shall never forgive you if you do not try to make some arrangement to bring Mr. L. Tieck and yourself up to Highgate very soon. The day, the dinner-hour, you may appoint yourself; but what I most wish would be, either that Mr. Tieck would come in the first stage, so as either to walk or to be driven in Mr. Gillman’s gig to Caen Wood, and its delicious groves and alleys (the finest in England, a grand cathedral aisle of giant lime-trees, Pope’s favourite composition walk when with the old Earl, a brother-rogue of yours in the law line), or else to come up to dinner, sleep here, and return (if then return he must) in the afternoon four o’clock stage the day after. I should be most happy to make him and that admirable man, Mr. Frere,[144] acquainted—their pursuits have been so similar—and to convince Mr. Tieck that he is the man among us in whom taste at its maximum has vitalized itself into productive power. [For] genius, you need only show him the incomparable translation annexed to Southey’s “Cid” (which, by the bye, would perhaps give Mr. Tieck the most favourable impression of Southey’s own powers); and I would finish the work off by Mr. Frere’s “Aristophanes.” In such GOODNESS, too, as both my Mr. Frere (the Right Hon. J. H. Frere), and his brother George (the lawyer in Brunswick Square), live, move, and have their being, there is genius.

I have read two pages of “Lalla Rookh,” or whatever it is called. Merciful Heaven! I dare read no more, that I may be able to answer at once to any questions, “I have but just looked at the work.” O Robinson! if I could, or if I dared, act and feel as Moore and his set do, what havoc could I not make amongst their crockery-ware! Why, there are not three lines together without some adulteration of common English, and the ever-recurring blunder of using the possessive case, “compassion’s tears,” etc., for the preposition “of”—a blunder of which I have found no instances earlier than Dryden’s slovenly verses written for the trade. The rule is, that the case ’s is always personal; either it marks a person, or a personification, or the relique of some proverbial personification, as “Who for their belly’s sake,” in “Lycidas.” But for A to weep the tears of B puts me in mind of the exquisite passage in Rabelais where Pantagruel gives the page his cup, and begs him to go down into the courtyard, and curse and swear for him about half an hour or so.

God bless you!

S. T. Coleridge.

CCXIV. TO THOMAS POOLE.

[July 22, 1817.]

My dear Poole,—It was a great comfort to me to meet and part from you as I did at Mr. Purkis’s:[145] for, methinks, every true friendship that does not go with us to heaven, must needs be an obstacle to our own going thither,—to one of the parties, at all events.

I entreat your acceptance of a corrected copy of my “Sibylline Leaves” and “Literary Life;” and so wildly have they been printed, that a corrected copy is of some value to those to whom the works themselves are of any. I would that the misprinting had been the worst of the delusions and ill-usage, to which my credulity exposed me, from the said printer. After repeated promises that he took the printing, etc., merely to serve me as an old schoolfellow, and that he should charge “one sixpence profit,” he charged paper, which I myself ordered for him at the paper-mill, at twenty-five to twenty-six shillings per ream, at thirty-five shillings, and, exclusive of this, his bill was £80 beyond the sum assigned by two eminent London printers as the price at which they would be willing to print the same quantity. And yet even this is among the minima of his Bristol honesty.

Fenner,[146] or rather his religious factotum, the Rev. T. Curtis, ci-devant bookseller, and whose affected retirement from business is a humbug, having got out of me a scheme for an Encyclopædia, which is the admiration of all the Trade, flatter themselves that they can carry it on by themselves. They refused to realise their promise to advance me £300 on the pledge of my works (a proposal of their own) unless I would leave Highgate and live at Camberwell. I took the advice of such friends as I had the opportunity of consulting immediately, and after taking into consideration the engagement into which I had entered, it was their unanimous opinion that their breach of their promise was a very fortunate circumstance, that it could not have been kept without the entire sacrifice of all my powers, and, above all, of my health—in short, that I could not in all human probability survive the first year. Mr. Frere yesterday advised me strenuously to finish the “Christabel,” to keep the third volume of “The Friend” within a certain fathom of metaphysical depth, but within that to make it as elevated as the subjects required, and finally to devote myself industriously to the Works I had planned, alternating a poem with a prose volume, and, unterrified by reviews on the immediate sale, to remain confident that I should in some way or other be enabled to live in comfort, above all, not to write any more in any newspaper. He told me both Mr. Canning and Lord Liverpool had spoken in very high terms of me, and advised me to send a copy of all my works with a letter of some weight and length to the Marquis of Wellesley. He offered me all his interest with regard to Derwent,[147] if he was sent to Cambridge. “It is a point” (these were his words) “on which I should feel myself authorised not merely to ask but to require and importune.”

Hartley has been with me for the last month. He is very much improved; and, if I could see him more systematic in his studies and in the employment of his time, I should have little to complain of in him or to wish for. He is very desirous to visit the place of his infancy, poor fellow! And I am very desirous, if it were practicable, that he should be in the neighbourhood, as it were, of his uncles, so that there might be a probability of one or the other inviting him to spend a few weeks of his vacation at Ottery. His cousins[148] (the sons of my brothers James and George) are very good and affectionate to him; and it is a great comfort to me to see the chasm of the first generation closing and healing up in the second. From the state of your sister-in-law’s health, when I last saw you, and the probable results of it, I cannot tell how your household is situated. Otherwise, I should venture to entreat of you, that you would give poor Hartley an invitation to pass a fortnight or three weeks with you this vacation.[149]

The object of the third volume of my “Friend,” which will be wholly fresh matter, is briefly this,—that morality without religion is as senseless a scheme as religion without morality; that religion not revealed is a contradiction in terms, and an historical nonentity; that religion is not revealed unless the sacred books containing it are interpreted in the obvious and literal sense of the word, and that, thus interpreted, the doctrines of the Bible are in strict harmony with the Liturgy and Articles of our Established Church.

May God Almighty bless you, my dear Friend! and your obliged and affectionately grateful

S. T. Coleridge.

CCXV. TO H. F. CARY.[150]

Little Hampton, October [29], 1817.

I regret, dear sir! that a slave to the worst of tyrants (outward tyrants, at least), the booksellers, I have not been able to read more than two books and passages here and there of the other, of your translation of Dante. You will not suspect me of the worthlessness of exceeding my real opinion, but like a good Christian will make even modesty give way to charity, though I say, that in the severity and learned simplicity of the diction, and in the peculiar character of the Blank Verse, it has transcended what I should have thought possible without the Terza Rima. In itself, the metre is, compared with any English poem of one quarter the length, the most varied and harmonious to my ear of any since Milton, and yet the effect is so Dantesque that to those who should compare it only with other English poems, it would, I doubt not, have the same effect as the Terza Rima has compared with other Italian metres. I would that my literary influence were enough to secure the knowledge of the work for the true lovers of poetry in general.[151] But how came it that you had it published in so too unostentatious a form? For a second or third edition, the form has its conveniences; but for the first, in the present state of English society, quod non arrogas tibi, non habes. If you have any other works, poems, or poemata, by you, printed or MSS., you would gratify me by sending them to me. In the mean time, accept in the spirit in which it is offered, this trifling testimonial of my respect from, dear sir,

Yours truly,
S. T. Coleridge.

CCXVI. TO THE SAME.

Little Hampton, Sussex, November 6, 1817.

My dear Sir,—I thank you for your kind and valued present, and equally for the kind letter that accompanied it. What I expressed concerning your translation, I did not say lightly or without examination: and I know enough of myself to be confident that any feeling of personal partiality would rather lead me to doubts and dissatisfactions respecting a particular work in proportion as it might possibly occasion me to overrate the man. For example, if, indeed, I do estimate too highly what I deem the characteristic excellencies of Wordsworth’s poems, it results from a congeniality of taste without a congeniality in the productive power; but to the faults and defects I have been far more alive than his detractors, even from the first publication of the “Lyrical Ballads,” though for a long course of years my opinions were sacred to his own ear. Since my last, I have read over your translation, and have carefully compared it with my distinctest recollections of every specimen of blank verse I am familiar with that can be called epic, narrative, or descriptive, excluding only the dramatic, declamatory, and lyrical—with Cowper, Armstrong, Southey, Wordsworth, Landor (the author of “Gebir”), and with all of my own that fell within comparisons as above defined, especially the passage from 287 to 292, “Sibylline Leaves,”[152]—and I find no other alteration in my judgement but an additional confidence in it. I still affirm that, to my ear and to my judgement, both your metre and your rhythm have in a far greater degree than I know any instance of, the variety of Milton without any mere Miltonisms, that (wherein I in the passage referred to have chiefly failed) the verse has this variety without any loss of continuity, and that this is the excellence of the work considered as a translation of Dante—that it gives the reader a similar feeling of wandering and wandering, onward and onward. Of the diction, I can only say that it is Dantesque even in that in which the Florentine must be preferred to our English giant—namely, that it is not only pure language, but pure English. The language differs from that of a mother or a well-bred lady who had read little but her Bible, and a few good books, only as far as the thoughts and things to be expressed require learned words from a learned poet! Perhaps I may be thought to appreciate this merit too highly; but you have seen what I have said in defence of this in the “Literary Life.” By the bye, there is no Publisher’s name mentioned in the title-page. Should I place any number of copies for you with Gale and Curtis, or at Murray’s?

Believe me, that it will be both a pleasure and a relief to my mind should you bring with you any MSS. that you can yourself make it so as to read them to me.

Mrs. Gillman hopes, that, if choice or chance should lead you and yours near Highgate, you will not deprive us of the opportunity of introducing you to my excellent friend Mr. Gillman, and of shewing by our gladness how much we are, my dear sir, yours and Mrs. Cary’s sincere respecters, and I beg you will accept an expression of particular esteem from your old lecturer,

S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. I return the “Prometheus” and the “Persæ” with thanks. I hope the Cambridge Professor will go through the remaining plays of Æschylus. They are delightful editions.

CCXVII. TO J. H. GREEN.[153]

Highgate, Friday morning, November 14, 1817.

Dear Sir,—I arrived at Highgate from Little Hampton yester-night: and the most interesting tidings I heard, were of your return and of your great kindness ... I can only say that I will call in Lincoln’s Inn Fields the first day I am able to come to town—but should your occupation suffer you to take me in any of your rides for exercise or relaxation, need I say with what gladness I should welcome you? Our dinner-hour is four: but alterable without inconvenience to earlier or later. As soon as I have finished my present slave-work I shall write at large to Mr. Tieck. Be pleased to present my respectful regards to Mrs. Green, and believe me, dear sir, with marked esteem,

Your obliged
S. T. Coleridge.

CCXVIII. TO THE SAME.

[December 13, 1817.]

My dear Sir,—I thank you for the transcript. The lecture[154] went off beyond my expectations; and in several parts, where the thoughts were the same, more happily expressed extempore than in the Essay on the Science of Method[155] for the “Encyclopædia Metropolitana.” However, you shall receive the first correct copy of the latter that I can procure. I would that I could present it to you, as it was written; though I am not inclined to quarrel with the judgment and prudence of omission, as far as the public are concerned. Be assured, I shall not fail to avail myself of your kind invitation, and that time passes happily with me under your roof, receiving and returning. Be pleased to make my best respects to Mrs. Green, and I beg her acceptance of the “Hebrew Dirge” with my free translation,[156] of which I will, as soon as it is printed, send her the music, viz. the original melody, and Bishop’s additional music. Of this I am convinced, that a dozen of such “very pretty,” and “so sweet,” and “how smooth,” “well, that is charming” compositions would gain me more admiration with the English public than twice the number of poems twice as good as the “Ancient Mariner,” the “Christabel,” the “Destiny of Nations,” or the “Ode to the Departing Year.”

My own opinion of the German philosophers does not greatly differ from yours; much in several of them is unintelligible to me, and more unsatisfactory. But I make a division. I reject Kant’s stoic principle, as false, unnatural, and even immoral, where in his “Kritik der praktischen Vernunft,”[157] he treats the affections as indifferent (ἀδιάφορα) in ethics, and would persuade us that a man who disliking, and without any feeling of love for virtue, yet acted virtuously, because and only because his duty, is more worthy of our esteem, than the man whose affections were aidant to and congruous with his conscience. For it would imply little less than that things not the objects of the moral will or under its control were yet indispensable to its due practical direction. In other words, it would subvert his own system. Likewise, his remarks on prayer in his “Religion innerhalb der reinen Vernunft,” are crass, nay vulgar and as superficial even in psychology as they are low in taste. But with these exceptions, I reverence Immanuel Kant with my whole heart and soul, and believe him to be the only philosopher, for all men who have the power of thinking. I cannot conceive the liberal pursuit or profession, in which the service derived from a patient study of his works would not be incalculably great, both as cathartic, tonic, and directly nutritious.

Fichte in his moral system is but a caricature of Kant’s, or rather, he is a Zeno, with the cowl, rope, and sackcloth of a Carthusian monk. His metaphysics have gone by; but he hath merit of having prepared the ground for, and laid the first stone of, the dynamic philosophy by the substitution of Act for Thing, Der einführen Actionen statt der Dinge an sich. Of the Natur-philosophen, as far as physical dynamics are concerned and as opposed to the mechanic corpuscular system, I think very highly of some parts of their system, as being sound and scientific—metaphysics of Quality, not less evident to my reason than the metaphysics of Quantity, that is, Geometry, etc.; of the rest and larger part, as tentative, experimental, and highly useful to a chemist, zoologist, and physiologist, as unfettering the mind, exciting its inventive powers. But I must be understood as confining these observations to the works of Schelling and H. Steffens. Of Schelling’s Theology and Theanthroposophy, the telescopic stars and nebulæ are too many for my “grasp of eye.” (N. B. The catachresis is Dryden’s, not mine.) In short, I am half inclined to believe that both he and his friend Francis Baader are but half in earnest, and paint the veil to hide not the face but the want of one.[158] Schelling is too ambitious, too eager to be the Grand Seignior of the allein-selig Philosophie to be altogether a trustworthy philosopher. But he is a man of great genius; and, however unsatisfied with his conclusions, one cannot read him without being either whetted or improved. Of the others, saving Jacobi, who is a rhapsodist, excellent in sentences all in small capitals, I know either nothing, or too little to form a judgement. As my opinions were formed before I was acquainted with the schools of Fichte and Schelling, so do they remain independent of them, though I con- and pro-fess great obligations to them in the development of my thoughts, and yet seem to feel that I should have been more useful had I been left to evolve them myself without knowledge of their coincidence. I do not very much like the Sternbald[159] of our friend; it is too like an imitation of Heinse’s “Ardinghello,”[160] and if the scene in the Painter’s Garden at Rome is less licentious than the correspondent abomination in the former work, it is likewise duller.

I have but merely looked into Jean Paul’s “Vorschule der Aisthetik,”[161] but I found one sentence almost word for word the same as one written by myself in a fragment of an Essay on the Supernatural[162] many years ago, viz. that the presence of a ghost is the terror, not what he does, a principle which Southey, too, overlooks in his “Thalaba” and “Kehama.”

But I must conclude. Believe me, dear sir, with unfeigned regard and esteem, your obliged

S. T. Coleridge.

I expect my eldest son, Hartley Coleridge, to-day from Oxford.

CCXIX. TO CHARLES AUGUSTUS TULK.[163]

Highgate, Thursday evening, 1818.

Dear Sir,—As an innocent female often blushes not at any image which had risen in her own mind, but from a confused apprehension of some x y z that might be attributed to her by others, so did I feel uncomfortable at the odd coincidence of my commending to you the late Swedenborgian advertisement. But when I came home I simply asked Mrs. G. if she remembered my having read to her such an address. She instantly replied not only in the affirmative, but mentioned the circumstance of my having expressed a sort of half-inclination, half-intention of addressing a letter to the chairman mentioning my receipt of a book of which I highly approved, and requesting him to transmit my acknowledgments, if, as was probable, the author was known to him or any of the gentlemen with him. I asked her then if she had herself read the advertisement? “Yes, and I carried it to Mr. Gillman, saying how much you had been pleased with the style and the freedom from the sectarian spirit.” “And do you recollect the name of the Chairman?” “No! why, bless me! could it be Mr. Tulk?” Very nearly the same conversation took place with Mr. Gillman afterwards. I can readily account for the fact in myself; for first I never recollect any persons by their names, and have fallen into some laughable perplexities by this specific catalepsy of memory, such as accepting an invitation in the streets from a face perfectly familiar to me, and being afterwards unable to attach the name and habitat thereto; and secondly, that the impression made by a conversation that appeared to me altogether accidental and by your voice and person had been completed before I heard your name; and lastly, the more habitual thinking is to any one, the larger share has the relation of cause and effect in producing recognition. But it is strange that neither Mrs. or Mr. Gillman should have recollected the name, though probably the accidentality of having made your acquaintance, and its being at Little Hampton, and associated with our having at the same time and by a similar accidental rencontre become acquainted with the Rev. Mr. Cary and his family, overlaid any former relique of a man’s name in Mrs. G. as well as myself.

I return you Blake’s poesies,[164] metrical and graphic, with thanks. With this and the book, I have sent a rude scrawl as to the order in which I was pleased by the several poems.

With respectful compliments to Mrs. Tulk, I remain, dear sir, your obliged

S. T. Coleridge.

Thursday evening, Highgate.

Blake’s Poems.—I begin with my dyspathies that I may forget them, and have uninterrupted space for loves and sympathies. Title-page and the following emblem contain all the faults of the drawings with as few beauties as could be in the compositions of a man who was capable of such faults and such beauties. The faulty despotism in symbols amounting in the title-page to the μισητὸν, and occasionally, irregular unmodified lines of the inanimate, sometimes as the effect of rigidity and sometimes of exossation like a wet tendon. So likewise the ambiguity of the drapery. Is it a garment or the body incised and scored out? The lumpness (the effect of vinegar on an egg) in the upper one of the two prostrate figures in the title-page, and the straight line down the waistcoat of pinky goldbeaters’ skin in the next drawing, with the I don’t-know-whatness of the countenance, as if the mouth had been formed by the habit of placing the tongue not contemptuously, but stupidly, between the lower gums and the lower jaw—these are the only repulsive faults I have noticed. The figure, however, of the second leaf, abstracted from the expression of the countenance given it by something about the mouth, and the interspace from the lower lip to the chin, is such as only a master learned in his art could produce.

N. B. I signifies “It gave me great pleasure.” Ɨ, “Still greater.” ƗƗ, “And greater still,” Θ, “In the highest degree.” O, “In the lowest.”

Shepherd, I; Spring, I (last stanza, Ɨ); Holy Thursday, ƗƗ; Laughing Song, Ɨ; Nurse’s Song, I; The Divine Image, Θ; The Lamb, Ɨ; The little black Boy, Θ yea Θ+Θ; Infant Joy, ƗƗ (N. B. For the three last lines I should write, “When wilt thou smile,” or “O smile, O smile! I’ll sing the while.” For a babe two days old does not, cannot smile, and innocence and the very truth of Nature must go together. Infancy is too holy a thing to be ornamented). “The Echoing Green,” I, (the figures Ɨ, and of the second leaf, ƗƗ); “The Cradle Song,” I; “The School Boy,” ƗƗ; Night, Θ; “On another’s Sorrow,” I; “A Dream,” ?; “The little boy lost,” I (the drawing, Ɨ); “The little boy found,” I; “The Blossom,” O; “The Chimney Sweeper,” O; “The Voice of the Ancient Bard,” O.

Introduction, Ɨ; Earth’s Answer, Ɨ; Infant Sorrow, I; “The Clod and the Pebble,” I; “The Garden of Love,” Ɨ; “The Fly,” I; “The Tyger,” Ɨ; “A little boy lost,” Ɨ; “Holy Thursday,” I; [p. 13, O; “Nurse’s Song,” O?]; “The little girl lost and found” (the ornaments most exquisite! the poem, I); “Chimney Sweeper in the Snow,” O; “To Tirzah, and the Poison Tree,” I—and yet O; “A little Girl lost,” O. (I would have had it omitted, not for the want of innocence in the poem, but from the too probable want of it in many readers.) “London,” I; “The Sick Rose,” I; “The little Vagabond,” O. Though I cannot approve altogether of this last poem, and have been inclined to think that the error which is most likely to beset the scholars of Emanuel Swedenborg is that of utterly demerging the tremendous incompatibilities with an evil will that arise out of the essential Holiness of the abysmal A-seity[165] in the love of the Eternal Person, and thus giving temptation to weak minds to sink this love itself into Good Nature, yet still I disapprove the mood of mind in this wild poem so much less than I do the servile blind-worm, wrap-rascal scurf-coat of fear of the modern Saint (whose whole being is a lie, to themselves as well as to their brethren), that I should laugh with good conscience in watching a Saint of the new stamp, one of the first stars of our eleemosynary advertisements, groaning in wind-pipe! and with the whites of his eyes upraised at the audacity of this poem! Anything rather than this degradation I of Humanity, and therein of the Incarnate Divinity!

S. T. C.

O means that I am perplexed and have no opinion.

I, with which how can we utter “Our Father”?

CCXX. TO J. H. GREEN.

Spring Garden Coffee House, [May 2, 1818.]

My dear Sir,—Having been detained here till the present hour, and under requisition for Monday morning early, I have decided on not returning to Highgate in the interim. I propose, therefore, to have the pleasure of passing the fore-dinner hours, from eleven o’clock to-morrow morning, with you in Lincoln’s Inn Square, unless I should hear from you to the contrary.

The Cotton-children Bill[166] (an odd irony to children bred up in cotton!) which has passed the House of Commons, would not, I suspect, have been discussed at all in the House of Lords, but have been quietly assented to, had it not afforded that Scotch coxcomb, the plebeian Earl of Lauderdale,[167] too tempting an occasion for displaying his muddy three inch depths in the gutter (? Guttur) of his Political Economy. Whether some half-score of rich capitalists are to be prevented from suborning suicide and perpetuating infanticide and soul-murder is, forsooth, the most perplexing question which has ever called forth his determining faculties, accustomed as they are well known to have been, to grappling with difficulties. In short, he wants to make a speech almost as much as I do to have a release signed by conscience from the duty of making or anticipating answers to such speeches.

O when the heart is deaf and blind, how blear
The lynx’s eye! how dull the mould-warp’s ear!

Verily the World is mighty! and for all but the few the orb of Truth labours under eclipse from the shadow of the world!

With kind respects to Mrs. Green, believe me, my dear sir, with sincere and affectionate esteem,

Yours,
S. T. Coleridge.

CCXXI. TO MRS. GILLMAN.

J. Green’s, Esq., St. Lawrence, nr. Maldon,
Wednesday, July 19, 1818.

My very dear Sister and Friend,—The distance from the post and the extraordinary thinness of population in this district (especially of men and women of letters) which affords only two days in the seven for sending to or receiving from Maldon, are the sole causes of your not hearing oftener from me. The cross roads from Margretting Street to the very house are excellent, and through the first gate we drove up between two large gardens, that on the right a flower and fruit garden not without kitchenery, and that on the left, a kitchen garden not without fruits and flowers, and both in a perfect blaze of roses. Yet so capricious is our, at least my, nature, that I feel I do not receive the fifth part of the delight from this miscellany of Flora, flowers at every step, as from the economized glasses and flower-pots at Highgate so tended and worshipped by me, and each the gift of some kind friend or courteous neighbour. I actually make up a flower-pot every night, in order to imitate my Highgate pleasures. The country road is very beautiful. About a quarter of a mile from the garden, all the way through beautiful fields in blossom, we come to a wood, full of birds and not uncharmed by the nightingales, and which the old workman, to please his mistress, has romanticised with, I dare say, fifty seats and honeysuckle bowers and green arches made by twisting the branches of the trees across the paths. The view from the hilly field above the wood commanding the arm of the sea, and ending in the open sea, reminded me very much of the prospects from Stowey and Alfoxden, in Somersetshire. The cottagers seem to be and are in possession of plenty of comfort. Poverty I have seen no marks of, nor of the least servility, though they are courteous and respectful. We have abundance of cream. The Farm must, I should think, be a valuable estate; and the parents are anxious to leave it as complete as possible for Joseph, their only child (for it is Mrs. J. Green’s sisters that we have seen—G. himself has no sister). There is no society hereabouts. I like it the better therefore. The clergyman, a young man, is lost in a gloomy vulgar Calvinism, will read no book but the Bible, converse on nothing but the state of the soul, or rather he will not converse at all, but visit each house once in two months, when he prays and admonishes, and gives a lecture every evening at his own rooms. On being invited to dine with us, the sad and modest youth returned for answer, that if Mr. Green and I should be here when he visited the house, he should have no objection to enter into the state of our souls with us, and if in the mean time we desired any instruction from him, we might attend at his daily evening lecture! Election, Reprobation, Children of the Devil, and all such flowers of rhetoric, and flour of brimstone, form his discourses both in church and parlour. But my folly in not filling the snuff canister is a subject of far more serious and awful regret with me, than the not being in the way of being thus led by the nose of this Pseudo-Evangelist. Nothing but Scotch; and that five miles off. O Anne! it was cruel in you not to have calculated the monstrous disproportion between the huge necessities of my nostrils, or rather of my thumb and forefinger, and that vile little vial three fourths empty of snuff! The flat of my thumb, yea, the nail of my forefinger is not only clean; it is white! white as the pale flag of famine![168]

Now for my health.... Ludicrous as it may seem, yet it is no joke for me, that from the marshiness of these sea marshes, and the number of unnecessary fish ponds and other stagnancies immediately around the house, the gnats are a very plague of Egypt, and suspicious, with good reason, of an erysipelatous tendency, I am anxious concerning the effects of the irritation produced by these canorous visitants. While awake (and two thirds of last night I was kept awake by their bites and trumpetings) I can so far command myself as to check the intolerable itching by a weak mixture of goulard and rosewater; but in my sleep I scratch myself as if old Scratch had lent me his best set of claws. This is the only drawback from my comforts here, for nothing can be kinder or more cordial than my treatment. I like Mrs. J. Green better and better; but feel that in twenty years it would never be above or beyond liking. She is good-natured, lively, innocent, but without a soothingness, or something I do not know what that is tender. As to my return, I do not think it will be possible, without great unkindness, to be with you before Tuesday evening or Wednesday, calculating wholly by the progress of the manuscript; and we have been hard at it. Do not take it as words, of course, when I say and solemnly assure you, that if I followed my own wishes, I should leave this place on Saturday morning: for I feel more and more that I can be well off nowhere away from you and Gillman. May God bless him! For a dear friend he is and has been to be. Remember me affectionately to the Milnes and Betsy, if they are at Highgate. Love to James. Kisses for the Fish of Five Waters,[169] none of which are stagnant, and I hope that Mary, Dinah, and Lucy are well, and that Mary is quite recovered. Again and again and again, God bless you, my most dear friends; for I am, and ever trust to remain, more than can be expressed, my dear Anne! your affectionate, obliged, and grateful

S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. Not to put Essex after Maldon.

CCXXII. TO W. COLLINS, ESQ., A. R. A.

Highgate, December, 1818.

My dear Sir,—I at once comply with, and thank you for, your request to have some prospectuses. God knows I have so few friends, that it would be unpardonable in me not to feel proportionably grateful towards those few who think the time not wasted in which they interest themselves in my behalf. There is an old Latin adage, Vis videri pauper, et pauper es! Poor you profess yourself to be, and poor therefore you are, and will remain. The prosperous feel only with the prosperous, and if you subtract from the whole sum of their feeling for all the gratifications of vanity, and all their calculations of lending to the Lord, both of which are best answered by confessing the superfluity of their superfluities on advertised and advertisable distress, or on such cases as are known to be in all respects their inferior, you will have, I fear, but a scanty remainder. All this is too true; but then, what is that man to do whom no distress can bribe to swindle or deceive? who cannot reply as Theophilus Cibber did to his father, Colley Cibber, who, seeing him in a rich suit of clothes whispered to him as he passed, “The! The! I pity thee!” “Pity me! pity my tailor!”

Spite of the decided approbation which my plan of delivering lectures has received from several judicious and highly respectable individuals, it is still too histrionic, too much like a retail dealer in instruction and pastime, not to be depressing. If the duty of living were not far more awful to my conscience than life itself is agreeable to my feelings, I should sink under it. But, getting nothing by my publications, which I have not the power of making estimable by the public without loss of self-estimation, what can I do? The few who have won the present age, while they have secured the praise of posterity, as Sir Walter Scott, Mr. Southey, Lord Byron, etc., have been in happier circumstances. And lecturing is the only means by which I can enable myself to go on at all with the great philosophical work to which the best and most genial hours of the last twenty years of my life have been devoted. Poetry is out of the question. The attempt would only hurry me into that sphere of acute feelings from which abstruse research, the mother of self-oblivion, presents an asylum. Yet sometimes, spite of myself, I cannot help bursting out into the affecting exclamation of our Spenser (his “wine” and “ivy garland” interpreted as competence and joyous circumstances):—

“Thou kenn’st not, Percy, how the rhyme should cage!
Oh, if my temples were bedewed with wine,
And girt with garlands of wild ivy-twine,
How I could rear the Muse on stately stage!
And teach her tread aloft in buskin fine,
With queen’d Bellona in her equipage!
But ah, my courage cools ere it be warm!”[170]

But God’s will be done. To feel the full force of the Christian religion it is, perhaps, necessary for many tempers that they should first be made to feel, experimentally, the hollowness of human friendship, the presumptuous emptiness of human hopes. I find more substantial comfort now in pious George Herbert’s “Temple,” which I used to read to amuse myself with his quaintness, in short, only to laugh at, than in all the poetry since the poems of Milton. If you have not read Herbert, I can recommend the book to you confidently. The poem entitled “The Flower” is especially affecting; and, to me, such a phrase as “and relish versing” expresses a sincerity, a reality, which I would unwillingly exchange for the more dignified “and once more love the Muse,” etc. And so, with many other of Herbert’s homely phrases.

We are all anxious to hear from, and of, our excellent transatlantic friend.[171] I need not repeat that your company, with or without our friend Leslie,[172] will gratify

Your sincere
S. T. Coleridge.

CCXXIII. TO THOMAS ALLSOP.

The origin of Coleridge’s friendship with Thomas Allsop, a young city merchant, dates from the first lecture which he delivered at Flower de Luce Court, January 27, 1818. A letter from Allsop containing a “judicious suggestion” with regard to the subject advertised, “The Dark Ages of Europe,” was handed to the lecturer, who could not avail himself of the hint on this occasion, but promised to do so before the close of the series. Personal intercourse does not seem to have taken place till a year later, but from 1819 to 1826 Coleridge and Allsop were close and intimate friends. In 1825 the correspondence seems to have dropped, but I am not aware that then or afterwards there was any breach of friendship. In 1836 Allsop published the letters which he had received from Coleridge. Partly on account of the personal allusions which some of the letters contain, and partly because it would seem that Coleridge expressed himself to his young disciple with some freedom on matters of religious opinion, the publication of these letters was regarded by Coleridge’s friends as an act of mala fides. Allsop was kindness itself to Coleridge, but, no doubt, the allusions to friends and children, which were of a painful and private nature, ought, during their lifetime at least, to have been omitted. The originals of many of these letters were presented by the Allsop family to the late Emperor of Brazil, an enthusiastic student and admirer of Coleridge.[173]

December 2, 1818.

My dear Sir,—I cannot express how kind I felt your letter. Would to Heaven I had had many with feelings like yours, “accustomed to express themselves warmly and (as far as the word is applicable to you, even) enthusiastically.” But, alas! during the prime manhood of my intellect I had nothing but cold water thrown on my efforts. I speak not now of my systematic and most unprovoked maligners. On them I have retorted only by pity and by prayer. These may have, and doubtless have, joined with the frivolity of “the reading public” in checking and almost in preventing the sale of my works; and so far have done injury to my purse. Me they have not injured. But I have loved with enthusiastic self-oblivion those who have been so well pleased that I should, year after year, flow with a hundred nameless rills into their main stream, that they could find nothing but cold praise and effective discouragement of every attempt of mine to roll onward in a distinct current of my own; who admitted that the “Ancient Mariner,” the “Christabel,” the “Remorse,” and some pages of “The Friend” were not without merit, but were abundantly anxious to acquit their judgements of any blindness to the very numerous defects. Yet they knew that to praise, as mere praise, I was characteristically, almost constitutionally, indifferent. In sympathy alone I found at once nourishment and stimulus; and for sympathy alone did my heart crave. They knew, too, how long and faithfully I had acted on the maxim, never to admit the faults of a work of genius to those who denied or were incapable of feeling and understanding the beauties; not from wilful partiality, but as well knowing that in saying truth I should, to such critics, convey falsehood. If, in one instance, in my literary life, I have appeared to deviate from this rule, first, it was not till the fame of the writer (which I had been for fourteen years successively toiling like a second Ali to build up) had been established; and, secondly and chiefly, with the purpose and, I may safely add, with the effect of rescuing the necessary task from malignant defamers, and in order to set forth the excellences and the trifling proportion which the defects bore to the excellences. But this, my dear sir, is a mistake to which affectionate natures are liable, though I do not remember to have ever seen it noticed, the mistaking those who are desirous and well-pleased to be loved by you, for those who love you. Add, as a mere general cause, the fact that I neither am nor ever have been of any party. What wonder, then, if I am left to decide which has been my worse enemy,—the broad, predetermined abuse of the “Edinburgh Review,” etc., or the cold and brief compliments, with the warm regrets of the “Quarterly”? After all, however, I have now but one sorrow relative to the ill success of my literary toils (and toils they have been, though not undelightful toils), and this arises wholly from the almost insurmountable difficulties which the anxieties of to-day oppose to my completion of the great work, the form and materials of which it has been the employment of the best and most genial hours of the last twenty years to mature and collect.

If I could but have a tolerably numerous audience to my first, or first and second Lectures on the History of Philosophy,[174] I should entertain a strong hope of success, because I know that these lectures will be found by far the most interesting and entertaining of any that I have yet delivered, independent of the more permanent interests of rememberable instruction. Few and unimportant would the errors of men be, if they did but know, first, what they themselves meant; and, secondly, what the words mean by which they attempt to convey their meaning; and I can conceive no subject so well fitted to exemplify the mode and the importance of these two points as the History of Philosophy, treated as in the scheme of these lectures. Trusting that I shall shortly have the pleasure of seeing you here,

I remain, my dear sir, yours most sincerely,
S. T. Coleridge.

CCXXIV. TO J. H. GREEN.

[Postmark, January 16, 1819.]

My dear Green,—I forgot both at the Lecture Room and at Mr. Phillips’s to beg you to leave out for me Goethe’s “Zur Farbenlehre.” It is for a passage in the preface in which he compares Plato with Aristotle, etc., as far as I recollect, in a spirited manner. The books are at your service again, after the lecture. Either Mr. Cary or some messenger will call for them to-morrow! I piously resolve on Tuesday to put my books in some order, but at all events to select yours and send all of them that I do not want (and I do not recollect any that I do, unless perhaps the little volume edited by Tieck of his friend’s composition), back to you. I am more and more delighted with Chantrey. The little of his conversation which I enjoyed ex pede Herculem, left me no doubt of the power of his insight. Light, manlihood, simplicity, wholeness. These are the entelechy of Phidian Genius; and who but must see these in Chantrey’s solar face, and in all his manners? Item: I am bewitched with your wife’s portrait. So very like and yet so ideal a portrait I never remember to have seen. But as Mr. Phillips[175] said: “Why, sir! she was a sweet subject, sir! That’s a great thing.”

As to my own, I can form no judgment. In its present state, the eyes appear too large, too globose, and their colour must be made lighter, and I thought that the face, exclusive of the forehead, was stronger, more energetic than mine seems to be when I catch it in the glass, and therefore the forehead and brow less so—not in themselves, but in consequence of the proportion. But of course I can form no notion of what my face and look may be when I am animated in friendly conversation. My kind and respectful remembrances to your Mother, and believe me, most affectionately,

Your obliged friend,
S. T. Coleridge.

CCXXV. TO JAMES GILLMAN.

[Ramsgate, Postmark, August 20, 1819.]

My dear Friend,—Whether from the mere intensity of the heat, and the restless, almost sleepless, nights in consequence, or from incautious exposure to draughts; or whether simply the change of air and the sea bath was repairing the intestinal canal (and bad indeed must the road be which is not better than a road a-mending, a hint which our revolutionary reformers would do well to attend to) or from whatever cause, I have been miserably unwell for the last three days—but last night passed a tolerably good night, and, finding myself convalescent this morning, I bathed, and now am still better, having had a glorious tumble in the waves, though the water is still not cold enough for my liking. The weather, however, is evidently on the change, and we have now a succession of flying April showers, and needle rains. My bath is about a mile and a quarter from the Lime Grove, a wearisome travail by the deep crumbly sands, but a very pleasant breezy walk along the top of the cliff, from which you descend through a deep steep lane cut through the chalk rocks. The tide comes up to the end of the lane, and washes the cliff, but a little before or a little after high-tide there are nice clean seats of rock with foot-baths, and then an expanse of sand, greater than I need; and exactly a hundred of my strides from the end of the lane there is a good, roomy, arched cavern, with an oven or cupboard in it, where one’s clothes may be put free from the sand.... I find that I can write no more if I am to send this by the to-day’s post. Pray, if you can with any sort of propriety, do come down to me—to us, I suppose I ought to say. We are all as should be Βυτ μονστρουσλι φορμαλ....

God bless you and
S. T. C.

CCXXVI. TO MRS. ADERS. [?][176]

[Highgate, October 28, 1819.]

Dear Madam,—I wish from my very heart that you could teach me to express my obligations to you with half the grace and delicacy with which you confer them! But not to the Giver does the evening cloud indicate the rich lights, which it has received and transmits and yet retains. For other eyes it must glow: and what it cannot return it will strive to represent, the poor proxy of the gracious orb which is departing. I would that the simile were less accurate throughout, and with those of Homer’s lost its likeness as it approached to its conclusion! This, I fear, is somewhat too selfish; but we cannot have attachment without fear or grief.

“We cannot choose—
But weep to have what we so dread to lose,”

says Nature’s child, our best Shakespeare; and that Humanity cannot grieve without a portion of selfishness, Nature herself says. To take up my allegoric strain with a slight variation, even in the fairest shews and liveliest demonstrations of grateful and affectionate leave-taking from a generous friend or disinterested patron or benefactor, we are like evening rainbows, that at once shine and weep, things made up of reflected splendour and our own tears.[177]

To meet, to know, t’ esteem—and then to part,
Forms the sad tale of many a genial heart.[178]

The storm[179] now louring and muttering in our political atmosphere might of itself almost forbid me to regret your leaving England. For I have no apprehension of any serious or extensive danger to property or to the coercive powers of the Law. Both reason and history preclude the fear of any revolution, where none of the constituent states of a nation are arrayed against the others. The risk is still less in Great Britain where property is so widely diffused and so closely interlinked and co-organized. But I dare not promise as much for personal safety. The struggle may be short, the event certain; yet the mischief in the interim appalling!

May my Fears,
My filial fears, be vain! and may the vaunts
And menace of the vengeful enemy
Pass like the gust, that roared and died away
In the distant tree: which heard, and only heard
In this low dell, bow’d not the delicate grass.[180]

I confess that I read the poem from which these lines are extracted (“Fears in Solitude”) and now cite them with far other than an author’s feelings; those, I trust, of a patriot, I am sure, those of a Christian.

You will not, I know, fail to assure Miss Harding[181] of the kind feelings and wishes with which I accompany her; but my sense of the last boon, which I owe to her, I shall convey, my dear madam! by hands less likely to make extenuating comments on my words than your tongue or hand. Before I subscribe my name, I must tell you that had my wish been the chooser and had taken a month to deliberate on the choice, I could not have received a keepsake so in all respects gratifying to me, as the exquisite impressions of cameo’s and intaglio’s.[182] First, it enables me to entertain and gratify so many friends, my own and Mr. and Mrs. Gillman’s; secondly, every little gem is associated with my recollections, or more or less recalls the images and persons seen and met with during my own stay in the Mediterranean and Italy; thirdly, they stand in the same connection with the places of your past and future sojourn, and therefore, lastly, supply me with the means and the occasion of expressing to others more strongly, perhaps, but not more warmly or sincerely than I now do to yourself, with how much respect and regard I remain, dear madam,

Your obliged friend and servant,
S. T. Coleridge.

Saturday, 28th Octr. 1819. On the 20th of this month completed my 49th year.

CCXXVII. TO J. H. GREEN.

January 14, 1820.

My dear Green,—Charles Lamb has just written to inform me that he and his sister will pay me their New Year’s visit on Sunday next, and may perhaps bring a friend to see me, though certainly not to dine, and hopes I may not be engaged. I must therefore defer our philosophical intercommune till the Sunday after; but if you have no more pleasant way of passing the ante-prandial or, still better, the day including prandial and post-prandial, I trust that it will be no anti-philosophical expenditure of time, and I need not say an addition to the pleasure of all this household. I should like, too, to arrange some plan of going with you to Covent Garden Theatre, to see Miss Wensley, the new actress, whose father (a merchant of Bristol, at whose house I had once been, but whom the capricious Nymph of Trade has unhorsed from his seat) has called on me, a compound of the Oratorical, the Histrionic, and the Exquisite! All the dull colours in the colour-shop at the sign of the Bluecoat Boy would not suffice to neutralize the glare of his Colorit into any tolerably fair likeness that would not be scouted as Caricature! Gillman will give you a slight sketch of him. Since I saw you, we have dined and spent the night (for it was near one when we broke up) at Mathews’, and heard and saw his forthcoming “At Home.” There were present, besides G. and myself, Mrs. and young Mathews, and Mr. and Mrs. Chisholm, James Smith of Rej. Add. notoriety, and the author of (all the trash of) Mathews’ Entertainment, for the good parts are his own, (What a pity that you dare not offer a word of friendly sensible advice to such men as M., but you may be certain that it will be useless to them and attributed to envy or some vile selfish object in the adviser!) Mr. Dubois,[183] the author of “Vaurien,” “Old Nic,” “My Pocket Book,” and a notable share of the theatrical puffs and slanders of the periodical press; and, lastly, Mr. Thomas Hill,[184] quondam drysalter of Thames Street, whom I remember twenty-five years ago with exactly the same look, person, and manners as now. Mathews calls him the Immutable. He is a seemingly always good-natured fellow who knows nothing and about everything, no person, and about and all about everybody—a complete parasite, in the old sense of a dinner-hunter, at the tables of all who entertain public men, authors, players, fiddlers, booksellers, etc., for more than thirty years. It was a pleasant evening, however.

Be so good as to remember the drawing from the Alchemy Book.

Mrs. Gillman desires her love to Mrs. Green; and we hope that the twin obstacles, ague and the boreal weather, to our seeing her here, will vanish at the same time. Mrs. G. bids me tell her that she grumbles at the doctors, her husband included, and is confident that her husband would have made a cure long ago. A faithful wife is a common blessing, I trust: but what a treasure to have a wife full of faith! By the bye, I have lit on some (ὡς ἔμοιγε δοκεῖ analogous) cases in which the nauseating plan, even for a short time, appears to have had a wonderful effect in breaking the chain of a morbid tendency; and the almost infallible specific of seasickness in curing an old ague is surely a confirmation as far as it goes.

Yours most affectionately,
S. T. Coleridge.

CCXXVIII. TO THE SAME.

[May 25, 1820.]

My dear Green,—I was greatly affected in finding how ill you had been, and long ere this should have let you know it, but that I have myself been in no usual degree unwell. I wish I could with truth underline the words have been, and in the hope of being able to do so it was that I delayed answering your note. Unless a speedy change for the better takes place, I should culpably deceive myself if I did not interpret my present state as a summons. God’s will be done! I cannot pretend that I have not received countless warnings; and for my neglect and for the habits, and all the feebleness and wastings of the moral will which unfit the soul for spiritual ascent, and must sink it, of moral necessity, lower and lower, if it be essentially imperishable, my only ray of hope is this, that in my inmost heart, as far as my consciousness can sound its depths, I plead nothing but my utter and sinful helplessness and worthlessness on one side, and the infinite mercy and divine Humanity of our Creator and Redeemer crucified from the beginning of the world, on the other! I use no comparatives, nor indeed could I ever charitably interpret the penitential phrases (“I am the vilest of sinners, worse than the wickedest of my fellow-men,” etc.) otherwise than as figures of speech, the whole purport of which is, “In relation to God I appear to myself the same as the very worst man, if such there be, would appear to an earthly tribunal.” I mean no comparatives; for what have a man’s permanent concerns to do with comparison? What avails it to a bird shattered and irremediably disorganized in one wing, that another bird is similarly conditioned in both wings? Or to a man in the last stage of ulcerated lungs, that his neighbour is liver-rotten as well as consumptive? Both find their equation, the birds as to flight, the men as to life. In o o o’s there is no comparison.

My nephew, the Revd. W. Hart Coleridge, came and stayed here from Monday afternoon to Tuesday noon, in order to make Derwent’s acquaintance, and brought with him by accident Marsh’s Divinity Lecture, No 3rd, on the authenticity and credibility of the Books collected in the New Testament. As I could not sit with the party after tea, I took the pamphlet with me into my bedroom, and gave it an attentive perusal, knowing the Bishop’s intimate acquaintance with the investigations of Eichhorn, Paulus, and their numerous scarcely less celebrated scholars, and myself familiar with the works of the Göttingen Professor (Eichhorn), the founder and head of the daring school. I saw or seemed to see more management in the Lecture than proof of thorough conviction. I supplied, however, from my own reasonings enough of what appeared wanting or doubtful in the Bishop’s to justify the conclusion that the Gospel History beginning with the Baptism of John, and the Doctrines contained in the fourth Gospel, and in the Epistles, truly represent the assertions of the Apostles and the faith of the Christian Church during the first century; that there exists no tenable or even tolerable ground for doubting the authenticity of the Books ascribed to John the Evangelist, to Mark, to Luke, and to Paul; nor the authority of Matthew and the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews; and lastly, that a man need only have common sense and a good heart to be assured that these Apostles and Apostolic men wrote nothing but what they themselves believed. And yet I have no hesitation in avowing that many an argument derived from the nature of man, nay, that many a strong though only speculative probability, pierces deeper, pushes more home, and clings more pressingly to my mind than the whole sum of merely external evidence, the fact of Christianity itself alone excepted. Nay, I feel that the external evidence derives a great and lively accession of force, for my mind, from my previous speculative convictions or presumptions; but that I cannot find that the latter are at all strengthened or made more or less probable to me by the former. Besides, as to the external evidence I make up my mind once for all, and merely as evidence think no more about it; but those facts or reflections thereon which tend to change belief into insight, can never lose their effect, any more than the distinctive sensations of disease, compared with a more perceived correspondence of symptoms with the diagnostics of a medical book.

I was led to this remark by reflecting on the awful importance of the physiological question (so generally decided one way by the late most popular writers on insanity), Does the efficient cause of disease and disordered action, and, collectively, of pain and perishing, lie entirely in the organs, and then, reawakening the active principle in me, depart—that all pain and disease would be removed, and I should stand in the same state as I stood in previous to all sickness, etc., to the admission of any disturbing forces into my nature? Or, on the contrary, would such a repaired Organismus be no fit organ for my life, as if, for instance, a worn lock with an equally worn key—[the key] might no longer fit the lock. The repaired organs might from intimate in-correspondence be the causes of torture and madness. A system of materialism, in which organisation stands first, whether compared by Nature, or God and Life, etc., as its results (even as the sound is the result of a bell), such a system would, doubtless, remove great part of the terrors which the soul makes out of itself; but then it removes the soul too, or rather precludes it. And a supposition of coexistence, without any wechselwirkung, it is not in our power to adopt in good earnest; or, if we did, it would answer no purpose. For which of the two, soul or body, am I to call “I”? Again, a soul separate from the body, and yet entirely passive to it, would be so like a drum playing a tattoo on the drummer, that one cannot build any hope on it. If then the organisation be primarily the result, and only by reaction a cause, it would be well to consider what the cases are in this life, in which the restoration of the organisation removes disease. Is the organisation ever restored, except as continually reproduced? And in the remaining number are they not cases into which the soul never entered as a conscious or rather a moral conscionable agent? The regular reproduction of scars, marks, etc., the increased susceptibility of disease in an organ, after a perfect apparent restoration to healthy structure in action; the insusceptibility in other cases, as in the variolous—these and many others are fruitful subjects, and even imperfect as the induction may be, and must be in our present degree of knowledge, we might yet deduce that a suicide, under the domination of disorderly passions and erroneous principles, plays a desperately hazardous game, and that the chance is, he may re-house himself in a worse hogshead, with the nails and spikes driven inward—or, sinking below the organising power, be employed fruitlessly in a horrid appetite of re-skinning himself, after he had succeeded in fleaing his life and leaving all its sensibilities bare to the incursive powers without even the cortex of a nerve to shield them? Would it not follow, too, from these considerations, that a redemptive power must be necessary if immortality be true, and man be a disordered being? And that no power can be redemptive which does not at the same time act in the ground of the life as one with the ground, that is, must act in my will and not merely on my will; and yet extrinsically, as an outward power, that is, as that which outward Nature is to the organisation, viz. the causa correspondens et conditio perpetua ab extra? Under these views, I cannot read the Sixth Chapter of St. John without great emotion. The Redeemer cannot be merely God, unless we adopt Pantheism, that is, deny the existence of a God; and yet God he must be, for whatever is less than God, may act on, but cannot act in, the will of another. Christ must become man, but he cannot become us, except as far as we become him, and this we cannot do but by assimilation; and assimilation is a vital real act, not a notional or merely intellective one. There are phenomena, which are phenomena relatively to our present five senses, and these Christ forbids us to understand as his meaning, and, collectively, they are entitled the Flesh that perishes. But does it follow that there are no other phenomena? or that these media of manifestation might not stand to a spiritual world and to our enduring life in the same relation as our visible mass of body stands to the world of the senses, and to the sensations correspondent to, and excited by, the stimulants of that world. Lastly, would not the sum of the latter phenomena (the spiritual) be appropriately named, the Flesh and Blood of the divine Humanity? If faith be a mere apperception, eine blösse Wahrnehmung, this, I grant, is senseless. For it is evident, that the assimilation in question is to be carried on by faith. But if faith be an energy, a positive act, and that too an act of intensest power, why should it necessarily differ in toto genere from any other act, ex. gr. from that of the animal life in the stomach? It will be found easier to laugh or stare at the question than to prove its irrationability. Enough for the present. I had been told that Dr. Leach[185] was a Lawrencian, a materialist, and I know not what. I met him at Mr. Abernethy’s, and with sincere delight I found him the very contrary in every respect. Except yourself, I have never met so enlarged or so bold a love of truth in an English physiologist. The few minutes of conversation that I had the power of enjoying have left a strong wish in my mind to see more of him.

Give my kind love to Mrs. Green. Mr. and Mrs. Gillman are anxious to see you. I assure you they were very much affected by the account of your health. Young Allsop behaves more like a dutiful and anxious son than an acquaintance. He came up yester-night at ten o’clock, and left the house at eight this morning, in order to urge me to go to some sea-bathing place, if it was thought at all advisable.

Derwent goes on in every respect to my satisfaction and comfort.

Again and again, God bless you and your sincerely affectionate friend,

S. T. Coleridge.

CCXXIX. TO CHARLES AUGUSTUS TULK.

February 12, 1821.

My dear Sir,—“They say, Coleridge! that you are a Swedenborgian!” “Would to God,” I replied fervently, “that they were anything.” I was writing a brief essay on the prospects of a country where it has become the mind of the nation to appreciate the evil of public acts and measures by their next consequences or immediate occasions, while the principle violated, or that a principle is thereby violated, is either wholly dropped out of the consideration, or is introduced but as a garnish or ornamental commonplace in the peroration of a speech! The deep interest was present to my thoughts of that distinction between the Reason, as the source of principles, the true celestial influx and porta Dei in hominem æternum, and the Understanding; with the clearness of the proof, by which this distinction is evinced, viz. that vital or zoo-organic power, instinct, and understanding fall all three under the same definition in genere, and the very additions by which the definition is applied from the first to the second, and from the second to the third, are themselves expressive of degrees only, and in degree only deniable of the preceding. (Ex. gr. 1. Reflect on the selective power exercised by the stomach of the caterpillar on the undigested miscellany of food, and, 2, the same power exercised by the caterpillar on the outward plants, and you will see the order of the conceptions.) 1. Vital Power = the power by which means are adapted to proximate ends. 2. Instinct = the power which adapts means to proximate ends. 3. Understanding = the power which adapts means to proximate ends according to varying circumstances. May I not safely challenge any man to peruse Huber’s “Treatise on Ants,” and yet deny their claim to be included in the last definition. But try to apply the same definition, with any extension of degree, to the reason, the absurdity will flash upon the conviction. First, in reason there is and can be no degree. Deus introit aut non introit. Secondly, in reason there are no means nor ends, reason itself being one with the ultimate end, of which it is the manifestation. Thirdly, reason has no concern with things (that is, the impermanent flux of particulars), but with the permanent Relations; and is to be defined even in its lowest or theoretical attribute, as the power which enables man to draw necessary and universal conclusions from particular facts or forms, ex. gr. from any three-cornered thing, that the two sides of a triangle are and must be greater than the third. From the understanding to the reason, there is no continuous ascent possible; it is a metabasis εἰς ἄλλο γένος even as from the air to the light. The true essential peculiarity of the human understanding consists in its capability of being irradiated by the reason, in its recipiency; and even this is given to it by the presence of a higher power than itself. What then must be the fate of a nation that substitutes Locke for logic, and Paley for morality, and one or the other for polity and theology, according to the predominance of Whig or Tory predilection. Slavery, or a commotion is at hand! But if the gentry and clerisy (including all the learned and educated) do this, then the nation does it, or a commotion is at hand. Acephalum enim, aurâ quamvis et calore vitali potiatur, morientem rectius dicimus, quam quod vivit. With these thoughts was I occupied when I received your very kind and most acceptable present, and the results I must defer to the next post. With best regards to Mrs. Tulk,

Believe me, in the brief interval, your obliged and grateful

S. T. Coleridge.

C. A. Tulk, Esq., M. P., Regency Park.

CHAPTER XIV
THE PHILOSOPHER AND DIVINE
1822-1832

CHAPTER XIV
THE PHILOSOPHER AND DIVINE
1822-1832

CCXXX. TO JOHN MURRAY.

Highgate, January 18, 1822.

Dear Sir,—If not with the works, you are doubtless familiar with the name of that “wonderful man” (for such, says Doddridge, I must deliberately call him), Archbishop Leighton. It would not be easy to point out another name, which the eminent of all parties, Catholic and Protestant, Episcopal and Presbyterian, Whigs and Tories, have been so unanimous in extolling. “There is a spirit in Archbishop Leighton I never met with in any human writings; nor can I read many lines in them without impressions which I could wish always to retain,” observes a dignitary of our Establishment and F. R. S. eminent in his day both as a philosopher and a divine. In fact, it would make no small addition to the size of the volume, if, as was the fashion in editing the classics, we should collect the eulogies on his writings passed by bishops only and church divines, from Burnet to Porteus. That this confluence of favourable opinions is not without good cause, my own experience convinces me. For at a time when I had read but a small portion of the Archbishop’s principal work, when I was altogether ignorant of its celebrity, much more of the peculiar character attributed to his writings (that of making and leaving a deep impression on readers of all classes), I remember saying to Mr. Southey[186] “that in the Apostolic Epistles I heard the last hour of Inspiration striking, and in Arch. Leighton’s commentary the lingering vibration of the sound.” Perspicuous, I had almost said transparent, his style is elegant by the mere compulsion of the thoughts and feelings, and in despite, as it were, of the writer’s wish to the contrary. Profound as his conceptions often are, and numerous as the passages are, where the most athletic thinker will find himself tracing a rich vein from the surface downward, and leave off with an unknown depth for to-morrow’s delving—yet there is this quality peculiar to Leighton, unless we add Shakespeare—that there is always a scum on the very surface which the simplest may understand, if they have head and heart to understand anything. The same or nearly the same excellence characterizes his eloquence. Leighton had by nature a quick and pregnant fancy, and the august objects of his habitual contemplation, and their remoteness from the outward senses, his constant endeavour to see or to bring all things under some point of unity, but, above all, the rare and vital union of head and heart, of light and love, in his own character,—all these working conjointly could not fail to form and nourish in him the higher power, and more akin to reason, the power, I mean, of imagination. And yet in his freest and most figurative passages there is a subduedness, a self-checking timidity in his colouring, a sobering silver-grey tone over all; and an experienced eye may easily see where and in how many instances Leighton has substituted neutral tints for a strong light or a bold relief—by this sacrifice, however, of particular effects, giving an increased permanence to the impression of the whole, and wonderfully facilitating its soft and quiet illapse into the very recesses of our convictions. Leighton’s happiest ornaments of style are made to appear as efforts on the part of the author to express himself less ornamentally, more plainly.

Since the late alarm respecting Church Calvinism and Calvinistic Methodism (a cry of Fire! Fire! in consequence of a red glare on one or two of the windows, from a bonfire of straw and stubble in the church-yard, while the dry rot of virtual Socinianism is snugly at work in the beams and joists of the venerable edifice) I have heard of certain gentle doubts and questions as to the Archbishop’s perfect orthodoxy—some small speck in the diamond which had escaped the quick eye of all former theological jewellers from Bishop Burnet to the outrageously anti-Methodistic Warburton. But on what grounds I cannot even conjecture, unless it be, that the Christianity which Leighton teaches contains the doctrines peculiar to the Gospel as well as the truths common to it with the (so-called) light of nature or natural religion, that he dissuades students and the generality of Christians from all attempts at explaining the mysteries of faith by notional and metaphysical speculations, and rather by a heavenly life and temper to obtain a closer view of these truths, the full light and knowledge of which it is in Heaven only that we shall possess. He further advises them in speaking of these truths to proper scripture language; but since something more than this had been made necessary by the restless spirit of dispute, to take this “something more” in the sound precise terms of the Liturgy and Articles of the Established Church. Enthusiasm? Fanaticism? Had I to recommend an antidote, I declare on my conscience that above all others it should be Leighton. And as to Calvinism, L.’s exposition of the scriptural sense of election ought to have prevented the very [suspicion of its presence]. You will long ago, I fear, have [been asking yourself], To what does all this tend? Briefly then, I feel strongly persuaded, perhaps because I strongly wish it, that the Beauties of Archbishop Leighton, selected and methodized, with a (better) Life of the Author, that is, a biographical and critical introduction as Preface, and Notes, would make not only a useful but an interesting Pocket Volume. “Beauties” in general are objectionable works—injurious to the original author, as disorganizing his productions, pulling to pieces the well-wrought crown of his glory to pick out the shining stones, and injurious to the reader, by indulging the taste for unconnected, and for that reason unretained single thoughts, till it fares with him as with the old gentleman at Edinburgh, who eat six kittywakes by way of whetting his appetite—“whereas” (said he) “it proved quite the contrary: I never sat down to a dinner with so little.” But Leighton’s principal work, that which fills two volumes and a half of the four, being a commentary on St. Peter’s Epistles, verse by verse, and varying, of course, in subject, etc., with almost every paragraph, the volume, I propose, would not only bring together his finest passages, but these being afterwards arranged on a principle wholly independent of the accidental place of each in the original volumes, and guided by their relative bearings, it would give a connection or at least a propriety of sequency, that was before of necessity wanting. It may be worth noticing, that the editions, both the one in three, and the other in four volumes, are most grievously misprinted and otherwise disfigured. Should you be disposed to think this worthy your attention, I would even send you the proof transcribed, sheet by sheet, as it should be printed, though doubtless by sacrificing one copy of Leighton’s works, it might be effected by references to volume, page, and line, I having first carefully corrected the copy. Or, should you think another more likely to execute the plan better, or that another name would better promote its sale, I should by no means resent the preference, nor feel any mortification for which, the having occasioned the existence of such a work, tastefully selected and judiciously arranged, would not be sufficient compensation for,

Dear sir, your obliged
S. T. Coleridge.

CCXXXI. TO JAMES GILLMAN.

October 28, 1822.

Dear Friend,—Words, I know, are not wanted between you and me. But there are occasions so awful, there may be instances and manifestations so affecting, and drawing up with them so long a train from behind, so many folds of recollection, as they come onward on one’s mind, that it seems but a mere act of justice to one’s self, a debt we owe to the dignity of our moral nature, to give them some record—a relief, which the spirit of man asks and demands to contemplate in some outward symbol of what it is inwardly solemnizing. I am still too much under the cloud of past misgivings;[187] too much of the stun and stupor from the recent peals and thunder-crash still remains to permit me to anticipate other than by wishes and prayers what the effect of your unweariable kindness may be on poor Hartley’s mind and conduct. I pray fervently, and I feel a cheerful trust that I do not pray in vain, that on my own mind and spring of action it will be proved not to have been wasted. I do inwardly believe that I shall yet do something to thank you, my dear Gillman, in the way in which you would wish to be thanked, by doing myself honour.

Mrs. Gillman has been determined by your letter, and the heavenly weather, and moral certainty of the continuance of bathing-weather at least, to accept her sister’s offer of coming into Ramsgate and to take a house, for a fortnight certain, at a guinea a week, in the buildings next to Wellington Crescent, and having a certain modicum and segment of sea-peep. You remember the house (the end one) with a balcony at the window, almost in a line with the Duke of W. ... in wood, lignum vitæ, like as life. I had thought of keeping my present bedroom at 10s. 6d. a week, but on consulting Mrs. Rogers, she did not think that this would satisfy the etiquette of the world, though the two houses are on different cliffs; and I felt so confident of the effect of the bathing and Ramsgate transparent water, the sands, the pier, etc., that as there was no alternative but of giving up the bathing (for Mrs. G. would not stay by herself, partly, if not chiefly, because she feared I might add more to your anxiety than your comfort in your bachelor state and with only Bessy of Beccles) or having Jane, I voted for the latter, and will do my very best to keep her in good humour and good spirits.

Dear Friend, and Brother of my Soul, God only knows how truly and in the depth you are loved and prized by your affectionate friend,

S. T. Coleridge.

CCXXXII. TO MISS BRENT.[188]

July 7, 1823.

My dear Charlotte,—I have been many times in town within the last three or four weeks; but with one exception, when I was driven in and back by Mr. Gillman to hear the present idol of the world of fashion, the Revd. Mr. Irving, the super-Ciceronian, ultra-Demosthenic pulpiteer of the Scotch Chapel in Cross Street, Hatton Garden, I have been always at the West End of the town, and mostly dancing attendance on a proud bookseller, and I fear to little purpose—weary enough of my existence, God knows! and yet not a tittle the more disposed to better it at the price of apostacy or suppression of the truth. If I could but once get off the two works, on which I rely for the proof that I have not lived in vain, and had those off my mind, I could then maintain myself well enough by writing for the purpose of what I got by it; but it is an anguish I cannot look in the face, to abandon just as it is completed the work of such intense and long-continued labour; and if I cannot make an agreement with Murray, I must try Colbourn, and if with neither, owing to the loud calumny of the “Edinburgh,” and the silent but more injurious detraction of the “Quarterly Review,” I must try to get them published by subscription. But of this when we meet. I write at present and to you as the less busy sister, to beg you will be so good as to send me the volume of Southey’s “Brazil,” which I am now in particular want of, by the Highgate Stage that sets off just before Middle Row. “Mr. Coleridge, or J. Gillman, Esq. (either will do), Highgate.”

My kind love to Mary. I have little doubt that I shall see you in the course of next week.

Do you think of taking rooms out of the smoke during this summer for any time?

God bless you, my dear Charlotte, and your affectionate

S. T. Coleridge.

CCXXXIII. TO THE REV. EDWARD COLERIDGE.[189]

Highgate, July 23, 1823.

My dear Edward,—From Carlisle to Keswick there are several routes possible, and neither of these without some attraction. The choice, however, lies between two; which to prefer, I find it hard to decide, and if, as on the whole I am disposed to do, I advise the former, it is not from thinking the other of inferior interest. On the contrary, if your laking were comprised between Carlisle and Keswick, I should not hesitate to recommend the latter in preference, but because the first will bring you soonest to Keswick, where Mr. Southey still is, having, as your cousin Sara writes me, deferred his journey to town, on account of his book on “The Church,” which has outgrown its intended dimensions; and because the sort of “scenery” (to use that slang word best confined to the creeking Daubenies of the Theatre) on the latter route, is what you will have abundant opportunities of seeing with the one leg of your compass fixed at Keswick.

First then, you may go from Carlisle to Rose Castle, and spend an hour in seeing that and its circumferency; and from thence to Caldbeck, its waterfalls and faery caldrons, with the Pulpit and Clerk’s Desk Rocks, over which the Cata-, or rather Kitten-ract, flings itself, and the cavern to the right of the fall, as you front it; and from Caldbeck to the foot of Bassenthwaite, when you are in the vale of Keswick and not many miles from Greta Hall. The second route is from Carlisle to Penrith (a road of little or no interest), but from Carlisle you would go to Lowther (Earl of Lonsdale’s seat and magnificent grounds), the village of Lowther, Hawes Water, and from Hawes Water you might pass over the mountains into Ulleswater, and when there, you might go round the head of the lake (that is, Patterdale), and, if on foot and strong enough and the weather is fine, pass over Helvellyn, and so get into the high road between Grasmere and Keswick, or, passing lower down on the lake, cross over by Graystock, or with a guide or manual instructions, over the fells so as to come out at or not far from Threlkeld, which is but three or four miles from Keswick. At least in good weather there is, I believe, a tolerably equitible (that is, horse or pony-tolerating) track. But at Patterdale you would receive the best direction. There is an inn at Patterdale where you might sleep, so as to make one day of it from Penrith to the Lake Head, viâ Lowther and Hawes Water; and thence to Keswick would take good part of a second. There is one consideration in favour of this plan, that from Carlisle to Penrith, or even to Lowther, you might go by the coach, and I question whether you could reach Greta Hall by the Caldbeck Route in one day when at Keswick. When at Keswick, I would advise you to go to Wastdale through Borrowdale, and if you could return by Crummock and through the vale of Newlands, the inverted arch of which (on the A͜B (A B) of which I once saw the two legs of a rich rainbow so as to form with the arch a perfect circle) faces Greta Hall, you will have seen the very pith and marrow of the Lakes, especially as your route to Chester or Liverpool will take you that heavenly road through Thirlmere, Grasmere, Rydal (where you will, of course, pay your respects to Mr. Wordsworth), Ambleside, and the striking half of Windermere.

God bless you! Pray take care of yourself, were it only that you know how fearful and anxious your father and Fanny[190] are respecting your chest and lungs, in case of cold or over-exertion.

I have heard from Sara and from Mr. Watson (a friend of mine who has just come from the North) a very comfortable account of Hartley.

Believe me, dear Edward, with every kind wish, your affectionate uncle and sincere friend,

[S. T. Coleridge.]

P. S. Your query respecting the poem I can only answer by a Nescio. Irving (the Scotch preacher, so blackguarded in the “John Bull” of last Sunday), certainly the greatest orator I ever heard (N. B. I make and mean the same distinction between oratory and eloquence as between the mouth + the windpipe and the brain + heart), is, however, a man of great simplicity, of overflowing affections, and enthusiastically in earnest; and I have reason to believe, deeply regrets his conjunction of Southey with Byron, as far as the men (and not the poems) are in question.

CCXXXIV. TO J. H. GREEN.

Grove, Highgate, February 15, 1824.

I mentioned to you, I believe, Basil Montagu’s kind endeavour to have an associateship of the Royal Society of Literature (a yearly £100 versus a yearly essay) conferred on me. I knew nothing of the particulars till this morning, or rather till within this hour, when I received a list of names (electors) from Mr. Montagu, with advice to write to such and such and such—while he, and he, and he had promised “for us”—in short, a regular canvass, or rather sackcloth with the ashes on it pulled out of the dust holes, moistened with cabbage-water, and other culinary excretions of the same kidney. Of course, I jibbed and with proper (if not equa; yet) mulanimity returned for answer—that what a man’s friends did sub rosâ, and what one friend might say to another in favour of an individual, was one thing—what a man did in his own name and person was another—and that I would not, could not, solicit a single vote. I should think it an affrontive interference with a decision, in which there ought to be neither ground or motive, but the elector’s own judgement, and conscience, and all for what? It is hard if, in the same time as I could produce an essay of the sort required, I could not get the same sum by compiling a school-book.

However, I fear, that having allowed my name, at Montagu’s instance, to be proposed, which it was by a Mr. Jerdan (N. B. Neither the one sub cubili, nor that in Palestine; but the Jerdan of Michael’s Grove, Brompton, No. 1), I cannot now withdraw my name without appearing to trifle with my friends, and without hurting Montagu—so I must submit to the probability of being black-balled as the penalty of having given my assent before I had ascertained the conditions. So I have decided to let the thing take its own course. But as Montagu wishes to have Mr. Chantrey’s vote for us, if you see and feel no objection (an objectiuncula will be quite sufficient), you will perhaps write him a line to state the circumstances. It comes on on Thursday next.

I look forward with a feel of regeneration to the Sundays.

My best and most affectionate respects to Mrs. J. Green, and to your dear and excellent mother if she be with you.

And till we meet, may God bless you and your obliged and sincere friend,

S. T. Coleridge.

CCXXXV. TO THE SAME.

Ædes Nemorosæ, apud Portm Altam,
May 19, 1824.

Mr. S. T. Coleridge, F. R. S. L., R. A., H. M., P. S. B., etc., etc., has the honour of avowing the high gratification he will receive should any answer from him be thought “to oblige Lincoln’s Inn Fields.” When he reflects indeed on their many and cogent claims on his admiration and gratitude, what a Fund of Literature they contain, what a Royal Society, what Royal Associates—not to speak of those as yet in the egg of futurity, the unhatched Decemvirate and Spes Altera Phœbi! What a royal College, where philosophy and eloquence unite to display their fresh and vernal green! what a conjunction of the Fine Arts with the Sciences, Law and Physique, Glossurgery and Chirurgery! when he remembers that if the Titanic Roc should take up the Great Pyramid in his beak, and drop the same with due skill, the L. I. F. would fit as cup to ball, bone to bone; though if S. T. C. might dare advise so great and rare a bird, the precious transport should be let fall point downwards, and thus prevent the adulteration of their intellectual splendours with “the light of common day,” while a duplicate of the Elysium below might be reared on its ample base in mid air—(ah! if a duplicate of No. 22 could be found)!—when S. T. C. ponders on these proud merits, what is there he would not do to “oblige Lincoln’s Inn Fields”? In vain does Gillman talk of a stop being put thereto! Between oblige and Lincoln’s Inn Fields continuity alone can intervene for the heart’s eye of their obliged and counter-obliging

S. T. Coleridge,

who, with his friends Mr. and Mrs. G., will, etc., on June 3rd.

J. H. Green, Esq., 22, Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

CCXXXVI. TO JAMES GILLMAN.

Ramsgate, November 2, 1824.

My dear Friend,—That so much longer an interval has passed between this and my last letter you will not, I am sure, attribute to any correspondent interval of oblivion. I do not, indeed, think that any two hours of any one day, taken at sixteen, have elapsed in which you, past or future, or myself in connection with you, were not for a longer or shorter space my uppermost thought. But the two days following James’s safe arrival by the coach I was so depressively unwell, so unremittingly restless, etc., and so exhausted by a teasing cough, and by two of these bad nights that make me moan out, “O for a sleep for sleep itself to rest in!” that I was quite disqualified for writing. And since then, I have been waiting for the Murrays to take a parcel with them, who were to have gone on Monday morning. But again not hearing from them, and remembering your injunction not to mind postage, I have resolved that no more time shall pass on and should have written to-day, even though Mrs. Gillman had not been dreaming about you last night, and about some letter, etc. Upon my seriousness, I do declare that I cannot make out certain dream-devils or damned souls that play pranks with me, whenever by the operation of a cathartic pill or from the want of one, a ci-devant dinner in its metempsychosis is struggling in the lower intestines. I cannot comprehend how any thoughts, the offspring or product of my own reflection, conscience, or fancy, could be translated into such images, and agents and actions, and am half-tempted (N. B. between sleeping and waking) to regard with some favour Swedenborg’s assertion that certain foul spirits of the lowest order are attracted by the precious ex-viands, whose conversation the soul half appropriates to itself, and which they contrive to whisper into the sensorium. The Honourable Emanuel has repeatedly caught them in the fact, in that part of the spiritual world corresponding to the guts in the world of bodies, and driven them away. I do not pass this Gospel; but upon my honour it is no bad apocrypha. I am at present in my best sort and state of health, bathed yesterday, and again this morning in spite of the rain, and in so deep a bath, that having thrown myself forward from the first step of the machine ladder, and only taken two strokes after my re-immersion, I had at least ten strokes to take before I got into my depth again, so that it is no false alarm when those who cannot swim are warned that a person may be drowned a very few yards from the machine. I returned to fetch out our ladies to see the huge lengthy Columbus, with the two steam vessels,[191] before and behind, the former to tow, and the latter to, God knows what. By aid of a good glass, we saw it “quite stink,” as the poor woman said, the people on board, etc. It is 310 feet long, and 50 wide, and looks exactly like a Brobdingnag punt, and on our return we had (from Mrs. Jones) the “Morning Herald,” with Fauntleroy’s trial, which (if he be not a treble-damned liar) completely bears out my assertion that nothing short of a miracle could acquit the partners of virtual accompliceship; this on my old principle, that the absence of what ought to have been present is all but equivalent to the presence of what ought to have been absent. Qui non prohibet quod prohibere potest et debet, facit.

Sir Alexander Johnston[192] has payed me great attention. There is a Lady Johnston not unlike Miss Sara Hutchinson in face and mouth, only that she is taller. Sir A. himself is a fine gentlemanly man, young-looking for his age, and with exception of one not easily describable motion of his head that makes him look as if he had been accustomed to have a pen behind his ear, a sort of “Torney’s” clerk look, he might remind you of J. Hookham Frere. He is a sensible well-informed man, specious in no bad sense of the word, but (I guess) not much depth. In all probability, you will see him. We have talked a good deal together about you and me, and me and you, in consequence of occasion given. Sir A. is one of the leading men in our Royal Society of Literature, and beyond doubt, a man of influence in town. I am apt to forget superfluities, but a voice from above asks, “if I have said that we begin to be anxious to hear from you.” But probably before you can sit down to answer this, you will have received another, and, I flatter myself, more amusing, at least pleasure-giving Scripture from me. (N. B. “Coleridge’s Scriptures”—a new title.)

[No signature.]

CCXXXVII. TO THE REV. H. F. CARY.

Highgate, Monday, December 14, 1824.

My dear Friend,—The gentleman, Mr. Gabriel Rossetti,[193] whose letter to you I enclose, is a friend of my friend, Mr. J. H. Frere, with whom he lived in habits of intimacy at Malta and Naples. He seems to me what from Mr. Frere’s high opinion of him I should have confidently anticipated, a gentleman, a scholar, and a man of talents. The nature of his request you will learn from the letter, namely, a perusal of his Manuscript on the spirit of Dante and the mechanism and interpretation of the “Divina Commedia,” of which he believes himself to have the filum Ariadneum in his hand, and a frank opinion of the merits of his labours. My dear friend! I know by experience what is asked in this twofold request, and that the weight increases in proportion to the kindness and sensibility and the shrinking from the infliction of pain of the person on whom it is enjoined. The name of Mr. John Hookham Frere would alone have sufficed to make me undertake this office, had the request been directed to myself. It would have been my duty. But I would not, knowing your temper and habits and avocations, have sought to engage you, or even have put you to the discomfort of excusing yourself had I not been strongly impressed by Mr. Rossetti’s manners and conversation with the belief that the interests of literature are concerned, and that Mr. Rossetti has a claim on all the services which the sons of the Muses, and more particularly the cultivators of ancient Italian Literature, and most particularly Dante’s “English Duplicate and Re-incarnation” can render him. If your health and other duties allow your accession to this request (for the recommendation of the work to the booksellers is quite a secondary consideration, of minor importance in Mr. Rossetti’s estimation, and I have, besides, explained to him how very limited our influence is), you will be so good as to let me hear from you, and where and when Mr. Rossetti might wait on you. He will be happy to attend you at Chiswick. He understands English, and, he speaking Italian and I our own language, we had no difficulty in keeping up an animated conversation.

Make mine and all our cordial remembrances to Mrs. Cary, and believe me, dear friend, with perfect esteem and most affectionate regard, yours,

S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. Both Mrs. G. and myself have returned much benefited by our sea-sojourn. Mr. Rossetti has, I find, an additional merit in good men’s thoughts. He is a poet who has been driven into exile for the high morale of his writings. For even general sentiments breathing the spirit of nobler times are treasons in the present Neapolitan and Holy Alliance Codes! Wretches!! I dare even pray against them, even with Davidian bitterness. Do not forget to let me have an answer to this, if possible, by next day’s post.

CCXXXVIII. TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

Monday Night, ? 1824 ? 1829.

Dear Wordsworth,—Three whole days the going through the first book cost me, though only to find fault. But I cannot find fault, in pen and ink, without thinking over and over again, and without some sort of an attempt to suggest the alteration; and, in so doing, how soon an hour is gone! so many half seconds up to half minutes are lost in leaning back in one’s chair, and looking up, in the bodily act of contracting the muscles of the brow and forehead, and unconsciously attending to the sensation. Had I the MS. with me for five or six months, so as to amuse myself off and on, without any solicitude as to a given day, and, could I be persuaded that if as well done as the nature of the thing (viz., a translation of Virgil,[194] in English) renders possible, it would not raise but simply sustain your well-merited fame for pure diction, where what is not idiom is never other than logically correct, I doubt not that the irregularities could be removed. But I am haunted by the apprehension that I am not feeling or thinking in the same spirit with you, at one time, and at another too much in the spirit of your writings. Since Milton, I know of no poet with so many felicities and unforgettable lines and stanzas as you. And to read, therefore, page after page without a single brilliant note, depresses me, and I grow peevish with you for having wasted your time on a work so much below you, that you cannot stoop and take. Finally, my conviction is, that you undertake an impossibility, and that there is no medium between a prose version and one on the avowed principle of compensation in the widest sense, that is, manner, genius, total effect. I confine myself to Virgil when I say this.

I must now set to work with all my powers and thoughts to my Leighton,[195] and then to my logic, and then to my opus maximum! if indeed it shall please God to spare me so long, which I have had too many warnings of late (more than my nearest friends know of) not to doubt. My kind love to Dorothy.

S. T. Coleridge.

CCXXXIX. TO JOHN TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

Grove, Highgate, Friday, April 8, 1825.

My dear Nephew,—I need not tell you that no attention in my power to offer shall be wanting to Dr. Reich. As a foreigner and a man of letters he might claim this in his own right; and that he came from you would have ensured it, even though he had been a Frenchman. But that he is a German, and that you think him a worthy and deserving man, and that his lot, like my own, has been cast on the bleak north side of the mountain, make me reflect with pain on the little influence I possess, and the all but zero of my direct means, to serve or to assist him. The prejudices excited against me by Jeffrey, combining with the mistaken notion of my German Metaphysics to which (I am told) some passages in some biographical gossip book about Lord Byron[196] have given fresh currency, have rendered my authority with the Trade worse than nothing. Of the three schemes of philosophy, Kant’s, Fichte’s, and Schelling’s (as diverse each from the other as those of Aristotle, Zeno, and Plotinus, though all crushed together under the name Kantean Philosophy in the English talk) I should find it difficult to select the one from which I differed the most, though perfectly easy to determine which of the three men I hold in highest honour. And Immanuel Kant I assuredly do value most highly; not, however, as a metaphysician, but as a logician who has completed and systematised what Lord Bacon had boldly designed and loosely sketched out in the Miscellany of Aphorisms, his Novum Organum. In Kant’s “Critique of the Pure Reason” there is more than one fundamental error; but the main fault lies in the title-page, which to the manifold advantage of the work might be exchanged for “An Inquisition respecting the Constitution and Limits of the Human Understanding.” I can not only honestly assert, but I can satisfactorily prove by reference to writings (Letters, Marginal Notes, and those in books that have never been in my possession since I first left England for Hamburgh, etc.) that all the elements, the differentials, as the algebraists say, of my present opinions existed for me before I had even seen a book of German Metaphysics, later than Wolf and Leibnitz, or could have read it, if I had. But what will this avail? A High German Transcendentalist I must be content to remain, and a young American painter, Leslie (pupil and friend of a very dear friend of mine, Allston), to whom I have been in the habit for ten years and more of shewing as cordial regards as I could to a near relation, has, I find, introduced a portrait of me in a picture from Sir W. Scott’s “Antiquary,” as Dr. Duster Swivil, or whatever his name is.[197] Still, however, I will make any attempt to serve Dr. Reich, which he may point out and which, I am not sure, would dis-serve him! I do not, of course, know what command he has over the English language. If he wrote it fluently, I should think that it would answer to any one of our great publishers to engage him in the translation of the best and cheapest Natural History in existence, viz., Okens, in three thick octavo volumes, containing the inorganic world, and the animals from the Πρωτόζωα and animalcula of Infusions, to man. The Botany was not published two years ago. Whether it is now I do not know. There is one thin quarto of plates. It is by far the most entertaining as well as instructive book of the kind I ever saw; and with a few notes and the omission (or castigation) of one or two of Oken’s adventurous whimsies, would be a valuable addition to our English literature. So much for this.

I will not disguise from you, my dearest nephew, that the first certain information of your having taken the “Quarterly”[198] gave me a pain, which it required all my confidence in the soundness of your judgement to counteract. I had long before by conversation with experienced barristers got rid of all apprehension of its being likely to injure you professionally. My fears were directed to the invidiousness of the situation, it being the notion of publishers that without satire and sarcasm no review can obtain or keep up a sale. Perhaps pride had some concern in it. For myself I have none, probably because I had time out of mind given it up as a lost cause, given myself over, I mean, a predestined author, though without a drop of true author blood in my veins. But a pride in and for the name of my father’s house I have, and those with whom I live know that it is never more than a dog-sleep, and apt to start up on the slight alarms. Now, though very sillily, I felt pain at the notion of any comparisons being drawn between you (to whom with your sister my heart pulls the strongest) and Mr. Gifford, even though they should be [to] your advantage; and still more, the thought that ... Murray should be or hold himself entitled to have and express an opinion on the subject. The insolence of one of his proposals to me, viz., that he would publish an edition of my Poems, on the condition that a gentleman in his confidence (Mr. Milman![199] I understand) was to select, and make such omissions and corrections as should be thought advisable—this, which offered to myself excited only a smile in which there was nothing sardonic, might very possibly have rendered me sorer and more sensitive when I boded even an infinitesimal ejusdem farinæ in connection with you.

But henceforward I shall look at the thing in a sunnier mood. Mr. Frere is strongly impressed with the importance and even dignity of the trust, and on the power you have of gradually giving a steadier and manlier tone to the feelings and principles of the higher classes. But I hope very soon to converse with you on this subject, as soon as I have finished my Essay for the Literary Society, (in which I flatter myself I have thrown some light on the passages in Herodotus respecting the derivation of the Greek Mythology from Egypt, and in what respect that paragraph respecting Homer and Hesiod is to be understood), and have, likewise, got my “Aids to Reflection” out of the Press. But I have more to do for the necessities of the day, and which are Nos non nobis, than I can well manage so as to go on with my own works, though I work from morning to night, as far as my health admits and the loss of my friendly amanuensis. For the slowness with which I get on with the pen in my own hand contrasts most strangely with the rapidity with which I dictate. Your kind letter of invitation did not reach me, but there was one which I ought to have answered long ago, which came while I was at Ramsgate. We have had a continued succession of illness in our family here, at one time six persons confined to their beds. I have been sadly afraid that we should lose Mrs. Gillman, who would be a loss indeed to the whole neighbourhood, young and old. But she seems, thank God! to recover strength, though slowly. As I hope to write again in a few days with my book, I shall now desire my cordial regards to Mrs. J. Coleridge, and with my affectionate love to the little ones.

With the warmest interest of affection and esteem, I am, my dear John, your sincere friend,

S. T. Coleridge.

J. T. Coleridge, Esq., 65, Torrington Square.

CCXL. TO THE REV. EDWARD COLERIDGE.

May 19, 1825.

My very dear Nephew,—You have left me under a painful and yet genial feeling of regret, that my lot in life has hitherto so much estranged me from the children of the sons of my father, that venerable countenance and name which form my earliest recollections and make them religious. It is not in my power to express adequately so as to convey it to others what a revolution has taken place in my mind since I have seen your sister, and John, and Henry, and lastly yourself. Yet revolution is not the word I want. It is rather the sudden evolution of a seed that had sunk too deep for the warmth and exciting air to reach, but which a casual spade had turned up and brought close to the surface, and I now know the meaning as well as feel the truth of the Scottish proverb, Blood is thicker than water.

My book will be out on Monday next, and Mr. Hessey hopes that he shall be able to have a copy ready for me by to-morrow afternoon, so that I may present it to the Bishop of London, whom (at his own request Lady B. tells me) with his angel-faced wife and Miss Howley[200] I am to meet at Sir George’s to-morrow at six o’clock. There are many on whose sincerity and goodness of heart I can rely. There are several in whose judgement and knowledge of the world I have greater trust than in my own. And among these few John Coleridge ranks foremost. It was, therefore, an indescribable comfort to me to hear from him, that the first draft of my “Aids to Reflection,” that is, all he had yet seen, had delighted him beyond measure. I can with severest truth declare that half a score flaming panegyrical reviews in as many works of periodical criticism would not have given me half the pleasure, nor one quarter the satisfaction.

I dine D. V. on Saturday next in Torrington Square, when doubtless we shall drink your health with appropriate adjuncts. Yesterday I had to inflict an hour and twenty-five minutes’ essay full of Greek and superannuated Metaphysics on the ears of the Royal Society of Literature, the subject being the Prometheus of Æschylus deciphered in proof and as instance of the connection of the Greek Drama with the Mysteries.[201] “Douce take it” (as Charles Lamb says in his Superannuated Man) if I did not feel remorseful pity for my audience all the time. For, at the very best, it was a thing to be read, not to read. God bless you or I shall be too late for the post.

Your affectionate uncle,
S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. I went yesterday to the Exhibition, and hastily “thrid” the labyrinth of the dense huddle, for the sole purpose of seeing our Bishop’s portrait.[202] My own by the same artist is very much better, though even in this the smile is exaggerated. But Fanny and your mother were in raptures with it while they too seemed very cold in their praise of William’s.

CCXLI. TO DANIEL STUART.

Postmark, July 9, 1825.

My dear Sir,—The bad weather had so far damped my expectations, that, though I regretted, I did not feel any disappointment at your not coming. And yet I hope you will remember our Highgate Thursday conversation evenings on your return to town; because, if you come once, I flatter myself, you will afterwards be no unfrequent visitor.

At least, I have never been at any of the town conversazioni, literary, or artistical, in which the conversation has been more miscellaneous without degenerating into pinches, a pinch of this, and a pinch of that, without the least connection between the subjects, and with as little interest. You will like Irving as a companion and a converser even more than you admire him as a preacher. He has a vigorous and (what is always pleasant) a GROWING mind, and his character is MANLY throughout. There is one thing, too, that I cannot help considering as a recommendation to our evenings, that, in addition to a few ladies and pretty lasses, we have seldom more than five or six in company, and these generally of as many professions or pursuits. A few weeks ago we had present, two painters, two poets, one divine, an eminent chemist and naturalist, a major, a naval captain and voyager, a physician, a colonial chief justice, a barrister, and a baronet; and this was the most numerous meeting we ever had.

It would more than gratify me to know from you, what the impressions are which my “Aids to Reflection” make on your judgment. The conviction respecting the character of the times expressed in the comment on Aph. vi., page 147, contains the aim and object of the whole book. I venture to direct your notice particularly to the note, page 204 to 207, to the note to page 218, and to the sentences respecting common sense in the last twelve lines of page 252, and the conclusion, page 377.

Lady Beaumont writes me that the Bishop of London has expressed a most favourable opinion of the book; and Blanco White was sufficiently struck with it, as immediately to purchase all my works that are in print, and has procured from Sir George Beaumont an introduction to me. It is well I should have some one to speak for it, for I am unluckily ill off ... and you will easily see what a chance a poor book of mine has in these days.

Such has been the influence of the “Edinburgh Review” that in all Edinburgh not a single copy of Wordsworth’s works or of any part of them could be procured a few months ago. The only copy Irving saw in Scotland belonged to a poor weaver at Paisley, who prized them next to his Bible, and had all the Lyrical Ballads by heart—a fact which would cut Jeffrey’s conscience to the bone, if he had any. I give you my honour that Jeffrey himself told me that he was himself an enthusiastic admirer of Wordsworth’s poetry, but it was necessary that a Review should have a character.

Forgive this egotism, and be pleased to remember me kindly and with my best respects to Mrs. Stuart, and with every cordial wish and prayer for you and yours, be assured that I am your obliged and affectionate friend,

S. T. Coleridge.

Friday, July 8, 1825.

CCXLII. TO JAMES GILLMAN.

[8 Plains of Waterloo, Ramsgate,]
October 10, 1825.

My dear Friend,—It is a flat’ning thought that the more we have seen, the less we have to say. In youth and early manhood the mind and nature are, as it were, two rival artists both potent magicians, and engaged, like the King’s daughter and the rebel genii in the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, in sharp conflict of conjuration, each having for its object to turn the other into canvas to paint on, clay to mould, or cabinet to contain. For a while the mind seems to have the better in the contest, and makes of Nature what it likes, takes her lichens and weather-stains for types and printers’ ink, and prints maps and facsimiles of Arabic and Sanscrit MSS. on her rocks; composes country dances on her moonshiny ripples, fandangos on her waves, and waltzes on her eddy-pools, transforms her summer gales into harps and harpers, lovers’ sighs and sighing lovers, and her winter blasts into Pindaric Odes, Christabels, and Ancient Mariners set to music by Beethoven, and in the insolence of triumph conjures her clouds into whales and walruses with palanquins on their backs, and chases the dodging stars in a sky-hunt! But alas! alas! that Nature is a wary wily long-breathed old witch, tough-lived as a turtle and divisible as the polyp, repullulative in a thousand snips and cuttings, integra et in toto. She is sure to get the better of Lady Mind in the long run and to take her revenge too; transforms our to-day into a canvas dead-coloured to receive the dull, featureless portrait of yesterday: not alone turns the mimic mind, the ci-devant sculptress with all her kaleidoscopic freaks and symmetries! into clay, but leaves it such a clay to cast dumps or bullets in; and lastly (to end with that which suggested the beginning) she mocks the mind with its own metaphor, metamorphosing the memory into a lignum vitæ escritoire to keep unpaid bills and dun’s letters in, with outlines that had never been filled up, MSS. that never went further than the title-pages, and proof sheets, and foul copies of Watchmen, Friends, Aids to Reflection, and other stationary wares that have kissed the publishers’ shelf with all the tender intimacy of inosculation! Finis! and what is all this about? Why, verily, my dear friend! the thought forced itself on me, as I was beginning to put down the first sentence of this letter, how impossible it would have been fifteen or even ten years ago for me to have travelled and voyaged by land, river, and sea a hundred and twenty miles with fire and water blending their souls for my propulsion, as if I had been riding on a centaur with a sopha for a saddle, and yet to have nothing more to tell of it than that we had a very fine day and ran aside the steps in Ramsgate Pier at half-past four exactly, all having been well except poor Harriet, who during the middle third of the voyage fell into a reflecting melancholy.... She looked pathetic, but I cannot affirm that I observed anything sympathetic in the countenances of her fellow-passengers, which drew forth a sigh from me and a sage remark how many of our virtues originate in the fear of death, and that while we flatter ourselves that we are melting in Christian sensibility over the sorrows of our human brethren and sisteren, we are in fact, though perhaps unconsciously, moved at the prospect of our own end. For who ever sincerely pities seasickness, toothache, or a fit of the gout in a lusty good liver of fifty?

What have I to say? We have received the snuff, for which I thank your providential memory.... To Margate, and saw the caverns, as likewise smelt the same, called on Mr. Bailey, and got the Novum Organum. In my hurry, I scrambled up the Blackwood instead of a volume of Giovanni Battista Vico, which I left on the table in my room, and forgot my sponge and sponge-bag of oiled silk. But perhaps when I sit down to work, I may have to request something to be sent, which may come with them. I therefore defer it till then....

God bless you, my dear friend! You will soon hear again from

S. T. Coleridge.

CCXLIII. TO THE REV. EDWARD COLERIDGE.

December 9, 1825.

My dear Edward,—I write merely to tell you, that I have secured Charles Lamb and Mr. Irving to meet you, and wait only to learn the day for the endeavour to induce Mr. Blanco White to join us. Will you present Mr. and Mrs. Gillman’s regards to your brothers Henry and John, and that they would be most happy if both or either would be induced to accompany you?

I have had a very interesting conversation with Irving this evening on the present condition of the Scottish Church, the spiritual life of which, yea, the very core he describes as in a state of ossification. The greater part of the Scottish clergy, he complains, have lost the unction of their own church without acquiring the erudition and accomplishments of ours. Their sermons are all dry theological arguing and disputing, lifeless, pulseless,—a rushlight in a fleshless skull.

My kindest love to your sister, and kisses, prayers, and blessings for the little one.

[S. T. Coleridge.]

Thursday midnight.

I almost despair of John’s coming; but do persuade Henry if you can. I quite long to see him again.

CCXLIV. TO MRS. GILLMAN.

May 3, 1827.

My dear Friend,—I received and acknowledge your this morning’s present both as plant and symbol, and with appropriate thanks and correspondent feeling. The rose is the pride of summer, the delight and the beauty of our gardens; the eglantine, the honeysuckle, and the jasmine, if not so bright or so ambrosial, are less transient, creep nearer to us, clothe our walls, twine over our porch, and haply peep in at our chamber window, with the crested wren or linnet within the tufts wishing good morning to us. Lastly the geranium passes the door, and in its hundred varieties imitating now this now that leaf, odour, blossom of the garden, still steadily retains its own staid character, its own sober and refreshing hue and fragrance. It deserves to be the inmate of the house, and with due attention and tenderness will live through the winter grave yet cheerful, as an old family friend, that makes up for the departure of gayer visitors, in the leafless season. But none of these are the myrtle![203] In none of these, nor in all collectively, will the myrtle find a substitute. All together and joining with them all the aroma, the spices, and the balsams of the hot-house, yet would they be a sad exchange for the myrtle! Oh, precious in its sweetness is the rich innocence of its snow-white blossoms! And dear are they in the remembrance; but these may pass with the season, and while the myrtle plant, our own myrtle plant remains unchanged, its blossoms are remembered the more to endear the faithful bearer; yea, they survive invisibly in every more than fragrant leaf. As the flashing strains of the nightingale to the yearning murmurs of the dove, so the myrtle to the rose! He who has once possessed and prized a genuine myrtle will rather remember it under the cypress tree than seek to forget it among the rose bushes of a paradise.

God bless you, my dearest friend, and be assured that if death do not suspend memory and consciousness, death itself will not deprive you of a faithful participator in all your hopes and fears, affections and solicitudes, in your unalterable

S. T. Coleridge.

CCXLV. TO THE REV. GEORGE MAY COLERIDGE.

Monday, January 14, 1828.

My dear Nephew,—An interview with your cousin Henry on Saturday and a note received from him last night had enabled me in some measure to prepare my mind for the awful and humanly afflicting contents of your letter, and I rose to the receiving of it from earnest suplication to “the Father of Mercies and God of all Comfort”—that He would be strong in the weakness of His faithful servant, and his effectual helper in the last conflict. My first impulse on reading your letter was to set off immediately, but on a re-perusal, I doubt whether I shall not better comply with your suggestion by waiting for your next. Assuredly, if God permit I will not forego the claim, which my heart and conscience justify me in making, to be one among the mourners who ever truly loved and honoured your father. Allow me, my dear nephew, in the swelling grief of my heart to say, that if ever man morning and evening and in the watches of the night had earnestly intreated through his Lord and Mediator, that God would shew him his sins and their sinfulness, I, for the last ten years at least of my life, have done so! But, in vain, have I tried to recall any one moment since my quitting the University, or any one occasion, in which I have either thought, felt, spoken, or intentionally acted of or in relation to my brother, otherwise than as one who loved in him father and brother in one, and who independent of the fraternal relation and the remembrance of his manifold goodness and kindness to me from boyhood to early manhood should have chosen him above all I had known as the friend of my inmost soul. Never have man’s feeling and character been more cruelly misrepresented than mine. Before God have I sinned, and I have not hidden my offences before him; but He too knows that the belief of my brother’s alienation and the grief that I was a stranger in the house of my second father has been the secret wound that to this hour never closed or healed up. Yes, my dear nephew! I do grieve, and at this moment I have to struggle hard in order to keep my spirit in tranquillity, as one who has long since referred his cause to God, through the grief at my little communication with my family. Had it been otherwise, I might have been able to shew myself, my whole self, for evil and for good to my brother, and often have said to myself, “How fearful an attribute to sinful man is Omniscience!” and yet have I earnestly wished, oh, how many times! that my brother could have seen my inmost heart, with every thought and every frailty. But his reward is nigh: in the light and love of his Lord and Saviour he will soon be all light and love, and I too shall have his prayers before the throne. May the Almighty and the Spirit the Comforter dwell in your and your mother’s spirit. I must conclude. Only, if I come and it should please God that your dear father shall be still awaiting his Redeemer’s final call, I shall be perfectly satisfied in all things to be directed by you and your mother, who will judge best whether the knowledge of my arrival though without seeing him would or would not be a satisfaction, would or would not be a disturbance to him.

Your affectionate uncle,
S. T. Coleridge.

Grove, Highgate.
Rev. George May Coleridge,
Warden House, Ottery St. Mary, Devon.

CCXLVI. TO GEORGE DYER.[204]

June 6, 1828.

My dear long known, and long loved friend,—Be assured that neither Mr. Irving nor any other person, high or low, gentle or simple, stands higher in my esteem or bears a name endeared to me by more interesting recollections and associations than yourself; and if gentle man or gentle woman, taking too literally the partial portraiture of a friend, has a mind to see the old lion in his sealed cavern, no more potent “Open, Sesame, Open” will be found than an introduction from George Dyer, my elder brother under many titles—brother Blue, brother Grecian, brother Cantab, brother Poet, and last best form of fraternity, a man who has never in his long life, by tongue or pen, uttered what he did not believe to be the truth (from any motive) or concealed what he did conceive to be such from other motives than those of tenderness for the feelings of others, and a conscientious fear lest what was truly said might be falsely interpreted,—in all these points I dare claim brotherhood with my old friend (not omitting grey hairs, which are venerable), but in one point, the long toilsome life of inexhaustible, unsleeping benevolence and beneficence, that slept only when there was no form or semblance of sentient life to awaken it, George Dyer must stand alone! He may have a few second cousins, but no full brother.

Now, with regard to your friends, I shall be happy to see them on any day they may find to suit their or your convenience, from twelve (I am not ordinarily visible before, or if the outward man were forced to make his appearance, yet from sundry bodily infirmities, my soul would present herself with unwashed face) till four, that is, after Monday next,—we having at present a servant ill in bed, you must perforce be content with a sandwich lunch or a glass of wine.

But if you could make it suit you to take your tea, an early tea, at or before six o’clock, and spend the evening, a long evening, with us on Thursday next, Mr. and Mrs. Gillman will be most happy to see you and Mrs. Dyer, with your friends, and you will probably meet some old friend of yours. On Thursday evening, indeed, at any time, between half-past five and eleven, you may be sure of finding us at home, and with a very fair chance of Basil Montagu taking you and Mrs. Dyer back in his coach.

I have long owed you a letter, and should have long since honestly paid my debt; but we have had a house of sickness. My own health, too, has been very crazy and out of repair, and I have had so much work accumulated on me that I have been like an overtired man roused from insufficient sleep, who sits on his bedside with one stocking on and the other in his hand, doing nothing, and thinking what a deal he has to do.

But I am ever, sick or well, weary or lively, my dear Dyer, your sincere and affectionate friend,

S. T. Coleridge.

CCXLVII. TO GEORGE CATTERMOLE.[205]

Grove, Highgate, Thursday, August 14, 1828.

My dear Sir,—I have but this moment received yours of the 13th, and though there are but ten minutes in my power, if I am to avail myself of this day’s post, I will rather send you a very brief than not an immediate answer. I shall be much gratified by standing beside the baptismal font as one of the sponsors of the little pilgrim at his inauguration into the rights and duties of Immortality, and he shall not want my prayers, nor aught else that shall be within my power, to assist him in becoming that of which the Great Sponsor who brought light and immortality into the world has declared him an emblem.

There are one or two points of character belonging to me, so, at least, I believe and trust, which I would gladly communicate with the name,—earnest love of Truth for its own sake, and steadfast convictions grounded on faith, not fear, that the religion into which I was baptised is the Truth, without which all other knowledge ceases to merit the appellation. As to other things, which yet I most sincerely wish for him, a more promising augury might be derived from other individuals of the Coleridge race.

Any day, that you and your dear wife (to whom present my kindest remembrances and congratulations) shall find convenient, will suit me, if only you will be so good as to give me two or three days’ knowledge of it.

Believe me, my dear sir, with sincere respect and regard,

Your obliged
S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. I returned from my seven weeks’ Continental tour with Mr. Wordsworth and his daughter this day last week. We saw the Rhine as high up as Bingen, Holland, and the Netherlands.

CCXLVIII. TO J. H. GREEN.

Grove, Highgate, June 1, 1830.

My dear Friend,—Do you happen among your acquaintances and connections to know any one who knows any one who knows Sir Francis Freeling of the Post Office sufficiently to be authorised to speak a recommendatory word to him? Our Harriet,[206] whose love and willing-mindedness to me-ward during my long chain of bodily miserablenesses render it my duty no less than my inclination to shew to her that I am not insensible of her humbly affectionate attentions, has applied to me in behalf of her brother, a young man who can have an excellent character, from Lord Wynford and others, for sobriety, integrity, and discretion, and who is exceedingly ambitious to get the situation of a postman or deliverer of letters to the General Post Office. Perhaps, before I see you next, you will be so good as to tumble over the names of your acquaintances, and if any connection of Sir Francis’ should turn up, to tell me, and if it be right and proper, to make my request and its motive.

Dr. Chalmers with his daughter and his very pleasing wife honoured me with a call this morning, and spent an hour with me, which the good doctor declared on parting to have been “a refreshment” such as he had not enjoyed for a long season.[207] N. B.—There were no sandwiches; only Mrs. Aders was present, who is most certainly a bonne bouche for both eye and ear, and who looks as bright and sunshine-showery as if nothing had ever ailed her. The main topic of our discourse was Mr. Irving and his unlucky phantasms and phantis(ms). I was on the point of telling Dr. Chalmers, but fortunately recollected there were ladies and Scotch ladies present, that, while other Scotchmen were content with brimstone for the itch, Irving had a rank itch for brimstone, new-sublimated by addition of fire. God bless you and your

Ever obliged and affectionate friend,
S. T. Coleridge.

30 May? or 1 June? at all events.
Monday night, 11 o’clock.

P. S.—Kind remembrances to Mrs. Green. I continue pretty well, on the whole, considering, save the soreness across the base of my chest.

CCXLIX. TO THOMAS POOLE.

1830.

My dear Poole,—Mr. Stutfield Junr.[208] has been so kind as to inform me of his father’s purposed journey to Stowey, and to give me this opportunity of writing; though in fact I have little pleasant to say, except that I am advancing regularly and steadily towards the completion of my Opus Magnum on Revelation and Christianity, the Reservoir of my reflections and reading for twenty-five years past, and in health not painfully worse. I do not know, however, that I should have troubled you with a letter merely to convey this piece of information, but I have a great favour to request of you; that is, that, supposing you to have still in your possession the two letters of the biography of my own childhood which I wrote at Stowey for you, and a copy of the letter from Germany containing the account of my journey to the Harz and my ascent of Mount Brocken, you would have them transcribed, and send me the transcript addressed to me, James Gillman’s Esq., Highgate, London.

O that riches would but make wings for me instead of for itself, and I would fly to the seashore at Porlock and Lynmouth, making a good halt at dear, ever fondly remembered Stowey, of which, believe me, your image and the feelings and associations connected therewith constitute four fifths, to, my dear Poole,

Your obliged and affectionate friend,
S. T. Coleridge.

CCL. TO MRS. GILLMAN.

1830.

Dear Mrs. Gillman,—Wife of the friend who has been more than a brother to me, and who have month after month, yea, hour after hour, for how many successive years, united in yourself the affections and offices of an anxious friend and tender sister to me-ward!

May the Father of Mercies, the God of Health and all Salvation, be your reward for your great and constant love and loving-kindness to me, abiding with you and within you, as the Spirit of guidance, support, and consolation! And may his Grace and gracious Providence bless James and Henry for your sake, and make them a blessing to you and their father! And though weighed down by a heavy presentiment respecting my own sojourn here, I not only hope but have a steadfast faith that God will be your reward, because your love to me from first to last has begun in, and been caused by, what appeared to you a translucence of the love of the good, the true, and the beautiful from within me,—as a relic of glory gleaming through the turbid shrine of my mortal imperfections and infirmities, as a Light of Life seen within “the body of this Death,”—because in loving me you loved our Heavenly Father reflected in the gifts and influences of His Holy Spirit!

S. T. Coleridge.

CCLI. TO J. H. GREEN.

December 15, 1831.

My dear Friend,—It is at least a fair moiety of the gratification I feel, that it will give you so much pleasure to hear from me, that I tacked about on Monday, continued in smooth water during the whole day, and with exceptions of about an hour’s muttering, as if a storm was coming, had a comfortable night. I was still better on Tuesday, and had no relapse yesterday. I have so repeatedly given and suffered disappointment, that I cannot even communicate this gleam of convalescence without a little fluttering distinctly felt at my heart, and a sort of cloud-shadow of dejection flitting over me. God knows with what aims, motives, and aspirations I pray for an interval of ease and competent strength! One of my present wishes is to form a better nomenclature or terminology. I have long felt the exceeding inconvenience of the many different meanings of the term objective,—sometimes equivalent to apparent or sensible, sometimes in opposition to it,—ex. gr. “The objectivity is the rain drops and the reflected light, the iris, is but an appearance.” Thus, sometimes it means real and sometimes unreal, and the worst is, that it forms an obstacle to the fixation of the great truth, that the perfect reality is predicable only where actual and real are terms of identity, that is, where there is no potential being, and that this alone is absolute reality; and further, of that most fundamental truth, that the ground of all reality, the objective no less than of the subjective, is the Absolute Subject. How to get out of the difficulty I do not know, save that some other term must be used as the antithet to phenomenal, perhaps noumenal.

James Gillman has passed an unusually strict and long examination for ordination with great credit, and was selected by the bishop to read the lessons in the service. The parents are, of course, delighted, and now, my dear friend, with affectionate remembrances to Mrs. Green, may God bless you and

S. T. Coleridge.

CCLII. TO HENRY NELSON COLERIDGE.[209]

The Grove, February 24, 1832.

My dear Nephew, and by a higher tie, Son, I thank God I have this day been favoured with such a mitigation of the disease as amounts to a reprieve, and have had ease enough of sensation to be able to think of what you said to me from Lockhart, and the result is a wish that you should—that is, if it appears right to you, and you have no objection of feeling—write for me to Professor Wilson, offering the Essays, and the motives for the wish to have them republished, with the authority (if there be no breach of confidence) of Mr. Lockhart. I cannot with propriety offer them to Fraser, having for a series of years received “Blackwood’s Magazine” as a free gift to me, until I have made the offer to Blackwood. Of course, my whole and only object is the desire to see them put into the possibility of becoming useful. But, oh! this is a faint desire, my dear Henry, compared with that of seeing a fair abstract of the principles I have advanced respecting the National Church and its revenue, and the National Clerisy as a coördinate of the State, in the minor and antithetic sense of the term State!

I almost despair of the Conservative Party, too truly, I fear, and most ominously, self-designated Tories, and of course half-truthmen! One main omission both of senators and writers has been, ὡς ἔμοιγε δοκεῖ, that they have forgotten to level the axe of their argument at the root, the true root, yea, trunk of the delusion, by pointing out the true nature and operation and modus operandi of the taxes in the first instance, and then and not till then the utter groundlessness, the absurdity of the presumption that any House of Commons formed otherwise, and consisting of other men of other ranks, other views or with other interests, than the present has been for the last twenty years at least, would or could (from any imaginable cause) have a deeper interest or a stronger desire to diminish the taxes, as far as the abolition of this or that tax would increase the ability to pay the remainder. For what are taxes but one of the forms of circulation? Some a nation must have, or it is no nation. But he that takes ninepence from me instead of a shilling, but at the same time and by this very act prevents sixpence from coming into my pocket,—am I to thank him? Yet such are the only thanks that Mr. Hume and the Country Squires, his cowardly back-clapping flatterers, can fairly claim. In my opinion, Hume is an incomparably more mischievous being than O’Connell and the gang of agitators. They are mere symptomatic and significative effects, the roars of the inwardly agitated mass of the popular sea. But Hume is a fermenting virus. But I must end my scrawl. God bless my dear Sara. Give my love to Mrs. C. and kiss the baby for

S. T. Coleridge.

H. N. Coleridge, Esq., 1, New Court, Lincoln’s Inn.

CCLIII. TO MISS LAWRENCE.[210]

March 22, 1832.

My dear Miss Lawrence,—You and dear, dear Mrs. Crompton are among the few sunshiny images that endear my past life to me, and I never think of you without heartfelt esteem, without affection, and a yearning of my better being toward you. I have for more than eighteen months been on the brink of the grave, the object of my wishes, and only not of my prayers, because I commit myself, poor dark creature, to an Omniscient and All-merciful, in whom are the issues of life and death,—content, yea, most thankful, if only His Grace will preserve within me the blessed faith that He is and is a God that heareth prayers, abundant in forgiveness, and therefore to be feared, no fate, no God as imagined by the Unitarians, a sort of, I know not what law-giving Law of Gravitation, to whom prayer would be as idle as to the law of gravity, if an undermined wall were falling upon me; but “a God that made the eye, and therefore shall He not see? who made the ear, and shall He not hear?” who made the heart of man to love Him, and shall He not love the creature whose ultimate end is to love Him?—a God who seeketh that which was lost, who calleth back that which had gone astray; who calleth through His own Name; Word, Son, from everlasting the Way and the Truth; and who became man that for poor fallen mankind he might be (not merely announced but be) the Resurrection and the Life,—“Come unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest!” Oh, my dear Miss Lawrence! prize above all earthly things the faith. I trust that no sophistry of shallow infra-socinians has quenched it within you,—that God is a God that heareth prayers. If varied learning, if the assiduous cultivation of the reasoning powers, if an accurate and minute acquaintance with all the arguments of controversial writers; if an intimacy with the doctrines of the Unitarians, which can only be obtained by one who for a year or two in his early life had been a convert to them, yea, a zealous and by themselves deemed powerful supporter of their opinions; lastly, if the utter absence of any imaginable worldly interest that could sway or warp the mind and affections,—if all these combined can give any weight or authority to the opinion of a fellow-creature, they will give weight to my adjuration, sent from my sickbed to you in kind love. O trust, O trust, in your Redeemer! in the coeternal Word, the Only-begotten, the living Name of the Eternal I AM, Jehovah, Jesus!

I shall endeavour to see Mr. Hamilton.[211] I doubt not his scientific attainments. I have had proofs of his taste and feeling as a poet, but believe me, my dear Miss Lawrence! that, should the cloud of distemper pass from over me, there needs no other passport to a cordial welcome from me than a line from you importing that he or she possesses your esteem and regard, and that you wish I should shew attention to them. I cannot make out your address, which I read “The Grange;” but where that is I know not, and fear that the Post Office may be as ignorant as myself. I must therefore delay the direction of my letter till I see Mr. Hamilton; but in all places, and independent of place, I am, my dear Miss Lawrence, with most affectionate recollections,

Your friend,
S. T. Coleridge.

Miss S. Lawrence, The Grange, nr. Liverpool.

CCLIV. TO THE REV. H. F. CARY.

Grove, Highgate, April 22, 1832.

My dear Friend,—For I am sure by my love for you that you love me too well to have suffered my very rude and uncourteous vehemence of contradiction and reclamation respecting your advocacy of the Catilinarian Reform Bill, when we were last together, to have cooled, much less alienated your kindness; even though the interim had not been a weary, weary time of groaning and life-loathing for me. But I hope that this fearful night-storm is subsiding, as you will have heard from Mr. Green or dear Charles Lamb. I write now to say, that if God, who in His Fatherly compassion and through His love wherewith He hath beheld and loved me in Christ, in whom alone He can love the world, hath worked almost a miracle of grace in and for me by a sudden emancipation from a thirty-three years’ fearful slavery,[212] if God’s goodness should in time and so far perfect my convalescence as that I should be capable of resuming my literary labours, I have a thought by way of a light prelude, a sort of unstiffening of my long dormant joints and muscles, to give a reprint as nearly as possible, except in quality of the paper, a facsimile of John Asgill’s tracts with a life and copious notes,[213] to which I would affix Pastilla et Marginalia. See my MSS. notes, blank leaf and marginal, on Southey’s “Life of Wesley,” and sundry other works. Now can you direct me to any source of information respecting John Asgill, a prince darling of mine, the most honest of all Whigs, whom at the close of Queen Anne’s reign the scoundrelly Jacobite Tories twice expelled from Parliament, under the pretext of his incomparable, or only-with-Rabelais-to-be-compared argument against the base and cowardly custom of ever dying? And this tract is a very treasure, and never more usable as a medicine for our clergy, at least all such as the Bishop of London, Archbishops of Canterbury and of Dublin, the Paleyans and Mageeites,[214] any one or all of whom I would defy to answer a single paragraph of Asgill’s tract, or unloose a single link from the chain of logic. I have no biographical dictionary, and never saw one but in a little sort of one-volume thing. If you can help me in this, do. I give my kindest love to Mrs. Cary.

Yours, with unutterable and unuttered love and regard, in all (but as to the accursed Reform Bill! that mendacium ingens to its own preamble (to which no human being can be more friendly than I am), that huge tapeworm lie of some threescore and ten yards) entire sympathy of heart and soul,

Your affectionate
S. T. Coleridge.

CCLV. TO JOHN PEIRSE KENNARD.[215]

Grove, Highgate, August 13, 1832.

My dear Sir,—Your letter has announced to me a loss too great, too awful, for common grief, or any of its ordinary forms and outlets. For more than an hour after, I remained in a state which I can only describe as a state of deepest mental silence, neither prayer nor thanksgiving, but a prostration of absolute faith, as if the Omnipresent were present to me by a more special intuition, passing all sense and all understanding. Whether Death be but the cloudy Bridge to the Life beyond, and Adam Steinmetz has been wafted over it without suspension, or with an immediate resumption of self-conscious existence, or whether his Life be hidden in God, in the eternal only-begotten, the Pleroma of all Beings and the Habitation both of the Retained and the Retrieved, therein in a blessed and most divine Slumber to grow and evolve into the perfected Spirit,—for sleep is the appointed season of all growth here below, and God’s ordinances in the earthly may shadow out his ways in the Heavenly,—in either case our friend is in God and with God. Were it possible for me even to think otherwise,[216] the very grass in the fields would turn black before my eyes, and nature appear as a skeleton fantastically mossed over beneath the weeping vault of a charnel house!

Deeply am I persuaded that for every man born on earth there is an appointed task, some remedial process in the soul known only to the Omniscient; and, this through divine grace fulfilled, the sole question is whether it be needful or expedient for the church that he should still remain: for the individual himself “to depart and to be with Christ” must needs be GREAT gain. And of my dear, my filial friend, we may with a strong and most consoling assurance affirm that he was eminently one

Who, being innocent, did even for that cause
Bestir him in good deeds!
Wise Virgin He, and wakeful kept his Lamp
Aye trimm’d and full; and thus thro’ grace he liv’d
In this bad World as in a place of Tombs,
And touch’d not the Pollutions of the Dead.

And yet in Christ only did he build a hope. Yea, he blessed the emptiness that made him capable of his Lord’s fullness, gloried in the blindness that was a receptive of his Master’s light, and in the nakedness that asked to be cloathed with the wedding-garment of his Redeemer’s Righteousness. Therefore say I unto you, my young friend, Rejoice! and again I say, Rejoice!

The effect of the event communicated in your letter has been that of awe and sadness on our whole household. Mrs. Gillman mourns as for a son, but with that grief which is felt for a departed saint. Even the servants felt as if an especially loved and honoured member of the family had been suddenly taken away. When I announced the sad tidings to Harriet, an almost unalphabeted but very sensible woman, the tears swelled in her eyes, and she exclaimed, “Ah sir! how many a Thursday night, after Mr. Steinmetz was gone, and I had opened the door for him, I have said to them below, ‘That dear young man is too amiable to live. God will soon have him back.’” These were her very words. Nor were my own anticipations of his recall less distinct or less frequent. Not once or twice only, after he had shaken hands with me on leaving us, I have turned round with the tear on my cheek, and whispered to Mrs. Gillman, “Alas! there is Death in that dear hand.”[217]

My dear sir! if our society can afford any comfort to you, as that of so dear a friend of Adam Steinmetz cannot but be to us, I beseech you in my own name, and am intreated by Mr. and Mrs. Gillman to invite you, to be his representative for us, and to take his place in our circle. And I must further request that you do not confine yourself to any particular evening of the week (for which there is now no reason), but that you consult your own convenience and opportunities of leisure. At whatever hour he comes, the fraternal friend of Adam Steinmetz will ever be dear and most welcome to

S. T. Coleridge.

CHAPTER XV
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
1833-1834

CHAPTER XV
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
1833-1834

CCLVI. TO J. H. GREEN.

Sunday night, April 8, 1833.

It is seldom, my dearest friend, that I find myself differing from you in judgements of any sort. It is more than seldom that I am left in doubt and query on any judgement of yours of a practical nature, for on the good ground of some sixteen or more years’ experience I feel a take-for-granted faith in the dips and pointings of the needle in every decision of your total mind. But in the instance you spoke of this afternoon, viz., your persistent rebuttal of the Temperance Society Man’s Request, though I do not feel sure that you are not in the right, yet I do feel as if I should have been more delighted and more satisfied if you had intimated your compliance with it. I feel that in this case I should have had no doubt; but that my mind would have leapt forwards with content, like a key to a loadstone.

Assuredly you might, at least you would, have a very promising chance of effecting considerable good, and you might have commenced your address with your own remark of the superfluity of any light of information afforded to an habitual dram-drinker respecting the unutterable evil and misery of his thraldom. As wisely give a physiological lecture to convince a man of the pain of burns, while he is lying with his head on the bars of the fire-grate, instead of snatching him off. But in stating this, you might most effectingly and preventively for others describe the misery of that condition in which the impulse waxes as the motive wanes. (Mem. There is a striking passage in my “Friend” on this subject,[218] and a no less striking one in a schoolboy theme of mine[219] now in Gillman’s possession, and in my own hand, written when I was fourteen, with the simile of the treacherous current of the Maelstrom.) But this might give occasion for the suggestion of one new charitable institution, under authority of a legislative act, namely, a Maison de Santé (what do the French call it?) for lunacy and idiocy of the will, in which, with the full consent of, or at the direct instance of the patient himself, and with the concurrence of his friends, such a person under the certificate of a physician might be placed under medical and moral coercion. I am convinced that London would furnish a hundred volunteers in as many days from the gin-shops, who would swallow their glass of poison in order to get courage to present themselves to the hospital in question. And a similar institution might exist for a higher class of will-maniacs or impotents. Had such a house of health been in existence, I know who would have entered himself as a patient some five and twenty years ago.

Second class. To the persons still capable of self-cure; and lastly, to the young who have only begun, and not yet begun—[add to this] the urgency of connecting the Temperance Society with the Christian churches of all denominations,—the classes known to each other, and deriving strength from religion. This is a beautiful part, or might have been made so, of the Wesleyan Church.

These are but raw hints, but unless the mercy of God should remove me from my sufferings earlier than I dare hope or pray for, we will talk the subject over again; as well as the reason why spirits in any form as such are so much more dangerous, morally and in relation to the forming a habit, than beer or wine. Item: if a government were truly fraternal, a healthsome and sound beer would be made universal; aye, and for the lower half of the middle classes wine might be imported, good and generous, from sixpence to eightpence per quart.

God bless you and your ever affectionate

S. T. Coleridge.

CCLVII. TO MRS. ADERS.[220]

[1833.]

My dear Mrs. Aders,—By my illness or oversight I have occasioned a very sweet vignette to have been made in vain—except for its own beauty. Had I sent you the lines that were to be written on the upright tomb, you and our excellent Miss Denman would have, first, seen the dimension requisite for letters of a distinctly visible and legible size; and secondly, that the homely, plain Church-yard Christian verses would not be in keeping with a Muse (though a lovelier I never wooed), nor with a lyre or harp or laurel, or aught else Parnassian and allegorical. A rude old yew-tree, or a mountain ash, with a grave or two, or any other characteristic of a village rude church-yard,—such a hint of a landscape was all I meant; but if any figure, rather that of an elderly man

Thoughtful, with quiet tears upon his cheek.

(Tombless Epitaph. See “Sibylline Leaves.”)

But I send the lines, and you and Miss Denman will form your own opinion.

Is one of Wyville’s proofs of my face worth Mr. Aders’ acceptance? I wrote under the one I sent to Henry Coleridge the line from Ovid, with the translation, thus:

S. T. Coleridge, ætat. suæ 63.

Not / handsome / was / but / was / eloquent /
“Non formosus erat, sed erat facundus Ulysses.”

Translation.

“In truth, he’s no Beauty!” cry’d Moll, Poll, and Tab;
But they all of them own’d He’d the gift of the Gab.

My best love to Mr. Aders, and believe that as I have been, so I ever remain your affectionate and trusty friend,

S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. I like the tombstone very much.

The lines when printed would probably have on the preceding page the advertisement—

Epitaph on a Poet little known, yet better known by
the Initials of his Name than by the Name itself.

S. T. C.
Stop, Christian Passer-by! Stop, Child of God!
And read with gentle heart. Beneath this sod
A Poet lies: or that, which once seem’d He.
O lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.
That He, who many a year with toilsome breath
Found Death in Life, may here find Life in Death.
Mercy for Praise—to be forgiven for Fame
He ask’d, and hoped thro’ Christ. DO THOU the Same.

CCLVIII. TO JOHN STERLING.[221]

Grove, Highgate, October 30, 1833.

My dear Sir,—I very much regret that I am not to see you again for so many months. Many a fond dream have I amused myself with, of your residing near me or in the same house, and of preparing, with your and Mr. Green’s assistance, my whole system for the press, as far as it exists in writing in any systematic form; that is, beginning with the Propyleum, On the power and use of Words, comprising Logic, as the canons of Conclusion, as the criterion of Premises, and lastly as the discipline and evolution of Ideas (and then the Methodus et Epochee, or the Disquisition on God, Nature, and Man), the two first grand divisions of which, from the Ens super Ens to the Fall, or from God to Hades, and then from Chaos to the commencement of living organization, containing the whole scheme of the Dynamic Philosophy, and the deduction of the Powers and Forces, are complete; as is likewise a third, composed for the greater part by Mr. Green, on the “Application of the Ideas, as the Transcendents of the Truths, Duties, Affections, etc., in the Human Mind.” If I could once publish these (but, alas! even these could not be compressed in less than three octavo volumes), I should then have no objection to print my MS. papers on “Positive Theology, from Adam to Abraham, to Moses, the Prophets, Christ and Christendom.” But this is a dream! I am, however, very seriously disposed to employ the next two months in preparing for the press a metrical translation (if I find it practicable) of the Apocalypse, with an introduction on the “Use and Interpretation of Scriptures.” I am encouraged to this by finding how much of original remains in my views after I have subtracted all I have in common with Eichhorn and Heinrichs. I write now to remind you, or to beg you to recall to my memory the name of the more recent work (Lobeck?) which you mentioned to me, and whether you can procure it for me, or rather the loan of it. Likewise, whether you know of any German translation and commentary on Daniel, that is thought highly of? I find Gesenius’ version exceedingly interesting, and look forward to the Commentaries with delight. You mentioned some works on the numerical Cabbala, the Gematria (I think) they call it. But I must not scribble away your patience, and after I have heard from you from Cambridge I will try to write to you more to the purpose (for I did not begin this scrawl till the hour had passed that ought to have found me in bed).

With sincere regard, your obliged friend,
S. T. Coleridge.

CCLIX. TO MISS ELIZA NIXON.[222]

July 9, 1834.

My dear Eliza,—The three volumes of Miss Edgeworth’s “Helen” ought to have been sent in to you last night, and are marked as having been so sent. And indeed, knowing how much noise this work was making and the great interest it had excited, I should not have been so selfish as to have retained them on my own account. But Mrs. Gillman is very anxious that I should read it, and has made me promise to write my remarks on it, and such reflections as the contents may suggest, which, in awe of the precisians of the Book Society, I shall put down on separate paper. The young people were so eager to read it, that with my slow and interrupted style of reading, it would have been cruel not to give them the priority. Mrs. Gillman flatters me that you and your sisters will think a copy of my remarks some compensation for the delay.

God bless you, my dear young friend. You, I know, will be gratified to learn, and in my own writing, the still timid but still strengthening and brightening dawn of convalescence with the last eight days.

S. T. Coleridge.

July 9, 1834.

The two volumes[223] that I send you are making a rumour, and are highly and I believe justly extolled. They are written by a friend of mine,[224] a remarkably handsome young man whom you may have seen on one of our latest Thursday evening conversazioni. I have not yet read them, but keep them till I send in “Helen,” and longer, if you should not have finished them.

CCLX. TO ADAM STEINMETZ KENNARD.

Grove, Highgate, July 13, 1834.

My dear Godchild,—I offer up the same fervent prayer for you now as I did kneeling before the altar when you were baptized into Christ, and solemnly received as a living member of His spiritual body, the church. Years must pass before you will be able to read with an understanding heart what I now write. But I trust that the all-gracious God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, who by His only-begotten Son (all mercies in one sovereign mercy!) has redeemed you from evil ground, and willed you to be born out of darkness, but into light; out of death, but into life; out of sin, but into righteousness; even into “the Lord our righteousness,”—I trust that He will graciously hear the prayers of your dear parents, and be with you as the spirit of health and growth, in body and in mind. My dear godchild, you received from Christ’s minister at the baptismal font, as your Christian name, the name of a most dear friend of your father’s, and who was to me even as a son,—the late Adam Steinmetz, whose fervent aspirations and paramount aim, even from early youth, was to be a Christian in thought, word, and deed; in will, mind, and affections. I, too, your godfather, have known what the enjoyment and advantages of this life are, and what the more refined pleasures which learning and intellectual power can give; I now, on the eve of my departure, declare to you, and earnestly pray that you may hereafter live and act on the conviction, that health is a great blessing; competence, obtained by honourable industry, a great blessing; and a great blessing it is, to have kind, faithful, and loving friends and relatives; but that the greatest of all blessings, as it is the most ennobling of all privileges, is to be indeed a Christian. But I have been likewise, through a large portion of my later life, a sufferer, sorely affected with bodily pains, languor, and manifold infirmities; and for the last three or four years have, with few and brief intervals, been confined to a sick-room, and at this moment, in great weakness and heaviness, write from a sickbed, hopeless of recovery, yet without prospect of a speedy removal. And I thus, on the brink of the grave, solemnly bear witness to you, that the Almighty Redeemer, most gracious in His promises to them that truly seek Him, is faithful to perform what He has promised; and has reserved, under all pains and infirmities, the peace that passeth all understanding, with the supporting assurance of a reconciled God, who will not withdraw His spirit from me in the conflict, and in His own time will deliver me from the evil one. Oh, my dear godchild! eminently blessed are they who begin early to seek, fear, and love their God, trusting wholly in the righteousness and mediation of their Lord, Redeemer, Saviour, and everlasting High Priest, Jesus Christ. Oh, preserve this as a legacy and bequest from your unseen godfather and friend,

S. T. Coleridge.

INDEX

Abergavenny, 410.

Abergavenny, Earl of, wreck of the, 494 n.;
495 n.

Abernethy, Dr. John, 525;
C. determines to place himself under the care of, 564, 565.

Achard, F. C., 299 and note.

Acland, Sir John, 523 and note.

Acting, 621-623.

Acton, 184, 186-188, 191.

Adams, Dr. Joseph, 442 and note.

Addison’s Spectator, studied by C. in connection with The Friend, 557, 558.

Address on the Present War, An, 85 n.

Address to a Young Jackass and its Tethered Mother, 119 and note, 120.

Aders, Mrs., 701 n., 702 n., 752;
letters from C., 701, 769.

Adscombe, 175, 184, 188.

Advising, the rage of, 474, 475.

Adye, Major, 493.

Æschylus, Essay on the Prometheus of, 740 and note.

Aids to Reflection, 688 n.;
preparation and publication of, 734 n., 738;
C. calls Stuart’s attention to certain passages in, 741;
favourable opinions of, 741;
756 n.

Ainger, Rev. Alfred, 400 n.

Akenside, Mark, 197.

Albuera, the Battle of, C.’s articles on, 567 and note.

Alfoxden, 10 n.;
Wordsworth settles at, 224, 227;
326, 515.

Alison’s History of Europe, 628 n.

Allen, Robert, 41 and note, 45, 47, 50;
extract from a letter from him to C., 57 n.;
63, 75, 83, 126;
appointed deputy-surgeon to the Second Royals, 225 and note;
letter to C., 225 n.

Allsop, Mrs., 733 n.

Allsop, Thomas, friendship and correspondence with C., 695, 696;
publishes C.’s letters after his death, 696;
his Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge, 41 n., 527 n., 675 n., 696 and note, 698 n., 721 n.;
711;
C.’s letter of Oct. 8, 1822, 721 n.;
letter from C., 696.

Allston, Washington, 523;
his bust of C., 570 n., 571;
his portraits of C., 572 and note;
his art and moral character, 573, 574;
581, 633;
his genius and his misfortunes, 650;
695 and notes;
letter from C., 498.

Ambleside, 335;
Lloyd settles at, 344;
577, 578.

America, proposed emigration of C. and other pantisocrats to, 81, 88-91, 98, 101-103, 146;
prospects of war with England, 91;
241;
progress of religious deism in, 414;
C.’s letter concerning the inevitableness of a war with, 629.

Amtmann of Ratzeburg, the, 264, 268, 271.

Amulet, The, 257.

Ancient Mariner, The, 81 n.;
written in a dream or dreamlike reverie, 245 n.;
696.

Animal Vitality, Essay on, by Thelwall, 179, 212.

Annual Anthology, the, edited by Southey, 207 n., 226 n., 295 n., 298 n.;
C. suggests a classification of poems in, 313, 314, 317;
318, 320, 322 and note, 330, 331, 748 n.

Annual Review, 488, 489, 522.

Anti-Jacobin, The Beauties of the, its libel on C., 320 and note.

Antiquary, The, by Scott, C.’s portrait introduced into an illustration for, 736 and note.

Ants, Treatise on, by Huber, 712.

Ardinghello, by Heinse, 683 and note.

Arnold, Mr., 602, 603.

Arrochar, 432 and note.

Arthur’s Crag, 439.

A-seity, 688 and note.

Asgill, John, and his Treatises, 761 and note.

Ashburton, 305 n.

Ashe, Thomas, his Miscellanies, Æsthetic and Literary, 633 n.

Ashley, C. with the Morgans at, 631.

Ashley, Lord, and the Ten Hours Bills, 689 n.

Ashton, 140 and note.

As late I roamed through Fancy’s shadowy vale, a sonnet, 116 n., 118.

Atheism, 161, 162, 167, 199, 200.

Athenæum, The, 206 n., 536 n., 753 n.

Atlantic Monthly, 206 n.

Autobiographical letters from C. to Thomas Poole, 3-21.

Baader, Franz Xavier von, 683 and note.

Babb, Mr., 422.

Bacon, Lord, his Novum Organum, 735.

Badcock, Mr., 21.

Badcock, Harry, 22.

Badcock, Sam, 22.

Bala, 79.

Ball, Lady, 494 n., 497.

Ball, Sir Alexander John, 484, 487, 496, 497;
mutual regard of C. and, 508 n.;
524, 554;
C.’s narrative of his life, 579 n.;
his opinions of Lady Nelson and Lady Hamilton, 637.

Ballad of the Dark Ladie, The, 375.

Bampfylde, John Codrington Warwick, his genius, originality, and subsequent lunacy, 309 and note;
his Sixteen Sonnets, 309 n.

Banfill, Mr., 306.

Barbauld, Anna Lætitia, 317 n.

Barbou Casimir, The, 67 and notes, 68.

Barlow, Caleb, 38.

Barr, Mr., his children, 154.

Barrington, Hon. and Rt. Rev. John Shute, Bishop of Durham, 582 and note.

Bassenthwaite Lake, 335, 376 n.;
sunset over, 384.

Beard, On Mrs. Monday’s, 9 n.

Beaumont, Lady, 459, 573, 580, 592, 593;
procures subscribers to C.’s lectures, 599;
644, 645, 739, 741;
letter from C., 641.

Beaumont, Sir George, 440 n., 462;
his affection for C. preceded by dislike, 468;
493;
extract from a letter from Wordsworth on John Wordsworth’s death, 494 n.;
496;
lends the Wordsworths his farmhouse near Coleorton, 509 n.;
579-581;
C. explains the nature of his quarrel with Wordsworth to, 592, 593;
595 n., 629;
on Allston as an historical painter, 633;
739, 741;
letter from C., 570.

Beauties of the Anti-Jacobin, The, its libel on C., 320 and note.

Becky Fall, 305 n.

Beddoes, Dr. Thomas, 157, 211, 338;
C.’s grief at his death, 543 and note, 544 and note;
his advice and sympathy in response to C.’s confession, 543 n.;
his character. 544.

Bedford, Grosvenor, 400 n.

Beet sugar, 299 and note.

Beguines, the, 327 n.

Bell, Rev. Andrew, D. D., 575, 582 and note, 605;
his Origin, Nature, and Object of the New System of Education, 581 and note, 582.

Bell, Rev. Andrew, Life of, by R. and C. C. Southey, 581 n.

Bellingham, John, 598 n.

Bell-ringing in Germany, 293.

Belper, Lord (Edward Strutt), 215 n.

Bennett, Abraham, his electroscope, 218 n., 219 n.

Bentley’s Quarto Edition of Horace, 68 and note.

Benvenuti, 498, 499.

Benyowski, Count, or the Conspiracy of Kamtschatka, a Tragi-comedy, by Kotzebue, 236 and note.

Berdmore, Mr., 80, 82.

Bernard, Sir Thomas, 579 and notes, 580, 582, 585, 595 n., 599.

Betham, Matilda, To. From a Stranger, 404 n.

Bible, The, as literature, C.’s opinion of, 200;
slovenly hexameters in, 398.

Bibliography, Southey’s proposed work, 428-430.

Bibliotheca Britannica, or an History of British Literature, a proposed work, 425-427, 429, 430.

Bigotry, 198.

Billington, Mrs. Elizabeth Weichsel, 368.

Bingen, 751.

Biographia Literaria, 3, 68 n., 74 n., 152 n., 164 n., 174 n., 232 n., 257, 320 n., 498 n., 607 n., 669 n., 670 n.;
C. ill-used by the printer of, 673, 674;
679, 756 n.

Birmingham, 151, 152.

Bishop’s Middleham, 358 and note, 360.

Blackwood’s Magazine, 756.

Blake, William, as poet, painter, and engraver, 685 n., 686 n.;
C.’s criticism of his poems and their accompanying illustrations, 686-688;
his Songs of Innocence and Experience, 686 n.

Bloomfield, Robert, 395.

Blumenbach, Prof., 279, 298.

Book of the Church, The, 724.

Books, C.’s early taste in, 11 and note, 12;
in later life, 180, 181.

Booksellers, C.’s horror of, 548.

Borrowdale, 431.

Borrowdale mountains, the, 370.

Botany Bay Eclogues, by Robert Southey, 76 n., 116.

Bourbons, C.’s Essay on the restoration of the, 629 and note.

Bourne, Sturges, 542.

Bovey waterfall, 305 n.

Bowdon, Anne, marries Edward Coleridge, 53 n.

Bowdon, Betsy, 18.

Bowdon, John (C.’s uncle), C. goes to live with, 18, 19.

Bowdons, the, C.’s mother’s family, 4.

Bowles, the surgeon, 212.

Bowles, To, 111.

Bowles, Rev. William Lisle, C.’s admiration for his poems, 37, 42, 179;
63 n., 76 and note;
C.’s sonnet to, 111 and note;
115;
his sonnets, 177;
his Hope, an Allegorical Sketch, 179, 180;
196, 197, 211;
his translation of Dean Ogle’s Latin Iambics, 374 and note;
school life at Winchester, 374 n.;
C.’s, Southey’s, and Sotheby’s admiration of, and its effect on their poems, 396;
borrows a line from a poem of C.’s, 396;
his second volume of poems, 403, 404;
637, 638, 650-652.

Bowscale, the mountain, 339.

Box, 631.

Boyce, Anne Ogden, her Records of a Quaker Family, 538 n.

Boyer, Rev. James, 61, 113, 768 n.

Brahmin creed, the, 229.

Brandes, Herr von, 279.

Brandl’s Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the English Romantic School, 258, 674 n., 740 n.

Bratha, 394, 535.

Bray, near Maidenhead, 69, 70.

Brazil, Emperor of, an enthusiastic student and admirer of C., 696.

Bread-riots, 643 n.

Brecon, 410, 411.

Bremhill, 650.

Brent, Mr., 598, 599.

Brent, Miss Charlotte, 520, 524-526;
C.’s affection for, 565;
577, 585, 600, 618, 643, 722 n.;
letter from C., 722.
See Morgan family, the.

Brentford, 326, 673 n.

Bridgewater, 164.

Bright, Henry A., 245 n.

Bristol, C.’s bachelor life in, 133-135;
138, 139, 163 n., 166, 167, 184, 326, 414, 520, 572 n., 621, 623, 624.

Bristol Journal, 633 n.

British Critic, the, 350.

Brookes, Mr., 80, 82.

Brothers, The, by Wordsworth, the original of Leonard in, 494 n.;
C. accused of borrowing a line from, 609 n.

Brown, John, printer and publisher of The Friend, 542 n.

Brun, Frederica, C.’s indebtedness to her for the framework of the Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni, 405 n.

Bruno, Giordano, 371.

Brunton, Miss, 86 and note, 87, 89;
verses to, 94.

Brunton, Elizabeth, 86 n.

Brunton, John, 86 n., 87.

Brunton, Louisa, 86 n.

Bryant, Jacob, 216 n., 219.

Buchan, Earl of, 139.

Buclé, Miss, 136.
See Cruikshank, Mrs. John.

Buller, Sir Francis (Judge), 6 n.;
obtains a Christ’s Hospital Presentation for C., 18.

Buonaparte, 308, 327 n., 329 and note;
his animosity against C., 498 n.;
530 n.;
C.’s cartoon and lines on, 642.

Burdett, Sir Francis, 598.

Burke, Edmund, C.’s sonnet to, 116 n., 118;
his Letter to a Noble Lord, 157 and note;
Thelwall on, 166;
177.

Burnett, George, 74, 121, 140-142, 144-151, 174 n., 325, 467.

Burns, Robert, 196;
C.’s poem on, 206 and note, 207.

Burton, 326.

Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, 428.

Busts of C., 570 n., 571, 695 n.

Butler, Samuel (afterwards Head Master of Shrewsbury and Bishop of Lichfield), 46 and note.

Buttermere, 393.

Byron, Lord, his Childe Harold, 583;
666, 694, 726.

Byron, Lord, Conversations of, by Capt. Thomas Medwin, 735 and note.

Cabriere, Miss, 18.

Caermarthen, 411.

Caldbeck, 376 n., 724.

Calder, the river, 339.

Caldwell, Rev. George, 25 and note, 29, 71, 82.

Calne, Wiltshire, C.’s life at, 641-653.

Calvert, Raisley, 345 n.

Calvert, William, proposes to study chemistry with C. and Wordsworth, 345;
his portrait in a poem of Wordsworth’s, 345 n.;
proposes to share his new house near Greta Hall with Wordsworth and his sister, 346;
his sense and ability, 346;
347, 348.

Cambridge, description of, 39;
137, 270.

Cambridge, Reminiscences of, by Henry Gunning, 24 n., 363 n.

Cambridge Intelligencer, The, 93 n., 218 n.

Cambridge University, C.’s life at, 22-57, 70-72, 81-129;
C. thinks of leaving, 97 n.;
137.

Cameos and intaglios, casts of, 703 and note.

Campbell, James Dykes, 251 n., 337 n.;
his Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 269 n., 527 n., 572 n., 600 n., 631 n., 653 n., 666 n., 667 n., 674 n., 681 n., 684 n., 698 n., 752 n., 753 n., 772 n.

Canary Islands, 417, 418.

Canning, George, 542, 674.

Canova, Antonio, on Allston’s modelling, 573.

Cape Esperichel, 473.

Carlisle, Sir Anthony, 341 and note.

Carlton House, 392.

Carlyle, Thomas, his portrait of C. in the Life of Sterling, 771 n.

Carlyon, Clement, M. D., his Early Years and Late Recollections, 258, 298 n.

Carnosity, Mrs., 472.

Carrock, the mountain, a tempest on, 339, 340.

Carrock man, the, 339.

Cartwright, Major John, 635 and note.

Cary, Rev. Henry, his Memoir of H. F. Cary, 676 n.

Cary, H. F., Memoir of, by Henry Cary, 676 n.

Cary, Rev. H. F., his translation of the Divina Commedia, 676, 677 and note, 678, 679;
C. introduces himself to, 676 n.;
685, 699;
letters from C., 676, 677, 731, 760.

Casimir, the Barbou, 67 and notes, 68.

Castlereagh, Lord, 662.

Castle Spectre, The, a play by Monk Lewis, C.’s criticism of, 236 and note, 237, 238;
626.

Catania, 458.

Cat-serenades in Malta, 483 n., 484 n.

Catherine II., Empress of Russia, 207 n.

Cathloma, 51.

Catholic Emancipation, C.’s Letters to Judge Fletcher on, 629 and note, 634 and note, 635, 636, 642.

Catholicism in Germany, 291, 292.

Catholic question, the, letters in the Courier on, 567 and note;
C. proposes to again write for the Courier on, 660, 662;
arrangements for the proposed articles on, 664, 665.

Cattermole, George, 750 n.;
letter from C., 750.

Cattermole, Richard, 750 n.

Cattle, disposal of dead and sick, in Germany, 294.

Chalmers, Rev. Thomas, D. D., calls on C., 752 and note.

Chantrey, Mr. (afterwards Sir) Francis, R. A., C.’s impressions of, 699;
727.

Chapman, Mr., appointed Public Secretary of Malta, 491, 496.

Character, A, 631 n.

Charity, 110 n.

Chatterton, Monody on the Death of, 110 n., 158 n.;
C.’s opinion of it in 1797, 222, 223;
620 n.

Chatterton, Thomas, unpopularity of his poems, 221, 222;
Southey’s exertions in aid of his sister, 221, 222.

Chemistry, C. proposes to study, 345-347.

Chepstow, 139, 140 n.

Chester, John, accompanies C. to Germany, 259;
265, 267, 269 n., 272, 280, 281, 300.

Childe Harold, by Byron, 583.

Childhood, memory of, in old age, 428.

Children in cotton factories, legislation as to the employment of, 689 and note.

Christ, both God and man, 710.

Christabel, written in a dream or dreamlike reverie, 245 n.;
310, 313, 317, 337 and note, 342, 349;
Conclusion to Part II., 355 and note, 356 n.;
Part II., 405 n.;
a fine edition proposed, 421, 422;
437 n., 523;
C. quotes from, 609, 610;
the broken friendship commemorated in, 609 n.;
the copyright of, 669;
the Edinburgh Review’s unkind criticism of, 669 and note, 670;
Mr. Frere advises C. to finish, 674;
696.

Christianity, the one true Philosophy (C.’s magnum opus), outline of, 632, 633;
fragmentary remains of, 632 n.;
the sole motive for C.’s wish to live, 668;
J. H. Green helps to lay the foundations of, 679 n.;
694, 753;
plans for, 772, 773.

Christian Observer, 653 n.

Christmas Carol, A, 330.

Christmas Indoors in North Germany, 257, 275 n.

Christmas Out of Doors, 257.

Christmas-tree, the German, 289, 290.

Christ’s Hospital, C.’s life at, 18-22;
173 n.

Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago, by Charles Lamb, 20 n.

Christ’s Hospital, List of Exhibitioners, from 1566-1885, 41 n.

Chronicle, Morning, 111 n., 114, 116 n., 119 n., 126, 162, 167, 505, 506, 606 n., 615, 616.

Chubb, Mr., of Bridgwater, 231.

Church, The Book of the, by Southey, 724.

Church, the English, 135, 306, 651-653, 676, 757.

Church, the Scottish, in a state of ossification, 744, 745.

Church, the Wesleyan, 769.

Cibber, Colley, and his son, Theophilus, 693.

Cibber, Theophilus, his reply to his father, 693.

Cintra, Wordsworth’s pamphlet on the Convention of, 534 and note, 543 and note;
C.’s criticism of, 548-550.

Clagget, Charles, 70 and note.

Clare, Lord, 638.

Clarke, Mrs., the notorious, 543 n.

Clarkson, Mrs., 592.

Clarkson, Thomas, 363, 398;
his History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 527 and note, 528-530;
his character, 529, 530;
C.’s review of his book, 535, 536;
538 n., 547, 548;
on the second rupture between C. and Wordsworth, 599 n.

Clement, Mr., a bookseller, 548.

Clergyman, an earnest young, 691.

Clevedon, C.’s honeymoon at, 136.

Clock, a motto for a market, 553 and note, 554 n.

Coates, Matthew, 441 n.;
his belief in the impersonality of the deity, 444;
letter from C., 441.

Coates, Mrs. Matthew, 442, 443.

Cobham, 673 n.

Cole, Mrs., 271.

Coleorton, Memorials of, 369 n., 440.

Coleorton Farmhouse, C.’s visit to the Wordsworths at, 509-514.

Coleridge, Anne (sister—usually called “Nancy”), 8 and note, 21, 26.

Coleridge, Berkeley (son), birth of, 247 and note, 248, 249;
taken with smallpox, 259 n., 260 n.;
262, 267, 272;
death of, 247 n., 282-287, 289.

Coleridge, David Hartley (son—usually called “Hartley”), birth of, 169;
176, 205, 213, 220, 231, 245, 260-262, 267 n., 289, 296, 305, 318;
his talkativeness and boisterousness at the age of three, 321;
his theologico-astronomical hypothesis as to stars, 323;
a pompous remark by, 332;
illness, 342, 343;
early astronomical observations, 342, 343;
an extraordinary creature, 343, 344;
345 n., 355, 356 n., 359;
a poet in spite of his low forehead, 395;
408, 413, 416, 421;
at seven years, 443;
plans for his education, 461, 462;
468, 508;
visits the Wordsworths at Coleorton Farmhouse with his father, 509-514;
as a traveller, 509;
his character at ten years, 510, 512;
511;
under his father’s sole care for four or five months, 511 n.;
spends five or six weeks with his father and the Wordsworths at Basil Montagu’s house in London, 511 n.;
portraits of, 511 n.;
521;
his appearance, behavior, and mental acuteness at the age of thirteen, 564;
at fifteen, 576, 577;
at Mr. Dawes’s school, 576 and note, 577;
583 n.;
friendly relations with his cousins, 675 and note;
C. asks Poole to invite him to Stowey, 675;
visits Stowey, 675 n.;
684, 721, 726;
letter of advice from S. T. C., 511.

Coleridge, Derwent (son of S. T. C. and father of the editor), birth baptism of, 338 and note;
344, and 355, 359;
learns his letters, 393, 395;
408, 413, 416;
at three years, 443;
462, 468, 521;
at nine years, 564;
at eleven years, 576, 577;
at Mr. Dawes’s school, 576 and note, 577;
580, 605 n., 671 n.;
John Hookham Frere’s assistance in sending him to Cambridge, 675 and note;
707, 711.

Coleridge, Miss Edith, 670 n.

Coleridge, Edward (brother), 7, 53-55, 699 n.

Coleridge, Rev. Edward (nephew), 724 n.;
letters from C., 724, 738, 744.

Coleridge, Frances Duke (niece), 726 and note, 740.

Coleridge, Francis Syndercombe (brother), 8, 9, 11, 12, 13;
his boyish quarrel with S. T. C., 13, 14;
becomes a midshipman, 17;
dies, 53 and note.

Coleridge, Frederick (nephew), 56.

Coleridge, Rev. George (brother), 7, 8;
his character and ability, 8;
12, 21 n., 25 n.;
his lines to Genius, Ibi Hæc Incondita Solus, 43 n.;
59;
his self-forgetting economy, 65;
extract from a letter from J. Plampin, 70 n.;
95, 97 n., 98 and note, 261;
visit from S. T. C. and his wife, 305 n., 306;
467, 498 n., 512;
disapproves of S. T. C.’s intended separation from his wife and refuses to receive him and his family into his house, 523 and note;
699 n.;
approaching death of, 746-748;
S. T. C.’s relations with, 747, 748;
letters from S. T. C., 22, 23, 42, 53, 55, 59, 60, 62-70, 103, 239.

Coleridge, the Rev. George, To, a dedication, 223 and note.

Coleridge, Rev. George May (nephew), his friendly relations with Hartley C., 675 and note;
letter from C., 746.

Coleridge, Hartley, Poems of, 511 n.

Coleridge, Henry Nelson (nephew and son-in-law), 3, 553 n., 570 n., 579 n., 744-746;
sketch of his life, 756 n.;
letter from S. T. C., 756.

Coleridge, Mrs. Henry Nelson (Sara Coleridge), 9 n., 163 n.;
extract from a letter from Mrs. Wordsworth, 220 n.;
320 n., 327 n., 572 n.

Coleridge, James, the younger, (nephew), his narrow escape, 56.

Coleridge, Colonel James (brother), 7, 54, 56, 61, 306, 724 n., 726 n.;
letter from S. T. C., 61.

Coleridge, Mrs. James (sister-in-law), 740.

Coleridge, John (brother), 7.

Coleridge, John (grandfather), 4, 5.

Coleridge, Mrs. John (mother), 5 n., 7, 13-17, 21 n., 25, 56;
letter from S. T. C., 21.

Coleridge, Rev. John (father), 5 and note, 6, 7, 10-12, 15, 16;
dies, 17, 18;
his character, 18.

Coleridge, John Duke, Lord Chief-Justice (great-nephew), 572 n., 699 n., 745 n.

Coleridge, Sir John Taylor (nephew), his friendly relations with Hartley C., 675 and note;
editor of The Quarterly Review, 736 and note, 737;
his judgment and knowledge of the world, 739;
delighted with Aids to Reflection, 739;
740 n., 744, 745;
letter from S. T. C., 734.

Coleridge, Luke Herman (brother), 8, 21, 22.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, his autobiographical letters to Thomas Poole, 3-18;
ancestry and parentage, 4-7;
birth, 6, 9 and note;
his brothers and sister, 7-9;
christened, 9;
infancy and childhood, 9-12;
learns to read, 10;
early taste in books, 11 and note, 12;
his dreaminess and indisposition to bodily activity in childhood, 12;
boyhood, 12-21;
has a dangerous fever, 12-13;
quarrels with his brother Frank, runs away, and is found and brought back, 13-15;
his imagination developed early by the reading of fairy tales, 16;
a Christ’s Hospital Presentation procured for him by Judge Buller, 18;
visits his maternal uncle, Mr. John Bowdon, in London, 18, 19;
becomes a Blue-Coat boy, 19;
his life at Christ’s Hospital, 20-22;
enters Jesus College, Cambridge, 22, 23;
becomes acquainted with the Evans family, 23 and note, 24;
writes a Greek Ode, for which he obtains the Browne gold medal for 1792, 43 and note;
is matriculated as pensioner, 44 and note;
his examination for the Craven Scholarship, 45 and note, 46;
his temperament, 47;
takes violin lessons, 49;
enlists in the army, 57 and note;
nurses a comrade who is ill of smallpox in the Henley workhouse, 58 and note;
his enlistment disclosed to his family, 57 n., 58, 59;
remorse, 59-61, 64, 65;
arrangements resulting in his discharge, 61-70;
his religious beliefs at twenty-one, 68, 69;
returns to the university and is punished, 70, 71;
drops his gay acquaintances and settles down to hard work, 71;
makes a tour of North Wales with Mr. J. Hucks, 72-81;
falls in love with Miss Sarah Fricker, 81;
proposes to go to America with a colony of pantisocrats, 81, 88-91, 101-103;
his interest in Miss Fricker cools and his old love for Mary Evans revives, 89;
his indolence, 103, 104;
on his own poetry, 112;
considers going to Wales with Southey and others to found a colony of pantisocrats, 121, 122;
his love for Mary Evans proves hopeless, 122-126;
in lodgings in Bristol after having left Cambridge without taking his degree, 133-135;
marries Miss Sarah Fricker and spends the honeymoon in a cottage at Clevedon, 136;
breaks with Southey, 136-151;
happiness in early married life, 139;
his tour to procure subscribers for the Watchman, 151 and note, 152-154;
poverty, 154, 155;
receives a communication from Mr. Thomas Poole that seven or eight friends have undertaken to subscribe a certain sum to be paid annually to him as the author of the monody on Chatterton, 158 n.;
discontinues the Watchman, 158;
takes Charles Lloyd into his home, 168-170;
birth of his first child, David Hartley, 169;
considers starting a day school at Derby, 170 and note;
has a severe attack of neuralgia for which he takes laudanum, 173-176;
early use of opium and beginning of the habit, 173 n., 174 n.;
selects twenty-eight sonnets by himself, Southey, Lloyd, Lamb, and others and has them privately printed, to be bound up with Bowles’s sonnets, 177, 206 and note;
his description of himself in 1796, 180, 181;
his personal appearance as described by another, 180 n., 181 n.;
anxious to take a cottage at Nether Stowey and support himself by gardening, 184-194;
makes arrangements to carry out this plan, 209;
his partial reconciliation with Southey, 210, 211;
in the cottage at Nether Stowey, 213;
his engagement as tutor to the children of Mrs. Evans of Darley Hall breaks down, 215 n.;
his visit at Mrs. Evans’s house, 216;
daily life at Nether Stowey, 219, 220;
visits Wordsworth at Racedown, 220 and note, 221;
secures a house (Alfoxden) for Wordsworth near Stowey, 224;
visits him there, 227;
finishes his tragedy, Osorio, 231;
suspected of conspiracy with Wordsworth and Thelwall against the government, 232 n.;
accepts an annuity of £150 for life from Josiah and Thomas Wedgwood, 234 and note, 235 and note;
declines an offer of the Unitarian pastorate at Shrewsbury, 235 and note, 236;
writes Joseph Cottle in regard to a third edition of his poems, 239;
rupture with Lloyd, 238, 245 n., 246;
first recourse to opium to relieve distress of mind, 245 n.;
birth of a second child, Berkeley, 247;
temporary estrangement from Lamb caused by Lloyd, 249-253;
goes to Germany with William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, and John Chester, for the purpose of study and observation, 258-262;
life en pension with Chester in the family of a German pastor at Ratzeburg, after parting from the Wordsworths at Hamburg, 262-278;
learning the German language, 262, 263, 267, 268;
writes a poem in German, 263;
proposes to proceed to Göttingen, 268-270;
proposes to write a life of Lessing, 270;
travels by coach from Ratzeburg to Göttingen, passing through Hanover, 278-280;
enters the University, 281;
receives word of the death of his little son, Berkeley, 282-287;
learns the Gothic and Theotuscan languages, 298;
reconciliation with Southey, after the return from Germany, 303, 304;
with his wife and child he visits the Southeys at Exeter, 305 and note;
accompanies Southey on a walking-tour in Dartmoor, 305 and note;
makes a tour of the Lake Country, 312 n., 313;
in London, writing for the Morning Post, 315-332;
life at Greta Hall, near Keswick, 335-444;
proposes to write an essay on the elements of poetry, 338, 347;
proposes to study chemistry with William Calvert as a fellow-student, 345-347;
proposes to write a book on the originality and merits of Locke, Hobbes, and Hume, 349, 350;
spends a week at Scarborough, riding and bathing for his health, 361-363;
divides the winter of 1801-1802 between London and Nether Stowey, 365-368;
domestic unhappiness, 366;
writes the Ode to Dejection, addressing it to Wordsworth, 378-384;
discouraged about his poetic faculty, 388;
a separation from his wife considered and harmony restored, 389, 390;
makes a walking-tour of the Lake Country, 393 and note, 394;
makes a tour of South Wales with Thomas and Sarah Wedgwood, 410-414;
his regimen at this time, 412, 413, 416, 417;
birth of his daughter Sara, 416;
with Charles and Mary Lamb in London, 421, 422;
takes Mary Lamb to the private madhouse at Hugsden, 422;
his tour in Scotland, 431-441;
love for and delight in his children, 443;
visits Wordsworth at Grasmere and is taken ill there, 447, 448;
his rapid recovery, 451;
plans and preparations for going abroad, 447-469;
his mental attitude towards his wife, 468;
voyage to Malta, 469-481;
dislike of his own first name, 470, 471;
life in Malta, 481-484;
a Sicilian tour, 485 and note, 486 and note, 487;
in Malta again, 487-497;
his duties as Acting Public Secretary at Malta, 487, 491, 493, 494 and note, 495-497;
his grief at Captain John Wordsworth’s death, 494 and note, 495 and note, 497;
in Italy, 498-502;
returns to England, 501;
remains in and about London, writing political articles for the Courier, 505-509;
invited to deliver a course of lectures at the Royal Institution, 507;
visits the Wordsworths at Coleorton Farmhouse with his son Hartley, 509-514;
spends five or six weeks with Hartley in the company of the Wordsworths at Basil Montagu’s house in London, 511 n.;
outlines his course of lectures at the Royal Institution, 515, 516, 522;
begins his lectures, 525;
a change for the better in health, habits, and spirits, the result of his placing himself under the care of a physician, 533 and note, 543 n.;
with the Wordsworths at Grasmere, devoting himself to the publication of The Friend, 533-559;
in London, 564;
determines to place himself under the care of Dr. John Abernethy, 564, 565;
visits the Morgans in Portland Place, Hammersmith, 566-575;
life-masks, death-mask, busts, and portraits, 570 and note, 572 and notes;
last visit to Greta Hall and the Lake Country, 575-578;
misunderstanding with Wordsworth, 576 n., 577, 578, 586-588;
visits the Morgans at No. 71 Berners Street, 579-612;
preparations for another course of lectures, 579, 580, 582, 585;
writes Wordsworth letters of explanation, 588-595;
his Lectures on the Drama at Willis’s Rooms, 595 and notes, 596, 597, 599;
reconciled with Wordsworth, 596, 597, 599;
second rupture with Wordsworth, 599 n., 600 n.;
Josiah’s half of the Wedgwood annuity withdrawn on account of C.’s abuse of opium, 602, 611 and note;
successful production of his tragedy, Remorse (Osorio rewritten), at Drury Lane Theatre, 602-611;
sells a part of his library, 616 and note;
anguish and remorse from the abuse of opium, 616-621, 623, 624;
at Bristol, 621-626;
proposes to translate Faust for John Murray, 624 and note, 625, 626;
convalescent, 631;
with the Morgans at Ashley, near Box, 631;
writing at his projected great work, Christianity, the one true Philosophy, 632 and note, 633;
with the Morgans at Mr. Page’s, Calne, Wilts, 641-653;
resolves to free himself from his opium habit and arranges to enter the house of James Gillman, Esq., a surgeon, in Highgate (an arrangement which ends only with his life), 657-659;
submits his drama Zapolya to the Drury Lane Committee, and, after its rejection, publishes it in book form, 666 and note, 667-669;
publishes Sibylline Leaves and Biographia Literaria, 673;
disputes with his publishers, Fenner and Curtis, 673, 674 and note;
proposes a new Encyclopædia, 674;
his reputation as a critic, 677 n.;
visits Joseph Henry Green, Esq., at St. Lawrence, near Maldon, 690-693;
his snuff-taking habits, 691, 692 and note;
his friendship and correspondence with Thomas Allsop, 695, 696;
delivers a course of Lectures on the History of Philosophy at the Crown and Anchor, Strand, 698 and note;
criticises his portrait by Thomas Phillips, 699, 700;
at the seashore, 700, 701;
a candidate for associateship in the Royal Society of Literature, 726, 727;
elected as a Royal Associate, 728;
at Ramsgate, 729-731;
prepares and publishes Aids to Reflection, 734 n., 738;
reads an Essay on the Prometheus of Æschylus before the Royal Society of Literature, 739, 740;
another visit to Ramsgate, 742-744;
takes a seven weeks’ continental tour with Wordsworth and his daughter, 751;
illness, 754-756, 758;
convalescence, 760, 761;
begins to see a new edition of his poetical works through the press, 769 n.;
writes a letter to his godchild from his deathbed, 775, 776.

Coleridge, Early Recollections of, by Joseph Cottle, 139 n., 140 n., 151 n., 219 n., 232 n., 251 n., 616 n., 617 n., 633 n.

Coleridge, Life of, by James Gillman, 3, 20 n., 23 n., 24 n., 45 n., 46 n., 171 n., 257, 680 n., 761 n.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, by James Dykes Campbell, 269 n., 527 n., 572 n., 600 n., 631 n., 653 n., 666 n., 667 n., 674 n., 681 n., 684 n., 698 n., 752 n., 753 n., 772 n.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, and the English Romantic School, by Alois Brandl, 258, 674 n., 740 n.

Coleridge, S. T., Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of, by Thomas Allsop, 41 n., 527 n., 675 n.;
the publication of, regarded by C.’s friends as an act of bad faith, 696 and note, 721 n.;
698 n.

Coleridge, S. T., Spiritual Philosophy, founded on the Teaching of, by J. H. Green, 680 n.

Coleridge’s Logic, article in The Athenæum, 753 n.

Coleridge and Southey, Reminiscences of, by Joseph Cottle, 268 n., 269 n., 417, 456 n., 617 n.

Coleridge, Mrs. Samuel Taylor (Sarah Fricker, afterwards called “Sara”), edits the second edition of Biographia Literaria, 3;
136, 145, 146, 150, 151;
illness and recovery of, 155, 156;
168;
birth of her first child, David Hartley, 169;
174 n., 181, 188-190, 205, 213, 214, 216, 224, 245;
birth of her second child, Berkeley, 247-249;
257, 258, 259 n.;
extract from a letter to S. T. C., 263 n.;
extract from a letter to Mrs. Lovell, 267 n.;
271, 297, 312 n., 313, 318, 321, 325, 326, 332;
birth and baptism of her third child, Derwent, 338 and note;
her devotion saves his life, 338 n.;
387;
fears of a separation from her husband operate to restore harmony, 389, 390;
her faults as detailed by S. T. C., 389, 390;
392, 393 n., 395, 396;
birth of a daughter, Sara, 416;
418, 443, 457, 467, 490, 491, 521;
extract from a letter to Poole, 576 n.;
578;
John Kenyon a kind friend to, 639 n.;
letters from S. T. C., 259-266, 271, 277, 284, 288, 367, 410, 420, 431, 460, 467, 480, 496, 507, 509, 563, 579, 583, 602;
letter to S. T. C. after her little Berkeley’s death, 282 n.

Coleridge, Sara (daughter), her birth, 416;
in infancy, 443;
at the age of nine, 575, 576;
580, 724;
marries her cousin, Henry Nelson C., 756 n.
See Coleridge, Mrs. Henry Nelson.

Coleridge, Sara, Memoir and Letters of, 461 n., 758 n.

Coleridge, the Hundred of, in North Devon, 4 and note.

Coleridge, the Parish of, 4 n.

Coleridge, William (brother), 7.

Coleridge, William Hart (nephew, afterwards Bishop of Barbadoes), befriends Hartley C., 675 n.;
707;
his portrait by Thomas Phillips, R. A., 740 and note.

Coleridge, William Rennell, 699 n.

Coleridge family, origin of, 4 n.

Collier, John Payne, 575 n.

Collins, William, his Ode on the Poetical Character, 196;
his Odes, 318.

Collins, William, A. R. A. (afterward, R. A.), letter from C., 693.

Colman, George, the younger, genius of, 621;
his Who wants a Guinea?, 621 n.

Columbus, the, a vessel, 730.

Combe Florey, 308 n.

Comberbacke, Silas Tomkyn, C.’s assumed name, 62.

Comic Drama, the downfall of the, 616.

Complaint of Ninathoma, The, 51.

Concerning Poetry, a proposed book, 347, 386, 387.

Conciones ad Populum, 85 n., 161 n., 166, 454 n., 527 n.

Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit, originally addressed to Rev. Edward Coleridge, 724 n.;
756 n.

Coniston, 394.

Connubial Rupture, On a late, 179 n.

Consciousness of infants, 283.

Conservative Party in 1832, the, 757.

Consolation, a note of, 113.

Consolations and Comforts, etc., a projected book, 452, 453.

Constant, Benjamin, his tract On the Strength of the Existing Government of France, and the Necessity of supporting it, 219 and note.

Contempt, C.’s definition of, 198.

Contentment, Motives of, by Archdeacon Paley, 47.

Conversation, C.’s, 181, 752 and note;
C.’s maxims of, 244.

Conversation evenings at the Gillmans’, 740, 741, 774.

Cookson, Dr., Canon of Windsor and Rector of Forncett, Norfolk, 311 and note.

Copland, 400.

Cordomi, a pseudonym of C.’s, 295 n.

Cornhill Magazine, 345 n.

Cornish, Mr., 66.

Corry, Right Hon. Isaac, 390 and note.

Corsham, 650, 652 n.

Corsica, 174 n.

Corsican Rangers, 554.

Cote House, Josiah Wedgwood’s residence, C. visits, 416;
455 n.

Cottle, Joseph, agrees to pay C. a fixed sum for his poetry, 136;
137;
his Early Recollections of Coleridge, 139 n., 140 n., 151 n., 219 n., 232 n., 251 n., 616 n., 617 n., 633 n.;
144, 184, 185, 191, 192, 212;
his Reminiscences of Coleridge and Southey, 268 n., 269 n., 417, 456 n., 617 n.;
his financial difficulties, 319;
358;
his Malvern Hill, 358;
his publication of C.’s letters of confession and remorse deeply resented by C.’s family and friends, 616 n., 617 n.;
convalescent after a dangerous illness, 619;
letters from C., 133, 134, 154, 218 n., 220, 238, 251 n., 616, 619.

Courier, the, 230;
C. writes for, 505, 506, 507 n., 520;
534 and note, 543;
its conduct during the investigation of the charges against the Duke of York universally extolled, 545;
articles and recommendations for, 567 and notes, 568;
C. as a candidate for the place of auxiliary to, 568-570;
568 n.;
C. breaks with, 574;
598, 629 and notes, 634 and note;
change in the character of, 660-662, 664;
C. proposes to write on the Catholic question for, 660, 662;
arrangements for the proposed articles, 664, 665.

Courier office, C. lodges at the, 505, 520.

Cowper, William, “the divine chit-chat of,” 197 and note;
his Task, 242 n.

Craven, Countess of, 86 n.

Craven Scholarship, C.’s examination for the, 45 and note, 46.

Crediton, 5 n., 11.

Critical Review, 185, 489.

Criticism welcome to true poets, 402.

Crompton, Dr., of Derby, 215;
letter from Thelwall on the Wedgwood annuity, 234 n.

Crompton, Mrs., of Derby, 215.

Crompton, Mrs., of Eaton Hall, 758.

Crompton, Dr. Peter, of Eaton Hall, 359 and note, 758 n.

Cruikshank, Ellen, 165.

Cruikshank, John, 136, 177, 184, 188.

Cruikshank, Mrs. John (Anna), 177;
lines to, 177 n.;
213.
See Buclé, Miss.

Cryptogram, C.’s, 597 n.

Cunningham, Rev. J. W., his Velvet Cushion, 651 and note.

Cupid turned Chymist, 54 n., 56.

Currie, James, 359 and note.

Curse of Kehama, The, by Southey, 684.

Curtis, Rev. T., partner of Fenner, C.’s publisher, his ill-usage of C., 674.

Cuxhaven, 259.

Dalton, John, 457 and note.

Damer, Hon. Mrs., 368.

Dana, Miss R. Charlotte, 572 n.

Dante and his Divina Commedia, 676, 677 and note, 678, 679, 731 n., 732.

Danvers, Charles, his kindness of heart, 316.

Dark Ladie, The Ballad of the, 375.

Darnley, Earl, 629.

Dartmoor, a walking-tour in, 305 and note.

Dartmouth, 305 and note.

Darwin, Dr. Erasmus, C.’s conversation with, 152, 153;
his philosophy of insincerity, 161;
C.’s opinion of his poems, 164;
211;
the first literary character in Europe, and the most original-minded man, 215;
386, 648.

Dash Beck, 375 n., 376 n.

Davy, Sir Humphry, 315-317, 321, 324, 326, 344, 350, 357, 365, 379 n., 448;
a Theo-mammonist, 455;
456;
C. attends his lectures, 462 and note, 463;
C.’s esteem and admiration for, 514;
his successful efforts to induce C. to give a course of lectures at the Royal Institution, 515, 516;
seriously ill, 520, 521;
hears from C. of his improvement in health and habits, 533 n.;
673 n.;
letters from C., 336-341, 345, 514.

Davy, Sir Humphry, Fragmentary Remains of, edited by Dr. Davy, 343 n., 533 n.

Dawe, George, R. A., his life-mask and portrait of C., 572 and note;
his funeral and C.’s epigram thereon, 572 n.;
immortalized by Lamb, 572 n.;
engaged on a picture to illustrate C.’s poem, Love, 573;
his admiration for Allston’s modelling, 573;
his character and manners, 581;
a fortunate grub, 605.

Dawes, Rev. John, teacher of Hartley and Derwent C., 576 and note, 577.

Death, fear of, responsible for many virtues, 744;
the nature of, 762, 763.

Death and life, meditations on, 283-287.

Death-mask of C., a, 570 n.

Death of Mattathias, The, by Robert Southey, 108 and note.

Deism, religious, 414.

Dejection: An Ode, 378 and note, 379 and note, 380-384, 405 n.

Della Cruscanism, 196.

Democracy, C. disavows belief in, 104-105;
134, 243.
See Republicanism and Pantisocracy.

Denbigh, 80, 81.

Denman, Miss, 769, 770.

Dentist, a French, 40.

De Quincey, Thomas, 405 n., 525;
revises the proofs and writes an appendix for Wordsworth’s pamphlet On the Convention of Cintra, 549, 550 n.;
563, 601, 772 n.

Derby, 152;
proposal to start a school in, 170 and note;
188;
the people of, 215 and note, 216.

Derwent, the river, 339.

Descartes, René, 351 and note.

Destiny of Nations, The, 278 n., 178 n.

Deutschland in seiner tiefsten Erniedrigung, by John Philip Palm, C.’s translation of, 530.

De Vere, Aubrey, extract from a letter from Sir William Rowan Hamilton to, 759 n.

Devil’s Thoughts, The, by Coleridge and Southey, 318.

Devock Lake, 393.

Devonshire, 305 and note.

Devonshire, Georgiana, Duchess of, Ode to, 320 and note, 330.

Dibdin, Mr., stage-manager at Drury Lane Theatre, 666.

Disappointment, To, 28.

Dissuasion from Popery, by Jeremy Taylor, 639.

Divina Commedia, C. praises the Rev. H. F. Cary’s translation of, 676, 677 and note, 678, 679;
Gabriele Rossetti’s essay on the mechanism and interpretation of, 732.

Doctor, The, 583 n., 584 n.

Döring, Herr von, 279.

Dove, Dr. Daniel, 583 and note, 584.

Dove Cottage, Grasmere, 379 n.
See Grasmere.

Dowseborough, 225 n.

Drakard, John, 567 and note.

Drayton, Michael, his Poly-Olbion, 374 n.

Dreams, the state of mind in, 663.

Drury Lane Theatre, C.’s Zapolya before the committee of, 666 and note, 667.

Dryden, John, his slovenly verses, 672.

Dubois, Edward, 705 and note.

Duchess, Ode to the, 320 and note, 330.

Dunmow, Essex, 456, 459.

Duns Scotus, 358.

Dupuis, Charles François, his Origine de tous les Cultes, ou Religion Universelle, 181 and note.

Durham, Bishop of, 582 and note.

Durham, C. reading Duns Scotus at, 358-361.

Duty, 495 n.

Dyer, George, 84, 93, 316, 317;
his article on Southey in Public Characters for 1799-1800, 317 and note;
363, 422;
sketch of his life, 748 n.;
C.’s esteem and affection for, 748, 749;
his benevolence and beneficence, 749;
letter from C., 748.

Earl of Abergavenny, the wreck of, 494 n.;
495 n.

Early Recollections of Coleridge, by Joseph Cottle, 139 n., 140 n., 151 n., 219 n., 232 n., 251 n., 616 n., 617 n., 633 n.

Early Years and Late Recollections, by Clement Carlyon, M. D., 258, 298 n.

East Tarbet, 431, 432 and note, 433.

Echoes, 400 n.

Edgeworth, Maria, her Helen, 773, 774.

Edgeworth, Richard Lovell, 262.

Edgeworth’s Essay on Education, 261.

Edgeworths, the, very miserable when children, 262.

Edinburgh, a place of literary gossip, 423;
C.’s visit to, 434-440;
Southey’s first impressions of, 438 n.

Edinburgh Review, The, 438 n.;
Southey declines Scott’s offer to secure him a place on, 521 and note, 522;
its attitude towards C., 527;
C.’s review of Clarkson’s book in, 527 and note, 528-530;
636, 637;
severe review of Christabel in, 669 and note, 670;
Jeffrey’s reply to C. in, 669 n.;
re-echoes C.’s praise of Cary’s Dante, 677 n.;
its broad, predetermined abuse of C., 697, 723;
its influence on the sale of Wordsworth’s books in Scotland, 741, 742.

Edmund Oliver, by Charles Lloyd, drawn from C.’s life, 252 and note;
311.

Education, Practical, by Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Maria Edgeworth, 261.

Education through the imagination preferable to that which makes the senses the only criteria of belief, 16, 17.

Edwards, Rev. Mr., of Birmingham, extract from a letter from C. to, 174 n.

Edwards, Thomas, LL. D., 101 and note.

Egremont, 393.

Egypt, Observations on, 486 n.

Egypt, political relations of, 492.

Eichhorn, Prof., of Göttingen, 298, 564, 707, 773.

Einbeck, 279, 280.

Elbe, the, 259, 277.

Electrometers of taste, 218 and note.

Elegy, by Robert Southey, 115.

Elleray, 535.

Elliot, H., Minister at the Court of Naples, 508 and note.

Elliston, Mr., an actor, 611.

Elmsley, Rev. Peter, 438 and note, 439.

Encyclopædia Metropolitana, a work projected by C., 674, 681.

Encyclopædias, 427, 429, 430.

Ennerdale, 393.

Epitaph, by C., 769 and note, 770, 771.

Epitaph, by Wordsworth, 284.

Erigena, Joannes Scotus, 417;
the modern founder of the school of pantheism, 424.

Erskine, Lord, his Bill for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, 635 and note.

Erste Schiffer, Der (The First Navigator), by Gesner, 369, 371, 372, 376-378, 397, 402, 403.

Eskdale, 393, 401.

Essay on Animal Vitality, by Thelwall, 179, 212.

Essay on Fasting, 157.

Essay on the New French Constitution, 320 and note.

Essay on the Prometheus of Æschylus, 740 and note.

Essay on the Science of Method, 681 and note.

Essays on His Own Times, 156 n., 157 n., 320 n., 327 n., 329 n., 335 n., 414 n., 498 n., 567 n., 629 n., 634 n.

Essay on the Fine Arts, 633 and note, 634.

Essays upon Epitaphs, by Wordsworth, 585 and note.

Estlin, Mrs. J. P., 190, 213, 214.

Estlin, Rev. J. P., 184, 185, 190, 239, 287, 288;
his sermons, 385;
416;
letters from C., 213, 245, 246, 414.

Ether, 420, 435.

Etna, 458, 485 n., 486 n.

Evans, Mrs., C. spends a fortnight with, 23 and note;
24;
C.’s filial regard for, 26, 27;
her unselfishness, 46;
letters from C., 26, 39, 45.

Evans, Anne, 27, 29-31;
letters from C., 37, 52.

Evans, Eliza, 78.

Evans, Mrs. Elizabeth, of Darley Hall, her proposal to engage C. as tutor to her children, 215 n.;
her kindness to C. and Mrs. C., 215 n., 210;
231, 367.

Evans, Mary, 23 n., 27, 30;
an acute mind beneath a soft surface of feminine delicacy, 50;
C. sees her at Wrexham and confesses to Southey his love for her, 78;
97 and note;
song addressed to, 100;
C.’s unrequited love for, 123-125;
letters from C., 30, 41, 47, 122, 124;
letter to C., 87-89.

Evans, Walter, 231.

Evans, William, of Darley Hall, 215 n.

Evolution, 648.

Examiner, The, its notice of C.’s tragedy, Remorse, 606.

Excursion, The, by Wordsworth, 244 n., 337 n., 585 n.;
C.’s opinion of, 641;
the Edinburgh Review’s criticism of, 642;
C. discusses it in the light of his previous expectations, 645-650.

Exeter, 305 and note.

Ezekiel, 705 n.

Faith, C.’s definition of, 202;
204.

Fall of Robespierre, The, 85 and note, 87, 93, 104 and notes.

Falls of Foyers, the, 440.

Farmer, Priscilla, Poems on the Death of, by Charles Lloyd, 206 and note.

Farmers, 335 n.

Farmhouse, by Robert Lovell, 115.

Fasting, Essay on, 157.

Faulkner: a Tragedy, by William Godwin, 524 and note.

Fauntleroy’s trial, 730.

Faust, C.’s proposal to translate, 624 and note, 625, 626.

Favell, Robert, 86, 109 n., 110 n., 113, 225 and note.

Fayette, 112.

Fears in Solitude, published, 261 n.;
318, 321, 328, 552, 703 and note.

Fellowes, Mr., of Nottingham, 153.

Female Biography, or Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, by Mary Hayes, 318 and note.

Fenner, Rest, publishes Zapolya for C., 666 n.;
his ill-usage of C. in regard to Sibylline Leaves, Biographia Literaria, and the projected Encyclopædia Metropolitana, 673, 674 and note.

Fenwick, Dr., 361 and note.

Fenwick, Mrs. E., 465 and note.

Fernier, John, 211.

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, the philosophy of, 682, 683, 735.

Field, Mr., 93.

Fine Arts, Essays on the, 633 and note, 634.

Fire, The, by Robert Southey, 108 and note.

Fire and Famine, 327.

First Landing Place, The, 684 n.

First Navigator, The, translation of Gesner’s Der Erste Schiffer, 369, 371, 372, 376-378, 397, 402, 403.

Fitzgibbon, John, 638.

Fletcher, Judge, C.’s Courier Letters to, 629 and note, 634 and note, 635, 636, 642.

Florence, 499 n.

Flower, Benjamin, editor of the Cambridge Intelligencer, 93 and note.

Flower, The, by George Herbert, 695.

Flowers, 745, 746.

Fort Augustus, 435.

Foster-Mother’s Tale, The, 510 n.

Fox, Charles James, his Letter to the Westminster Electors, 50;
327;
Coleridge versus, 423, 424;
proposed articles on, 505;
506;
death of, 507 and note;
629 and note.

Fox, Dr., 619.

Foyers, the Falls of, 440.

Fragment found in a Lecture Room, A, 44.

Fragments of a Journal of a Tour over the Brocken, 257.

France, political condition of, in 1800, 329 and note.

France, an Ode, 261 n., 552.

Freeling, Sir Francis, 751.

French, C. not proficient in, 181.

French Constitution, Essay on the New, 320 and note.

French Empire under Buonaparte, C.’s essays on the, 629 and note.

French Revolution, the, 219, 240.

Frend, William, 24 and note.

Frere, George, 672.

Frere, Right Hon. John Hookham, 672 and note;
advice and friendly assistance to C. from, 674, 675 and note;
698, 731, 732, 737.

Fricker, Mrs., 98, 189;
C. proposes to allow her an annuity of £20, 190;
423, 458.

Fricker, Edith (afterwards Mrs. Robert Southey), 82;
marries Southey, 137 n.;
163 n.
See Southey, Mrs. Robert.

Fricker, George, 315, 316.

Fricker, Martha, 600.

Fricker, Sarah, C. falls in love with, 81;
83-86;
C.’s love cools, 89;
marries C., 136;
138, 163 n.;
letter from Southey, 107 n.
See Coleridge, Mrs. Samuel Taylor.

Friend, The, 11 n., 25 n., 86 n., 257, 274 n., 275 n., 351 n., 404 n., 412 n., 453 n., 454 n.;
preliminary prospectus of, and its revision, 533, 536 and note, 537-541, 542 n.;
arrangements for the publication of, 541, 542 and note, 544, 546, 547;
its vicissitudes during its first eight months, 547, 548, 551, 552, 554-559;
Addison’s Spectator compared with, 557, 558;
the reprint of, 575, 579 and note, 580 n., 585 and note;
606, 611, 629 and note, 630, 667 n.;
J. H. Frere’s advice in regard to, 674;
the object of the third volume of, 676;
684 n.;
697, 756 n., 768 and note.

Friends, C. complains of lack of sympathy on the part of his, 696, 697.

Friend’s Quarterly Examiner, The, 536 n., 538 n.

Frisky Songster, The, 237.

Frost at Midnight, 8 n., 261 n.

Gale and Curtis, 579 and note, 580 n.

Gallow Hill, 359 n., 362, 379 n.

Gallows and hangman in Germany, 294.

Gardening, C. proposes to undertake, 183-194;
C. begins it at Nether Stowey, 213;
recommended to Thelwall, 215;
at Nether Stowey, 219, 220.

Gebir, 328.

Gentleman’s Magazine, The, 455 n.

Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, Ode to, 320 and note, 330.

German language, the, C. learning, 262, 263, 267, 268.

German philosophers, C.’s opinions of, 681-683, 735.

German playing-cards, 263.

Germans, their partiality for England and the English, 263, 264;
their eating and smoking customs, 276, 277;
an unlovely race, 278;
their Christmas-tree and other religious customs, 289-292;
superstitions of the bauers, 291, 292, 294;
marriage customs of the bauers, 292, 293.

Germany, 257, 258;
C.’s sojourn in, 259-300;
post coaches in, 278, 279;
the clergy of, 291;
Protestants and Catholics of, 291, 292;
bell-ringing in, 293;
churches in, 293;
shepherds in, 293;
care of owls in, 293;
gallows and hangman in, 294;
disposal of dead and sick cattle in, 294;
beet sugar in, 299.

Gerrald, Joseph, 161 and note, 166, 167 n.

Gesenius, Friedrich Heinrich Wilhelm, 773.

Gesner, his Erste Schiffer (The First Navigator), 369, 371, 372, 376-378, 397, 402, 403;
his rhythmical prose, 398.

Ghosts, 684.

Gibraltar, 469, 473, 474;
description of, 475-479;
480, 493.

Gifford, William, his criticism of C.’s tragedy, Remorse, 605, 606;
669, 737.

Gillman, Alexander, 703 n.

Gillman, Henry, 693 n.

Gillman, James, his Life of Coleridge, 3, 20 n., 23 n., 24 n., 45 n., 46 n., 171 n., 257;
442 n., 680 n., 761 n.;
his faithful friendship for C., 657;
C. arranges to enter his household as a patient, 657-659;
C.’s pecuniary obligations to, 658 n.;
character and intellect of, 665;
670 n., 679, 685, 692, 704;
C.’s gratitude to and affection for, 721, 722;
on C.’s opium habit, 761 n.;
768;
extracts from a letter from John Sterling to, 772 n.;
letters from C., 657, 700, 721, 729, 742.

Gillman, James, the younger, passes his examination for ordination with great credit, 755.

Gillman, Mrs. James (Anne), her faithful friendship for C., 657;
character of, 665;
679, 684, 685, 702 n., 705, 721, 722, 729, 733;
illness of, 738;
C.’s attachment to, 746;
C.’s gratitude to and affection for, 754;
764, 774;
letters from C., 690, 745, 754.

Ginger-tea, 412, 413.

Glencoe, 413, 440.

Glen Falloch, 433.

Gloucester, 72.

Gnats, 692.

Godliness, C.’s definition of, 203 n., 204;
St. Peter’s paraphrase of, 204.

Godwin, William, 91, 114;
C.’s sonnet to, 116 n., 117;
lines by Southey to, 120;
his misanthropy, 161, 162;
161 n., 167;
C.’s book on, 210;
316, 321;
his St. Leon, 324, 325;
a quarrel and reconciliation with C., 457, 464-466;
his Faulkner: a Tragedy, 524 and note;
C. accepts his invitation to meet Grattan, 565, 566;
letter from C., 565.

Godwin, William: His Friends and Contemporaries, by Charles Kegan Paul, 161 n., 324 n., 465 n.

Godwin, Mrs. William, 465, 466, 566.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, his Faust, C.’s proposal to translate, 624 and note, 625, 626;
his Zur Farbenlehre, 699.

Gosforth, 393.

Goslar, 272, 273.

Göttingen, C. proposes to visit, 268-270, 272;
268 n., 269 n.;
C. calls on Professor Heyne at, 280;
C. enters the University of, 281;
the Saturday Club at, 281;
the gallows near, 294;
C.’s stay at, 281-300.

Gough, Charles, 369 n.

Governments as effects and causes, 241.

Grasmere, 335, 346, 362, 379 n., 394, 405 n., 419, 420;
C. visits and is taken ill there, 447, 448;
C. visits, 533-569.
See Kendal.

Grattan, Henry, C.’s admiration for, 566.

Greek Islands, the, 329.

Greek poetry contrasted with Hebrew poetry, 405, 406.

Greek Sapphic Ode, On the Slave Trade, 43 and note.

Green, Mr., clerk of the Courier, 568 and note.

Green, Joseph Henry, 605, 632 n.;
his eminence in the surgical profession, 679 n.;
C.’s amanuensis and collaborateur, 679 n.;
C. appoints him his literary executor, 679 n.;
his published works, 679 n., 680 n.;
his character and intellect, 680 n.;
his faithful friendship for C., 680 n.;
his Spiritual Philosophy, founded on the Teaching of S. T. Coleridge, 680 n.;
receives a visit from C. at St. Lawrence, near Maldon, 690-693;
753 n.;
letters from C., 669, 680, 688, 699, 704, 706, 726, 728, 751, 754, 767.

Green, Mrs. Joseph Henry, 691, 692, 699, 705.

Greenough, Mr., 458 and note.

Greta, the river, 339.

Greta Hall, near Keswick, C.’s life at, 335-444;
situation of, 335;
description of 391, 392;
C. urges Southey to make it his home, 391, 392, 394, 395;
Southey at first declines but subsequently accepts C.’s invitation to settle there, 395 n.;
Southey makes a visit there which proves permanent, 435;
460 n.;
sold by its owner in C.’s absence, 490, 491;
C.’s last visit to, 575 and note, 576-578;
724, 725.
See Keswick.

Grey, Mr., editor of the Morning Chronicle, 114.

“Grinning for joy,” 81 n.

Grisedale Tarn, 547.

Grose, Judge, 567 and note.

Grossness versus suggestiveness, 377.

Group of Englishmen, A, by Eliza Meteyard, 269 n., 308 n.

Growth of the Individual Mind, On the, C.’s extempore lecture, 680 and note, 681.

Gunning, Henry, his Reminiscences of Cambridge, 24 n.

Gwynne, General, K. L. D., 62.

Hæmony, Milton’s allegorical flower, 406, 407.

Hague, Charles, 50.

Hale, Sir Philip, a “titled Dogberry,” 232 n.

Hall, S. C., 257, 745 n.

Hamburg, 257, 259;
C.’s arrival at, 261;
268 n.

Hamilton, a Cambridge man at Göttingen, 281.

Hamilton, Lady, 637 and note.

Hamilton, Sir William Rowan, 759 and note, 760.

Hamlet, Notes on, 684 n.

Hancock’s house, 297.

Hangman and gallows in Germany, 294.

Hanover, 279, 280.

Happiness, 75 n.

Happy Warrior, The, by Wordsworth, the original of, 494 n.

Harding, Miss, sister of Mrs. Gillman, 703.

Harper’s Magazine, 570 n., 571 n.

Harris, Mr., 666.

Hart, Dick, 54.

Hart, Miss Jane, 7, 8.

Hart, Miss Sara, 8.

Hartley, David, 113, 169, 348, 351 n., 428.

Haunted Beach, The, by Mrs. Robinson, 322 n.;
C. struck with, 331, 332.

Hayes, Mary, 318 and note;
her Female Biography, 318 and note;
her correspondence with Lloyd, 322;
C.’s opinion of her intellect, 323.

Hazlitt, William, supposed to have written the Edinburgh Review criticism of Christabel, 669 and note.

Hebrew poetry richer in imagination than the Greek, 405, 406.

Heinse’s Ardinghello, 683 and note.

Helen, by Maria Edgeworth, 773, 774.

Helvellyn, 547.

Henley workhouse, C. nurses a fellow-dragoon in the, 58 and note.

Herald, Morning, its notice of C.’s tragedy, Remorse, 603.

Herbert, George, C.’s love for his poems, 694, 695;
his Temple, 694;
his Flower, 695.

Heretics of the first two Centuries after Christ, History of the, by Nathaniel Lardner, D. D., 330.

Herodotus, 738.

Hertford, C. a Blue-Coat boy at, 19 and note.

Hess, Jonas Lewis von, 555 and note.

Hessey, Mr., of Taylor and Hessey, publishers, 739.

Hexameters, parts of the Bible and Ossian written in slovenly, 398.

Heyne, Christian Gottlob, 279;
C. calls on, 280;
281.

Higginbottom, Nehemiah, a pseudonym of C.’s, 251 n.

Highgate, History of, by Lloyd, 572 n.

Highland Girl, To a, by Wordsworth, 549.

Highland lass, a beautiful, 432 and note, 459.

High Wycombe, 62-64.

Hill, Mrs. Herbert. See Southey, Bertha.

Hill, Thomas, 705 and note.

History of Highgate, by Lloyd, 572 n.

History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, by Thomas Clarkson, C.’s review of, 527 and note, 528-530, 535, 536.

History of the Heretics of the first two Centuries after Christ, by Nathaniel Lardner, D. D., 330.

History of the Levelling Principle, proposed, 323, 328 n., 330.

Hobbes, Thomas, 349, 350.

Holcroft, Mr., C.’s conversation on Pantisocracy with, 114, 115;
the high priest of atheism, 162.

Hold your mad hands!, a sonnet by Southey, 127 and note.

Holland, 751.

Holt, Mrs., 18.

Home-Sick, Written in Germany, quoted, 298.

Homesickness of C. in Germany, 265, 266, 272, 273, 278, 288, 289, 295, 296, 298.

Hood, Thomas, his Odes to Great People, 250 n.

Hope, an Allegorical Sketch, by Bowles, 179, 180.

Hopkinson, Lieutenant, 62.

Horace, Bentley’s Quarto Edition of, 68 and note.

Hospitality in poverty, 340.

Hour when we shall meet again, The, 157.

Howe, Admiral Lord, 262 and note.

Howe, Emanuel Scoope, second Viscount, 262 n.

Howell, Mr., of Covent Garden, 366 and note.

Howick, Lord, 507.

Howley, Miss, 739.

Huber’s Treatise on Ants, 712.

Hucks, J., accompanies C. on a tour in Wales, 74-81;
his Tour in North Wales, 74 n., 81 n.;
76, 77 and note, 81 and note, 306.

Hume, David, 307, 349, 350.

Hume, Joseph, M. P., a fermentive virus, 757.

Hungary, 329.

Hunt, Leigh, Autobiography of, 20 n., 41 n., 225 n., 455 n.

Hunter, John, 211.

Hurwitz, Hyman, 667 n.;
his Israel’s Lament, 681 n.

Hutchinson, George, 358 and note, 359 n., 360.

Hutchinson, Joanna, 359 n.

Hutchinson, John, of Penrith, 358 n.

Hutchinson, John, of the Middle Temple, 359 n.

Hutchinson, Mary, marries William Wordsworth, 359 n.;
367.

Hutchinson, Sarah, 359 n., 360, 362, 367, 393 n.;
her motherly care of Hartley C., 510;
511;
C.’s amanuensis, 536 n., 542 n.;
582, 587, 590 n.

Hutchinson, Thomas, of Gallow Hill, 359 n., 362.

Hutton, James, M. D., 153 and note;
his Investigation of the Principles of Knowledge, 167.

Hutton, Lawrence, 570 n.

Hutton Hall, near Penrith, 296.

Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni, origin of, 404 and 405 and note.

Ibi Hæc Incondita Solus, by George Coleridge, 43 n.

Idolatry of modern religion, the, 414, 415.

Illuminizing, 323, 324.

Illustrated London News, The, 258, 453 n., 497 n., 768 n.

Imagination, education of the, 16, 17.

Imitated from the Welsh (a song), 112 and note, 113.

Imitations from the Modern Latin Poets, 67 n., 122.

Impersonality of the Deity, 444.

Indolence, a vice of powerful venom, 103, 104.

Infant, the death of an, 282-287.

Infant, who died before its Christening, On an, 287.

Ingratitude, C. complains of, 627-631.

Insincerity, a virtue, 161.

Instinct, definition of, 712.

In the Pass of Killicranky, by Wordsworth, 458.

Ireland, Account of, by Edward Wakefield, 638.

Ireland, View of the State of, by Edmund Spenser, 638 n.

Irving, Rev. Edward, 723;
a great orator, 726;
on Southey and Byron, 726;
741, 742, 744, 748, 752.

Isaiah, 200.

Israel’s Lament, by Hyman Hurwitz, C. translates, 681 and note.

Jackson, Mr., owner of Greta Hall, 335, 368, 391, 392, 394, 395, 434, 460 and note, 461;
godfather to Hartley C., 461 n.;
sells Greta Hall, 491;
Hartley C.’s attachment for, 510.

Jackson, William, 309 and notes.

Jackstraws, 462, 468.

Jacobi, Heinrich Freidrich, 683.

Jacobinism in England, 642.

Jardine, Rev. David, 139 and note.

Jasper, by Mrs. Robinson, 322 n.

Jeffrey, Francis (afterwards Lord), 453 n., 521 n.;
C. accuses him of being unwarrantably severe on him, 527;
536 n., 538 n.;
C.’s accusation of personal and ungenerous animosity against himself and his reply thereto, 669 and note, 670;
735;
his attitude toward Wordsworth’s poetry, 742;
letters from C., 527, 528, 534.
See Edinburgh Review.

Jerdan, Mr., of Michael’s Grove, Brompton, 727.

Jesus College, C.’s life at, 22-57, 70-72, 81-129.

Jews in a German inn, 280.

Joan of Arc, by Southey, 141, 149, 178 and note, 179;
Cottle sells the copyright to Longman, 319.

John of Milan, 566 n.

Johnson, J., the bookseller, lends C. £30, 261;
publishes Fears in Solitude, for C., 261 and notes, 318;
321.

Johnson, Dr. Samuel, on the condition of the mind during stage representations, 663.

Johnston, Lady, 731.

Johnston, Sir Alexander, 730 and note;
C.’s impressions of, 731.

Josephus, 407.

Kant, Immanuel, 204 n., 351 n.;
C.’s opinion of the philosophy of, 681, 682;
his Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 681, 682 and note;
his Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, 682;
valued by C. more as a logician than as a metaphysician, 735;
his Critique of the Pure Reason, 735.

Keats, John, 764 n.

Keenan, Mr., 309.

Keenan, Mrs., 309 and note.

Kehama, The Curse of, by Southey, 684.

Kempsford, Gloucestershire, 267 n.

Kendal, 447, 451, 452, 535, 575.
See Grasmere.

Kendall, Mr., a poet, 306.

Kennard, Adam Steinmetz, 762 n.;
letter from C., 775.

Kennard, John Peirse, 762 n.;
letter from C., 772.

Kenyon, Mrs., 639, 640.

Kenyon, John, 639 n.;
letter from C., 639.

Keswick, 174 n.;
C. passes through, during his first tour in the Lake Country, 312 n.;
a Druidical circle near, 312 n.;
C.’s house at, 335;
climate of, 361;
405 n., 530, 535, 724, 725.
See Greta Hall.

Keswick, the lake of, 335.

Keswick, the vale of, 312 n., 313 n.;
its beauties, 410, 411.

Kielmansegge, Baron, and his daughter, Mary Sophia, 263 n.

Kilmansig, Countess, C. becomes acquainted with, 262, 263.

King, Mr., 183, 185, 186.

King, Mrs., 183.

Kingsley, Rev. Charles, 771 n.

Kingston, Duchess of, her masquerade costume, 237.

Kinnaird, Douglas, 666, 667.

Kirkstone Pass, a storm in, 418-420.

Kisses, 54 n.

Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 257;
his Messias, 372, 373.

Knecht, Rupert, 289 n., 290, 291.

Knight, Rev. William Angus, LL.D., his Life of William Wordsworth, 164 n., 220 n., 447 n., 585 n., 591 n., 596 n., 599 n., 600 n., 733 n., 759 n.

Kosciusko, C.’s sonnet to, 116 n., 117.

Kotzebue’s Count Benyowski, or the Conspiracy of Kamtschatka, a Tragi-comedy, 236 and note.

Kubla Khan, when written, 245 n.;
437 n.

Kyle, John, the Man of Ross, 77, 651 n.

Lake Bassenthwaite, 335, 376 n.;
sunset over, 384.

Lake Country, the, C. makes a tour of, 312 n., 313;
another tour of, 393 and note, 394;
C.’s last visit to, 575 n.
See Grasmere, Greta Hall, Kendal, Keswick.

Lalla Rookh, by Moore, 672.

Lamb, C., To, 128 and note.

Lamb, Charles, love of Woolman’s Journal, 4 n.;
visit to Nether Stowey, 10 n.;
his Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago, 20 n.;
a man of uncommon genius, 111;
writes four lines of a sonnet for C., 111, 112 and note;
and his sister, 127, 128;
C.’s lines to, 128 and note;
163 n.;
correspondence with C. after his (Lamb’s) mother’s tragic death, 171 and note;
182;
extract from a letter to C., 197 n.;
206 n.;
his Grandame, 206 n.;
C.’s poem on Burns addressed to, 206 and note, 207;
extract from a letter to C., 223 n.;
visits C. at Nether Stowey, 224 and note, 225-227;
temporary estrangement from C., 249-253;
his relations to the quarrel between C. and Southey, 304, 312, 320 n.;
visits C. at Greta Hall with his sister, 396 n.;
a Latin letter from, 400 n.;
405 n., 421, 422, 460 n., 474;
his Recollections of a Late Royal Academician, 572 n.;
his connection with the reconciliation of C. and Wordsworth, 586-588, 594;
on William Blake’s paintings, engravings, and poems, 686 n.;
704;
his Superannuated Man, 740;
744;
his acquaintance with George Dyer, 748 n.;
751 n., 760;
letter of condolence from C., 171;
other letters from C., 249, 586.

Lamb, Charles, Letters of, 164 n., 171 n., 197 n., 396 n., 400 n., 465 n., 466 n., 686 n., 748 n.

Lamb’s Prose Works, 4 n., 20 n., 25 n., 41 n.

Lamb, Mary, 127, 128, 226 n.;
visits the Coleridges at Greta Hall with her brother Charles, 396 n.;
becomes worse and is taken to a private madhouse, 422;
465;
learns from C. of his quarrel with Wordsworth, 590, 591;
endeavors to bring about a reconciliation between C. and Wordsworth, 594;
704.

Lampedusa, island, essay on, 495 and note.

Landlord at Keswick, C.’s, 335.
See Jackson, Mr.

Lardner, Nathaniel, D. D., his Letter on the Logos, 157;
his History of the Heretics of the first two Centuries after Christ, 330;
on a passage in Josephus, 407.

Latin essay by C., 29 n.

Laudanum, used by C. in an attack of neuralgia, 173 and note, 174 and note, 175-177;
193, 240, 617, 659.
See Opium.

Lauderdale, James Maitland, Earl of, 689 and note.

Law, human as distinguished from divine, 635, 636.

Lawrence, Miss, governess in the family of Dr. Peter Crompton, 758 n.;
letter from C., 758.

Lawrence, William, 711 n.

Lawson, Sir Gilford, 270;
C. has free access to his library, 336;
392.

Lay of the Last Minstrel, The, by Scott, 523.

Lay Sermon, the second, 669.

Leach, William Elford, C. meets, 711 and note.

Lecky, G. F., British Consul at Syracuse, 458;
C. entertained by, 485 n.

Lectures, C.’s at the Royal Institution, 506 n., 507, 508, 511, 515, 516, 522, 525;
at the rooms of the London Philosophical Society, 574 and note, 575 and note;
a proposed course at Liverpool, 578;
preparations for another course in London, 579, 580, 582, 585;
at Willis’s Rooms on the Drama, 595 and note, 596, 597, 599;
602, 604;
an extempore lecture On the Growth of the Individual Mind, at the rooms of the London Philosophical Society, 680 and note, 681;
regarded as a means of livelihood, 694;
on the History of Philosophy, delivered at the Crown and Anchor, Strand, 698 and note.

Lectures on Shakespeare, 575 n.

Lectures on Shakespeare and Other Dramatists, 756 n.

Leghorn, 498, 499 and note, 500.

Le Grice, Charles Valentine, 23, 24;
his Tineum, 111 and note;
225 and note, 325.

Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Baron von, 280, 360, 735.

Leighton, Robert, Archbishop of Glasgow, his genius and character, 717, 718;
his orthodoxy, 719;
C. proposes to compile a volume of selections from his writings, 719, 720;
C. at work on the compilation, which, together with his own comment and corollaries, is finally published as Aids to Reflection, 734 and note.

Leslie, Charles Robert, 695 and note;
his pencil sketch of C., 695 n.;
introduces a portrait of C. into an illustration for The Antiquary, 736 and note.

Lessing, Life of, C. proposes to write, 270;
321, 323, 338.

Letters, C.’s reluctance to open and answer, 534.

Letters from the Lake Poets, 25 n., 86 n., 267 n., 366 n., 369 n., 527 n., 534 n., 542 n., 543 n., 705 n.

Letter smuggling, 459.

Letters on the Spaniards, 629 and note.

Letter to a Noble Lord, by Edmund Burke, 157 and note.

Leviathan, the man-of-war, 467;
a majestic and beautiful creature, 471, 472;
477.

Lewis Monk, his play, Castle Spectre, 236 and note, 237, 238, 626.

Liberty, the Progress of, 206.

Life and death, meditations on, 283-287.

Life-masks of C., 570 and note.

Lime-Tree Bower my Prison, this, 225 and note, 226 and notes, 227, 228 n.

Lines on a Friend who died of a Frenzy Fever, 98 and note, 103 n., 106 and note.

Lines to a Friend, 8 n.

Lippincott’s Magazine, 674 n.

Lisbon, the Rock of, 473.

Literary Life. See Biographia Literaria.

Literary Remains, 684 n., 740 n., 756 n., 761 n.

Literature, a proposed History of British, 425-427, 429, 430.

Literature as a profession, C.’s opinion of, 191, 192.

Live nits, 360.

Liverpool, 578.

Liverpool, Lord, 665, 674.

Llandovery, 411.

Llanfyllin, 79.

Llangollen, 80.

Llangunnog, 79.

Lloyd, Mr., father of Charles, 168, 186.

Lloyd, Charles, and Woolman’s Journal, 4 n.;
goes to live with C., 168-170;
character and genius of, 169, 170;
184, 189, 190, 192, 205, 206;
his Poems on the Death of Priscilla Farmer, 206 n.;
207 n., 208 n.;
with C. at Nether Stowey, 213;
238;
a serious quarrel with C., 238, 245 n., 246, 249-253;
his Edmund Oliver drawn from C.’s life, 252 and note;
his relations to the quarrel between C. and Southey, 304;
reading Greek with Christopher Wordsworth, 311;
unworthy of confidence, 311, 312;
his Edmund Oliver, 311;
his moral sense warped, 322, 323;
settles at Ambleside, 344;
C. spends a night with him at Bratha, 394;
563;
his History of Highgate, 572 n., 578.

Llyswen, 234 n., 235 n.

Loch Katrine, 431, 432 and note, 433.

Loch Lomond, 431, 432 n., 433, 440.

Locke, John, C.’s opinion of his philosophy, 349-351, 648;
713.

Lockhart, Mr., 756.

Lodore, the waterfall of, 335, 408.

Lodore mountains, the, 370.

Logic, The Elements of, 753 n.

Logic, The History of, 753 n.

Logos, Letter on the, by Dr. Nathaniel Lardner, 157.

London, Bishop of, 739;
his favourable opinion of Aids to Reflection, 741.

London Philosophical Society, C.’s lectures at the rooms of, 574 and note, 575 and note, 680 n.

Longman, Mr., the publisher, 319, 321;
on anonymous publications, 324, 325;
328, 329, 341, 349, 357;
loses money on C.’s translation of Wallenstein, 403;
593.

Lonsdale, Lord, 538 n., 550, 733 n.

Losh, James, 219 and note.

Louis XVI., the death of, 219 and note.

Love, George Dawe engaged on a picture to illustrate C.’s poem, 573.

Love and the Female Character, C.’s lecture, 574 n., 575 and note.

Lovell, Robert, 75;
C.’s opinion of his poems, 110;
114;
his Farmhouse, 115, 121, 122, 139, 147, 150;
dies, 159 n.;
317 n.

Lovell, Robert, and Robert Southey of Balliol College, Bath, Poems by, 107 n.

Lovell, Mrs. Robert (Mary Fricker), 122, 159 and note, 485.

Lover’s Complaint to his Mistress, A, 36.

Low was our pretty Cot, C.’s opinion of, 224.

Lubec, 274, 275.

Lucretius, his philosophy and his poetry, 648.

Luff, Captain, 369 and note, 547.

Luise, ein ländliches Gedicht in drei Idyllen, by Johann Heinrich Voss, quotation from, 203 n.;
an emphatically original poem, 625;
627.

Lüneburg, 278.

Lushington, Mr., 101.

Luss, 431.

Lycon, Ode to, by Robert Southey, 107 n., 108.

Lyrical Ballads, by Coleridge and Wordsworth, 336, 337, 341, 350 and note, 387, 607, 678.

Macaulay, Alexander, death of, 491.

Mackintosh, Sir James, his rejected offer to procure a place for C. under himself in India, 454, 455;
C.’s dislike and distrust of, 454 n., 455 n.;
596.

Macklin, Harriet, 751 and note, 764.

Madeira, 442, 451, 452.

Madoc, by Southey, C. urges its completion and publication, 314, 467;
357;
C.’s enthusiasm for, 388, 489, 490;
a divine passage of, 463 and note.

Mad Ox, The, 219 n., 327.

Magee, William, D. D., 761 n.

Magnum Opus. See Christianity, the one true Philosophy.

Maid of Orleans, 239.

Malta, C. plans a trip to, 457, 458;
the voyage to, 469-481;
sojourn at, 481-484, 487-497;
army affairs at, 554, 555.

Maltese, the, 483 and note, 484 and note.

Maltese, Regiment, the, 554, 555.

Malvern Hills, by Joseph Cottle, 358.

Manchester Massacre, the, 702 n.

Manchineel, 223 n.

Marburg, 291.

Margarot, 166, 167 n.

Markes, Rev. Mr., 310.

Marriage as a means of ensuring the nature and education of children, 216, 217.

Marsh, Herbert, Bishop of Peterborough, his lecture on the authenticity and credibility of the books collected in the New Testament, 707, 708.

Martin, Rev. H., 74 n., 81 n.

Mary, the Maid of the Inn, by Southey, 223.

Massena, Marshal, defeats the Russians at Zurich, 308 and note.

Masy, Mr., 40.

Mathews, Charles, C. hears and sees his entertainment, At Home, 704, 705;
letter from C., 621.

Mattathias, The Death of, by Robert Southey, 108 and note.

Maurice, Rev. John Frederick Dennison, 771 n.

Maxwell, Captain, of the Royal Artillery, 493, 495, 496.

McKinnon, General, 309 n.

Medea, a subject for a tragedy, 399.

Meditation, C.’s habits of, 658.

Medwin, Capt. Thomas, his Conversations of Lord Byron, 735 and note.

Meerschaum pipes, 277.

Melancholy, a Fragment, 396 and note, 397.

Memory of childhood in old age, 428.

Mendelssohn, Moses, 203 n., 204 n.

Men of the Time, 317 n.

Merry, Robert, 86 n.

Messina, 485, 486.

Metaphysics, 102, 347-352;
C. proposes to write a book on Locke, Hobbes, and Hume, 349, 350;
in poetry, 372;
effect of the study of, 388;
C.’s projected great work on, 632 and note, 633;
of the German philosophers, 681-683, 735;
712, 713.
See Christianity, the One True Philosophy, Philosophy, Religion.

Meteyard, Eliza, her Group of Englishmen, 269 n., 308 n.

Method, Essay on the Science of, 681 and note.

Methuen, Rev. T. A., 652 and note.

Microcosm, 43 and note.

Middleton, H. F. (afterwards Bishop of Calcutta), 23, 25, 32, 33.

Milman, Henry Hart, 737 and note.

Milton, John, 164, 197 and note;
a sublimer poet than Homer or Virgil, 199, 200;
the imagery in Paradise Lost borrowed from the Scriptures, 199, 200;
his Accidence, 331;
on poetry, 387;
his platonizing spirit, 406, 407;
678, 734.

Milton, Lord, 567 and note.

Mind versus Nature, in youth and later life, 742, 743.

Minor Poems, 317 n.

Miscellanies, Æsthetic and Literary, 711 n.

Miss Rosamond, by Southey, 108 and note.

Mitford, Mary Russell, 63 n.

Molly, 11.

Monarchy likened to a cockatrice, 73.

Monday’s Beard, On Mrs., 9 n.

Money, Rev. William, 651 n.;
letter from C., 651.

Monody on the Death of Chatterton, 110 n., 158 n., 620 n.

Monologue to a Young Jackass in Jesus Piece, 119 n.

Monopolists, 335 n.

Montagu, Basil, 363 n., 511 n.;
causes a misunderstanding between C. and Wordsworth, 578, 586-591, 593, 599, 612;
endeavours to have an associateship of the Royal Society of Literature conferred on C., 726, 727;
his efforts successful, 728;
749.

Montagu, Mrs. Basil, her connection with the quarrel between C. and Wordsworth, 588, 589, 591, 599.

Monthly Magazine, the, 179 and note, 185, 197, 215, 251 n., 310, 317.

Moore, Thomas, his Lalla Rookh, 672;
his misuse of the possessive case, 672.

Moors, C.’s opinion of, 478.

Morality and religion, 676.

Moreau, Jean Victor, 449 and note.

Morgan, Mrs., 145, 148.

Morgan, John James, 524, 526;
a faithful and zealous friend, 580;
C. confides the news of his quarrel with Wordsworth to, 591, 592;
596, 650, 665;
letter from C., 575.

Morgan, Mrs. John James, C.’s affection for, 565;
578, 600, 618, 650, 722 n.;
letter from C., 524.

Morgan family, the (J. J. Morgan, his wife, and his wife’s sister, Miss Charlotte Brent), C.’s feelings of affection, esteem, and gratitude towards, 519, 520, 524-526, 565;
C. visits, 566-575 and note, 579-622;
585;
C. confides the news of his quarrel with Wordsworth to, 591, 592;
C. regards as his saviours, 592;
600 n.;
with C. at Calne, 641-653;
their faithful devotion to C., 657, 722 n.;
letters from C., 519, 524, 564.

Mortimer, John Hamilton, 373 and note.

Motion of Contentment, by Archdeacon Paley, 47.

Motley, J. C., 467-469, 475.

Mountains, of Portugal, 470, 473;
about Gibraltar, 478.

Mumps, the, 545 and note.

Murray, John, 581;
proposes to publish a translation of Faust, 624-626;
his connection with the publication of Zapolya, 666 and note, 667-669;
offers C. two hundred guineas for a volume of specimens of Rabbinical wisdom, 667 n.;
699 n.;
proposal from C. to compile a volume of selections from Archbishop Leighton, 717-720;
723;
his proposal to publish an edition of C.’s poems, 787;
letters from C., 624, 665, 717.

Murray, John, Memoirs of, 624 n., 666 n.

Music, 49.

Myrtle, praise of the, 745, 746.

Mythology, Greek and Roman, contrasted with Christianity, 199, 200.

Nanny, 260, 295.

Naples, 486, 502.

Napoleon, 308, 327 n., 329 and note;
his animosity against C., 498 n.;
530 n.;
C.’s cartoon and lines on, 642.

Napoleon Bonaparte, Life of, by Sir Walter Scott, 174 n.

Natural Theology, by William Paley, 424 n., 425 n.

Nature, her influence on the passions, 243, 244;
Mind and, two rival artists, 742, 743.

Natur-philosophen, C. on the, 682, 683.

Navigation and Discovery, The Spirit of, by William Lisle Bowles, 403 and note.

Necessitarianism, the sophistry of, 454.

Neighbours, 186.

Nelson, Lady, 637.

Nelson, Lord, 637 and note.

Nesbitt, Fanny, C.’s poem to, 56, 57.

Netherlands, the, 751.

Nether Stowey, 165 and note;
C. proposes to move to, 184-194;
arrangements for moving to, 209;
settled at, 213;
C.’s description of his place at, 213;
Thelwall urged not to settle at, 232-234;
the curate-in-charge of, 267 n.;
297, 325, 366;
C.’s last visit to, 405 n.;
497 n.

Neuralgia, a severe attack of, 173-177.

Newcome’s (Mr.) School, 7, 25 n.

Newlands, 393 and note, 411, 725.

New Monthly Magazine, 257.

Newspapers, freshness necessary for, 568.

New Testament, the, Bishop March’s lecture on the authenticity and credibility of the books collected in, 707, 708.

Newton, Mr., 48.

Newton, Mrs., sister of Thomas Chatterton, 221, 222.

Newton, Sir Isaac, 352.

Nightingale, The, a Conversational Poem, 296 n.

Ninathoma, The Complaint of, 51.

Nixon, Miss Eliza, unpublished lines of C. to, 773 n., 774 n.;
letter from C., 773.

Nobs, Dr. Daniel Dove’s horse, in The Doctor, 583 and note, 584.

No more the visionary soul shall dwell, 109 and note, 208 n.

Nordhausen, 273.

Northcote, Sir Stafford, 15 and note.

Northmore, Thomas, C. dines with, 306, 307;
an offensive character to the aristocrats, 310.

North Wales, C.’s tour of, 72-81.

Notes on Hamlet, 684 n.

Notes on Noble’s Appeal, 684 n.

Notes Theological and Political, 684 n., 761 n.

Nottingham, 153, 154, 216.

Novi, Suwarrow’s victory at, 307 and note.

Nuremberg, 555.

Objective, different meanings of the term, 755.

Observations on Egypt, 486 n.

Ocean, the, by night, 260.

Ode in the manner of Anacreon, An, 35.

Ode on the Poetical Character, by William Collins, 196.

Odes to Great People, by Thomas Hood, 250 n.

Ode to Dejection, 378 and note, 379 and note, 380-384, 405 n.

Ode to Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, 320 and note, 330.

Ode to Lycon, by Robert Southey, 107 n., 108.

Ode to Romance, by Robert Southey, 107 and note.

Ode to the Departing Year, 212 n.;
C.’s reply to Thelwall’s criticisms on, 218 and note;
221.

Ode to the Duchess, 320 and note, 330.

O gentle look, that didst my soul beguile, a sonnet, 111, 112 and note.

Ogle, Captain, 63 and note.

Ogle, Lieutenant, 374 n.

Ogle, Dr. Newton, Dean of Westminster, his Latin Iambics, 374 and note.

Oken, Lorenz, his Natural History, 736.

Old Man in the Snow, 110 and note.

Omniana, by C. and Southey, 9 n., 554 n., 718 n.

On a Discovery made too late, 92 and note, 123 n.

On a late Connubial Rupture, 179 n.

On an Infant who died before its Christening, 287.

Once a Jacobin, always a Jacobin, 414.

On Revisiting the Sea-Shore, 361 n.

Onstel, 97 n.

On the Slave Trade, 43 and note.

Opium, C.’s early use of, and beginning of the habit, 173 and note, 174 and note, 175;
first recourse to it for the relief of mental distress, 245 n.;
daily quantity reduced, 413;
regarded as less harmful than other stimulants, 413;
420;
its use discontinued for a time, 434, 435;
anguish and remorse from its abuse, 616-621, 623, 624;
in order to free himself from the slavery, C. arranges to live with Mr. James Gillman as a patient, 657-659;
a final effort to give up the use of it altogether, 760 and note;
the habit regulated and brought under control, but never entirely done away with, 760 n., 761 n.

Oporto, seen from the sea, 469, 470.

Orestes, by William Sotheby, 402, 409, 410.

Original Sin, C. a believer in, 242.

Original Sin, Letter on, by Jeremy Taylor, 640.

Origine de tous les Cultes, ou Religion universelle, by Charles François Dupuis, 181 and note.

Origin, Nature, and Object of the New System of Education, by Andrew Bell, D. D., 581 and note, 582.

Osorio, a tragedy, 10 n., 229 and note, 231, 284 n., 603 n.
See Remorse.

Ossian, hexameters in, 398.

Otter, the river, 14, 15.

Ottery St. Mary, 6-8, 305 n.;
C. wished by his family to settle at, 325;
C.’s last visit to, 405 n.;
a proposed visit to, 512, 513;
745 n.

Owen, William, 425 n.

O what a loud and fearful shriek was there, a sonnet, 116 n., 117.

Owls, care of, in Germany, 293.

Oxford University, C.’s feeling towards, 45, 72.

Paignton, 305 n.

Pain, a sonnet, 174 n.

Pain, C. interested in, 341.

Pains of Sleep, The, 435-437 and note.

Paley, William, Archdeacon of Carlisle, his Motives of Contentment, 47;
his Natural Theology, 424 and note;
713.

Palm, John Philip, his pamphlet reflecting on Napoleon leads to his trial and execution, 530 and note;
C. translates his pamphlet, 530.

Pantisocracy, 73, 79, 81, 82, 88-91, 101-103, 109 n., 121, 122, 134, 135, 138-141, 143-147, 149, 317 n., 748 n.

Paradise Lost, by Milton, its imagery borrowed from the Scriptures, 199, 200.

Parasite, a, 705.

Parliamentary Reform, essay on, 567.

Parndon House, 506 n., 507, 508.

Parret, the river, 165.

Parties, political, in England, 242.

Pasquin, Antony, 603 and note.

Patience, 203 and note.

Patteson, Hon. Mr. Justice, 726 n.

Paul, Charles Kegan, his William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, 161 n., 324 n., 465 n.

Pauper’s Funeral, by Robert Southey, 108 and note, 109.

Peace and Union, by William Friend, 24 n.

Pearce, Dr., Master of Jesus College, 23, 24, 65, 70-72.

Pedlar, The, former title of Wordsworth’s Excursion, 337 and note.

Peel, Sir Robert, 689 n.

Penche, M. de la, 49.

Penmaen Mawr, C.’s ascent of, 81 n.

Penn, William, 539.

Pennington, W., 541, 542 n., 544.

Penrith, 420, 421, 547, 548, 575 n.

Penruddock, 420, 421.

Perceval, Rt. Hon. Spencer, assassination of, 597, 598 and note.

Perdita, see Robinson, Mrs. Mary.

Peripatetic, The, or Sketches of the Heart, of Nature, and of Society, by John Thelwall, 166 and note.

Perry, James, 114.

Perspiration. A Travelling Eclogue, 73.

Peterloo, 702 n.

Philip Van Artevelde, by Sir Henry Taylor, 774 and note.

Phillips, Elizabeth (C.’s half sister), 54 n.

Phillips, Sir Richard, 317 and note, 325, 327.

Phillips, Thomas, R. A., 699;
his two portraits of C., 699 and note, 700, 740;
his portrait of William Hart Coleridge, Bishop of Barbadoes and the Leeward Islands, 740 and note.

Philological Museum, 733 n.

Philosophy, 648-650;
German, 681-683
C.’s lectures on the History of, 698 and note.
See Metaphysics and Religion.

Pickering, W., 579 n.

Picture, The: or The Lover’s Resolution, 405 n., 620 n.

Pinney, Mr., of Bristol, 163 n.;
his estate in the West Indies, 360, 361.

Pipes, meerschaum, 277.

Pisa, C.’s stay at, 499 n., 500 n.;
his account of, 500 n.

Pitt, Rt. Hon. William, C.’s report in the Morning Post of his speech on the continuance of the war with France, 327 and note;
proposed articles on, 505;
C.’s detestation of, 535 and note;
629 and note.

Pixies’ Parlour, The, 222.

Plampin, J., 70 and note.

Plato, his gorgeous nonsense, 211;
his theology, 406.

Playing-cards, German, 263.

Pleasure, intoxicating power of, 370.

Plinlimmon, C.’s ascent of, 81 n.

Plot Discovered, The, 156 and note.

Poems by Robert Lovell and Robert Southey of Balliol College, Bath, 107 n.

Poems and fragments of poems introduced by C. into his letters, 28, 35, 36, 51, 52, 54, 56, 73, 75, 77, 83, 92, 94, 98, 100, 111-113, 207, 212, 225, 355, 379-384, 388, 389, 397, 404, 412, 435-437, 553, 609, 620, 642, 646, 702, 770, 771.

Poems on the Death of Priscilla Farmer, by Charles Lloyd, 206 and note.

Poetical Character, Ode on the, by Collins, 196.

Poetry, Concerning, a proposed book, 347, 386, 387.

Poetry, C. proposes to write an essay on, 338, 347, 386, 387;
Greek and Hebrew, 405, 406.

Poetry, C.’s, not obscure or mystical, 194, 195.

Poland, 329.

Political parties in England, 242.

Politics, 240-243, 546, 550, 553, 574, 702, 712, 713, 757.
See Democracy, Pantisocracy, Republicanism.

Poole, Richard, 249.

Poole, Mrs. Richard, 248.

Poole, Thomas, contributes to The Watchman, 155;
collects a testimonial in the form of an annuity of £35 or £40 for C., 158 n.;
C.’s gratitude, 158, 159;
C. proposes to visit, 159;
C.’s affection for, 168, 210, 258, 609, 610, 753;
C. proposes to visit him with Charles Lloyd, 170;
C.’s happiness at the prospect of living near, 173;
his connection with C.’s removal to Nether Stowey, 183-193, 208-210;
213, 219, 220;
his opinion of Wordsworth, 221;
232 and note, 233, 239, 257, 258, 260, 282 n., 289;
effects a reconciliation between C. and Southey, 390;
308, 319;
C.’s reasons for not naming his third son after, 344;
death of his mother, 364;
396, 437 n.;
nobly employed, 453;
his rectitude and simplicity of heart, 454;
456 n.;
his forgetfulness, 460;
515, 523;
extract from a letter from C., 533 n.;
a visit to Grasmere proposed, 545;
his narrative of John Walford, 553 and note;
C. complains of unkindness from, 609, 610;
639 n., 657;
meets C. at Samuel Purkis’s, Brentford, 673;
extract from a letter from C. about Samuel Purkis, 673 n.;
autobiographical letters from C., 3-18;
other letters from C., 136, 155, 158, 168, 172, 176, 183-187, 208, 248, 249, 258, 267, 282, 305, 335, 343, 348, 350, 364, 452, 454, 541, 544, 550, 556, 609, 673, 753.

Poole, Thomas, and his Friends, by Mrs. Henry Sandford, 158 n., 165 n., 170 n., 183 n., 232 n., 234 n., 258, 267 n., 282 n., 391 n., 335 n., 456 n., 533 n., 553 n., 673 n., 676 n.

Poole, William, 176.

Pope, the, C. leaves Rome at a warning from, 498 n.

Pope, Alexander, his Essay on Man, 648;
a favorite walk of, 671.

Pople, Mr., publisher of C.’s tragedy, Remorse, 602.

Porson, Mr., 114, 115.

Portinscale, 393 and note.

Portraits of C., crayon sketch by Dawe, 572 and note;
full-length portrait by Allston begun at Rome, 572 and note;
portrait by Allston taken at Bristol, 572 n.;
pencil sketch by Leslie, 695 n.;
two portraits by Thomas Phillips, 699 and note, 700, 740;
Wyville’s proofs, 770.

Portugal, C. on Southey’s proposed history of, 387, 388, 423;
the coast of, 469-471, 473.

Possessive case, Moore’s misuse of the, 672.

Post, Morning, 310;
C. writing for, 320 and note, 324, 326, 327 and note, 329 and note;
331, 335 n., 337, 376, 378 n., 379 n., 398, 404 n., 405, 414, 423, 455 n.;
Napoleon’s animosity aroused by C.’s articles in, 498 n.;
its notice of C.’s tragedy, Remorse, 603 n.

Postage, rates too high, 345.

Posthumous Fame, 29 n.

Potter, Mr., 97 and note, 106.

Poverty, in England, 353, 354;
blessings of, 364.

Pratt, 321.

Prelude, The, by Wordsworth, a reference to C. in, 486 n.;
C.’s lines To William Wordsworth after hearing him recite, 641, 644, 646, 647 and note;
C.’s admiration of, 645, 647 n.

Pride, 149.

Priestley, Joseph, C.’s sonnet to, 116 and note;
his doctrine as to the future existence of infants, 286.

Progress of Liberty, The, 296.

Prometheus of Æschylus, Essay on the, 740 and note.

Property, to be modified by the predominance of intellect, 323.

Pseudonym, Ἔστησε, 398;
its meaning, 407 and note, 408.

Public Characters for 1799-1800, published by Richard Phillips, 317 n.

Puff and Slander, projected satires, 630 and notes, 631 n.

Purkis, Samuel, 326, 673 n.

Quack medicine, a German, 264.

Quaker Family, Records of a, by Anne Ogden Boyce, 538 n.

Quaker girl, inelegant remark of a little, 362, 368.

Quakerism, 415;
C.’s belief in the essentials of, 539-541;
C.’s definition of, 556.

Quakers, as subscribers to The Friend, 556, 557.

Quakers and Unitarians, the only Christians, 415.

Quantocks, the, 405 n.

Quarterly Review, The, 606;
its review of The Letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton, 637 and note, 667;
reëchoes C.’s praise of Cary’s Dante, 677 n.;
its attitude towards C., 697, 723;
John Taylor Coleridge editor of, 736 and notes, 737.

Rabbinical Tales, 667 and note, 669.

Racedown, C.’s visit to Wordsworth at, 163 n., 220 and note, 221.

Race of Banquo, The, by Southey, 92 and note.

Rae, Mr., an actor, 611, 667.

Rainbow, The, by Southey, 108 and note.

Ramsgate, 700, 722, 729-731, 742-744.

Ratzeburg, 257;
C.’s stay in, 262-278;
the Amtmann of, 264, 268, 271;
description of, 273-277;
C. leaves, 278;
292-294.

“Raw Head” and “Bloody Bones,” 45.

Reading, see Books.

Reading, Berkshire, 66, 67.

Reason and understanding, the distinction between, 712, 713.

Recluse, The, a projected poem by Wordsworth of which The Excursion (q. v.) was to form the second part and to which The Prelude (q. v.) was to be an introduction, C.’s hopes for, 646, 647 and note, 648-650.

Recollections of a Late Royal Academician, by Charles Lamb, 572 n.

Records of a Quaker Family, by Anne Ogden Boyce, 538 n.

Redcliff, 144.

Redcliff Hill, 154.

Reflection, Aids to, 688 n.

Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement, 606 n.

Reform Bill, 760, 762.

Reich, Dr., 734, 736.

Rejected Addresses, by Horace and James Smith, 606.

Religion, beliefs and doubts of C. in regard to, 64, 68, 69, 88, 105, 106, 127, 135, 152, 153, 159-161, 167, 171, 172, 198-205, 210, 211, 228, 229, 235 n., 242, 247, 248, 285, 286, 342, 364, 365, 407, 414, 415, 444, 538-541, 617-620, 624, 676, 688, 694, 706-712, 746-748, 750, 754, 758-760, 762, 763, 771, 775, 776.

Religious Musings, 239.

Reminiscences of Cambridge, by Henry Gunning, 24 n., 363 n.

Reminiscences of Coleridge and Southey, by Cottle, 268 n., 269 n., 417, 456 n., 617 n.

Remorse, C.’s definition of, 607.

Remorse, A Tragedy (Osorio rewritten), rehearsal of, 600;
has a brief spell of success, 600 n., 602, 604, 610, 611;
business arrangements as to its publication, 602;
press notices of, 603 and note, 604;
William Gifford’s criticism of, 605;
the underlying principle of the plot of, 607, 608;
wretchedly acted, 608, 611;
metres of, 608;
lack of pathos in, 608;
plagiarisms in, 608;
labors occasioned to C. by its production and success, 610;
financial success of, 611;
Quarterly Review’s criticism of, 630;
696.

Repentance preached by the Christian religion, 201.

Reporting the debates for the Morning Post, 324, 326, 327.

Republicanism, 72, 79-81, 243.
See Democracy, Pantisocracy.

Retrospect, The, by Robert Southey, 107 and note.

Revelation, 676.

Reynell, Richard, 497 and note.

Rheumatism, C.’s sufferings from, 174 n., 193, 209, 307, 308, 432, 433.

Rhine, the, 751.

Richards, George, 41 and note.

Richardson, Mrs., 145.

Richter, Jean Paul, his Vorschule der Aisthetik, 683 and note.

Rickman, John, 456 n., 459, 462, 542, 599.

Ridgeway and Symonds, publishers, 638 n.

Robbers, The, by Schiller, 96 and note, 97, 221.

Roberts, Margaret, 358 n.

Robespierre, Maximilian Marie Isidore, 203 n., 329 n.

Robespierre, The Fall of, 85 and note, 87, 93, 104 and notes.

Robinson, Frederick John (afterwards Earl of Ripon), his Corn Bill, 643 and note.

Robinson, Henry Crabb, 225 n., 593, 599, 670 n.;
in old age, 671 n.;
reads William Blake’s poems to Wordsworth, 686 n.;
extract from a letter from C. to, 689 n.;
his Diary, 225 n., 575 n., 591 n., 595 n., 686 n., 689 n.;
letter from C., 671.

Robinson, Mrs. Mary (“Perdita”), contributes poems to the Annual Anthology, 322 and note;
her Haunted Beach, 331, 332;
her ear for metre, 332.

Roman Catholicism in Germany, 291, 292.

Romance, Ode to, by Southey, 107 and note.

Rome, C.’s flight from, 498 n.;
501, 502.

Rosamund, Miss, by Southey, 108 and note.

Rosamund to Henry; written after she had taken the veil, by Southey, 108 n.

Roscoe, William, 359 and note.

Rose, Sir George, 456 and note.

Rose, The, 54 and note.

Rose, W., 542.

Roskilly, Rev. Mr., 267 n., 270;
letter from C., 267.

Ross, 77.

Ross, the Man of, 77, 651 n.

Rossetti, Gabriele, 731 and note, 732, 733.

Rough, Sergeant, 225 and note.

Royal Institution, C. obtains a lectureship at the, 506 n., 507, 508, 511;
an outline of proposed lectures at the, 515, 516, 522;
C.’s lectures at the, 525.

Royal Society of Literature, the, Basil Montagu’s endeavors to secure for C. an associateship of, 726, 727;
C. an associate of, 728;
731;
an essay for, 737, 738;
C. reads an Essay on the Prometheus of Æschylus before, 739, 740.

Rulers, always as bad as they dare to be, 240.

Rush, Sir William, 368.

Rushiford, 358.

Russell, Mr., of Exeter, C.’s fellow-traveller, 498 n., 500 and note.

Rustats, 24, 43.

Ruth, by Wordsworth, 387.

Ruthin, 78.

St. Albyn, Mrs., the owner of Alfoxden, 232 n.

St. Augustine, 375.

St. Bees, 392, 393.

St. Blasius, 292.

St. Clear, 411, 412.

St. Lawrence, near Maldon, description of, 690-692.

St. Leon, by Godwin, the copyright sold for £400, 324, 325.

St. Nevis, 360, 361.

St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, 200.

Salernitanus, 566 and note.

Salisbury, 53-55.

Samuel, C.’s dislike of the name, 470, 471.

Sandford, Mrs. Henry, 183 n.;
her Thomas Poole and his Friends, 158 n., 165 n., 170 n., 183 n., 232 n., 234 n., 258, 267 n., 282 n., 319 n., 335 n., 456 n., 533 n., 553 n., 673 n., 676 n.

Saturday Club, the, at Göttingen, 281.

Satyrane’s Letters, 257, 274 n., 558.

Savage, Mr., 534.

Savory, Mr., 316.

Scafell, 393, 394;
in a thunderstorm on, 400 and note;
view from the summit of, 400, 401;
suggests the Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni, 404 and note, 405 and note.

Scale Force, 375.

Scarborough, 361-363.

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, the philosophy of, 683, 735.

Schiller, his Robbers, 96 and note, 97, 221;
C. translates manuscript plays of, 331;
C.’s translation of his Wallenstein, 403, 608.

Scholarship examinations, 24, 43, 45 and note, 46.

Schöning, Maria Eleanora, the story of, 555 and note, 556.

Scoope, Emanuel, second Viscount Howe, 262 n.

Scotland, C.’s tour in, 431-441;
the four most wonderful sights in, 439, 440.

Scott, an attorney, his manner of revenging himself on C., 310, 311.

Scott, Sir Walter, his Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, 174 n.;
his house in Edinburgh, 439;
takes Hartley C. to the Tower, 511 n.;
his offer to use his influence to get a place for Southey on the staff of the Edinburgh Review, 522 and note, 522;
his Lay of the Last Minstrel, 523;
605, 694;
his Antiquary, 736 and note.

Sea-bathing, 361 n., 362 and note.

Seasickness, no sympathy for, 743, 744.

Sermoni propriora, 606 and note.

Shad, 82, 89, 96.

Shaftesbury, Lord, 689 n.

Shakespeare, Lectures on, 557 n.

Shakespeare and other Dramatists, Lectures on, 756 n.

Sharp, Richard, 447 n.;
letter from C., 447.

Shepherds, German, 293.

Sheridan, R. B., Esq., To, 116 n., 118.

Shrewsbury, C. offered the Unitarian pastorate at, 235 and note, 236.

Sibylline Leaves, 178 n., 378 n., 379 n., 404 n.;
C. ill-used by the printer of, 673, 674;
678, 770.

Sicily, C. plans to visit, 457, 458;
C.’s first tour in, 485 and note, 486 and note, 487;
523.

Siddons, Mrs., 50.

Sieyès, Abbé, 329 and note.

Sigh, The, 100 and note.

Simplicity, Sonnet to, 251 and note.

Sin, original, C. a believer in, 242.

Sincerity, regarded by Dr. Darwin as vicious, 161.

Sixteen Sonnets, by Bampfylde, 369 n.

Skiddaw, 335, 336;
sunset over, 384.

Skiddaw Forest, 376 n.

Slavery, question of its introduction into the proposed pantisocratic colony, 89, 90, 95, 96.

Slave Trade, History of the Abolition of the, by Thomas Clarkson, C.’s review of, 527 and note, 528-530, 535, 536.

Slave Trade, On the, 43 and note.

Slee, Miss, 362, 363.

Sleep, C.’s sufferings in, 435, 440, 441, 447.

Smerdon, Mrs., 21, 22.

Smerdon, Rev. Mr., Vicar of Ottery, 22, 106 and note.

Smith, Charlotte, 326.

Smith, Horace and James, their Rejected Addresses, 606.

Smith, James, 704.

Smith, Raphael, 701 n.

Smith, Robert Percy (Bobus), 43 and note.

Smith, William, M. P., 506 n., 507 and note.

Snuff, 691, 692 and note.

Social Life at the English Universities, by Christopher Wordsworth, 225 n.

Something Childish, but Very Natural, quoted, 294.

Song, 100.

Songs of the Pixies, 222.

Sonnet, an anonymous, 177, 178.

Sonnet composed on a journey homeward, the author having received intelligence of the birth of a son, 194 and note, 195.

Sonnets, 111, 112, and note;
to Priestley, 116 and note;
to Kosciusko, 116 n., 117;
to Godwin, 116 n., 117;
to Sheridan, 116 n., 117, 118;
to Burke, 116 n., 118;
to Southey, 116 n., 120;
a selection of, privately printed by C., 177, 206 and note;
by “Nehemiah Higginbottom,” 251 n.

Sonnets, Sixteen, by Bampfylde, 309 n.

Sonnet to Simplicity, 251 and note.

Sonnet to the Author of the Robbers, 96 n.

Sorrel, James, 21.

Sotheby, William, C. translates Gesner’s Erste Schiffer at his instance, 369, 371, 372, 376-378, 397, 402, 403;
his translation of the Georgics of Virgil, 375;
his Poems, 375;
his Netley Abbey, 396;
his Welsh Tour, 396;
his Orestes, 402, 409, 410;
proposes a fine edition of Christabel, 421, 422;
492, 579, 595 n., 604, 605;
letters from C., 369, 376, 396-408.

Sotheby, Mrs. William, 369, 375, 378.

Soul and body, 708, 709.

South Devon, 305 n.

Southey, Lieutenant, 563.

Southey, Bertha, daughter of Robert S., born, 546, 547 and note, 578.

Southey, Catharine, daughter of Robert S., 578.

Southey, Rev. Charles Cuthbert, his Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, 308 n., 309 n., 327 n., 329 n., 384 n., 395 n., 400 n., 425 n., 488 n., 521 n., 584 n., 748 n.;
on the date of composition of The Doctor, 583 n.

Southey, Edith, daughter of Robert S., 578.

Southey, Dr. Henry, 615 and note.

Southey, Herbert, son of Robert S., 578;
his nicknames, 583 n.

Southey, Margaret, daughter of Robert S., born, 394 n., 395 n.;
dies, 435 n.

Southey, Mrs. Margaret, mother of Robert S., 138, 147.

Southey, Robert, his and C.’s Omniana, 9 n., 554 n., 718 n.;
his Botany Bay Eclogues, 76 n., 116;
proposed emigration to America with a colony of pantisocrats, 81, 82, 89-91, 95, 96, 98, 101-103;
his sonnets, 82, 83, 92, 108;
his connection with C.’s engagement to Miss Sarah Fricker, 84-86, 126;
his Race of Banquo, 92 and note;
97 n.;
his Retrospect, 107 and note;
his Ode to Romance, 107 and note;
his Ode to Lycon, 107 n., 108;
his Death of Mattathias, 108 and note;
his sonnets, To Valentine, The Fire, The Rainbow, 108 and notes;
his Rosamund to Henry, 108 and notes;
his Pauper’s Funeral, 108 and note, 109;
his Chapel Bell, 110 and note;
C. prophesies fame for, 110;
his Elegy, 115;
C.’s sonnet to, 116 n., 120;
lines to Godwin, 120;
suggestion that the proposed colony of pantisocrats be founded in Wales, 121, 122;
his sonnet, Hold your mad hands!, 127 and note;
his abandonment of pantisocracy causes a serious rupture with C., 134-151;
marries Edith Fricker, 137 n.;
his Joan of Arc, 141, 149, 178 and note, 210, 319;
163 n.;
the poet for the patriot, 178;
198 and note;
his verses to a college cat, 207;
C. compares his poetry with his own, 210;
personal relations with C. after the partial reconciliation, 210, 211;
his exertions in aid of Chatterton’s sister, 221, 222;
his Mary the Maid of the Inn, 223;
C.’s Sonnet to Simplicity not written with reference to, 251 and note;
a more complete reconciliation with C., 303, 304;
visits C. at Stowey with his wife, 304;
C., with his wife and child, visits him at Exeter, 305 and note;
accompanies C. on a walking tour in Dartmoor, 305 and note;
his Specimens of the Later English Poets, 309 n.;
his Madoc, 314, 357, 388, 463 and note, 467, 489, 490;
his Thalaba the Destroyer, 314, 319, 324, 357, 684;
out of health, 314;
C. suggests his removing to London, 315;
George Dyer’s article on, 317 and note;
The Devil’s Thoughts, written in collaboration with C., 318;
320 n.;
thinks of going abroad for his health, 326, 329, 360, 361;
an advocate of the establishment of Protestant orders of Sisters of Mercy, 327 n.;
proposes the establishment of a magazine with signed articles, 328 n.;
extract from a letter to C. on the condition of France, 329 n.;
C. begs him to make his home at Greta Hall, 354-356, 362, 391, 392, 394, 395;
367, 379 n.;
his proposed history of Portugal, 387, 388, 423;
secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer for Ireland for a short time, 390 and note;
birth of his first child, Margaret, 394 n., 395 n.;
his admiration of Bowles and its effect on his poems, 396;
400 n.;
his prose style, 423;
his proposed bibliographical work, 428-430;
makes a visit to Greta Hall which proves permanent, 435;
death of his little daughter, Margaret, 435 and note, 437;
his first impressions of Edinburgh, 438 n.;
442;
on Hartley and Derwent Coleridge, 443;
460, 463, 468, 484, 488 n.;
poverty, 490;
his Wat Tyler, 507 n.;
declines an offer from Scott to secure him a place on the staff of the Edinburgh Review, 521 and note;
542 n.;
extract from a letter to J. N. White, 545 n.;
on the mumps, 545 n.;
546;
birth of his daughter Bertha, 546, 547 and note;
548;
corrects proofs of The Friend, 551 and note;
575;
C.’s love and esteem for, 578;
his family in 1812, 578;
C.’s estimate of, 581;
on the authorship of The Doctor, 583 n., 584 n.;
585;
C. states his side of the quarrel with Wordsworth in conversation with, 592;
604, 609 n., 615, 617 n.;
writes of his friend John Kenyon, 639 n.;
his protection of C.’s family, 657;
C.’s letter introducing Mr. Ludwig Tieck, 670;
his Curse of Kehama, 684;
694, 718, 724;
his Book of the Church, 724;
726;
his acquaintance with George Dyer, 748 n.;
letters from C., 72-101, 106-121, 125, 134, 137, 221, 251 n., 303, 307-332, 354-361, 365, 384, 393, 415, 422-430, 434, 437, 464, 469, 487, 520, 554, 597, 605, 670;
letter to Miss Sarah Fricker, 107 n.
See Annual Anthology, the, edited by Southey.

Southey, Robert, Life and Correspondence of, by Rev. Charles Cuthbert Southey, 108 n., 308 n., 309 n., 327 n., 329 n., 384 n., 395 n., 400 n., 425 n., 488 n., 521 n., 584 n., 736 n., 748 n.

Southey, Robert, Selections from Letters of, 305 n., 438 n., 447 n., 543 n., 545 n., 583 n., 584 n., 736 n.

Southey, Robert, of Balliol College, Bath, Poems by Robert Lovell and, 107 n.

Southey, Mrs. Robert (Edith Fricker), Southey’s sonnet to, 127 and note;
384, 385, 390-392;
birth of her first child, Margaret, 394 n., 395 n.;
484;
birth of her daughter Bertha, 546, 547 and note;
592.

Southey, Thomas, 108 n., 109 n., 147;
a midshipman on the Sylph at the time of her capture, 308 and note.

South Molton, 5.

Spade of a Friend (an Agriculturist), To the, by Wordsworth, in honor of Thomas Wilkinson, 538 n.

Spaniards, C.’s opinion of, 478.

Spaniards, Letters on the, 629 and note.

Sparrow, Mr., head-master of Newcome’s Academy, 24, 25 n.

Specimens of the Later English Poets, by Southey, 309 n.

Spectator, Addison’s, studied by C. in connection with The Friend, 557, 558.

Speedwell, the brig, 467;
on board, 469-481.

Spenser, Edmund, his View of the State of Ireland, 638 and note;
quotation from, 694.

Spillekins, 462, 468.

Spinoza, Benedict, 632.

Spirit of Navigation and Discovery, The, by William Lisle Bowles, 403 and note.

Spiritual Philosophy, founded on the Teaching of S. T. Coleridge, by J. H. Green, with memoir of the author’s life, by Sir John Simon, 680 n.

Spurzheim, Johann Kaspar, his life-mask and bust of C., 570 n.

Stage, illusion of the, 663.

Stamford News, 567 n.

Stanger, Mrs. Joshua (Mary Calvert), 345 n.

Stanzas written in my Pocket Copy of Thomson’s Castle of Indolence, by Wordsworth, 345 n.

Steam vessels, 730 and note, 743.

Steffens, Heinrich, 683.

Steinburg, Baron, 279.

Steinmetz, Adam, C.’s letter to his friend, John Peirse Kennard, after his death, 762;
his character and amiable qualities, 763, 764, 775.

Steinmetz, John Henry, 762 n.

Stephen, Leslie, on C.’s study of Kant, 351 n.

Stephens (Stevens), Launcelot Pepys, 25 and note.

Sterling, Life of, by Carlyle, 771 n., 772 n.

Sterling, John, his admiration for C., 771 n., 772 n.;
letter from C., 771.

Sternbald’s Wanderungen, by Ludwig Tieck, 683 and note.

Stevens (Stephens), Launcelot Pepys, 25 and note.

Stoddart, Dr. (afterwards Sir) John, 477 and note, 481, 508;
detains C.’s books and MSS., 523;
524.

Stoke House, C. visits the Wedgwoods at, 673 n.

Storm, on a mountain-top, 339, 340;
with lightning in December, 365, 366;
on Scafell, 400 and note;
in Kirkstone Pass, 418-420.

Stowey, see Nether Stowey.

Stowey Benefit Club, 233.

Stowey Castle, 225 n.

Street, Mr., editor of the Courier, 506, 533, 567, 568, 570, 616, 629, 634;
his unsatisfactory conduct of the Courier, 661, 662.

Strutt, Mr., 152, 153.

Strutt, Edward (Lord Belper), 215 n.

Strutt, Joseph, 215 n., 216, 367.

Strutt, Mrs. Joseph, 216.

Strutt, William, 215 and note.

Stuart, Miss, a personal reminiscence of C. by, 705 n.

Stuart, Daniel, proprietor and editor of the Morning Post and Courier, 311, 315;
engages C. for the Morning Post, 319, 320;
321, 329;
engages lodgings in Covent Garden for C., 366 n.;
on C.’s dislike of Sir James Mackintosh, 454 n., 455 n.;

458, 468, 474, 486 n., 507, 508, 519, 520, 542, 543 n.;
a friend of Dr. Henry Southey, 615 n.;
his steadiness and independence of character, 660;
his public services, 660;
his knowledge of men, 660;
letters from C., 475, 485, 493, 501, 505, 533, 545, 547, 566, 595, 615, 627, 634, 660, 663, 740.
See Courier and Post, Morning.

Stutfield, Mr., amanuensis and disciple of C., 753 and note.

Sugar, beet, 299 and note.

Sun, The, 633.

Sunset in the Lake Country, a, 384.

Supernatural, C.’s essay on the, 684.

Superstitions of the German bauers, 291, 292, 294.

Suwarrow, Alexander Vasilievitch, 307 and note.

Swedenborg, Emanuel, his De Cultu et Amore Dei, 684 n.;
his De Cœlo et Inferno, 684 n.;
688, 729, 730.

Swedenborgianism, C. and, 684 n.

Swift, Jonathan, his Drapier Letters, 638 and note.

Sylph, the gun-brig, capture of, 308 n.

Sympathy, C.’s craving for, 696, 697.

Synesius, by Canterus, 67 and note, 68.

Syracuse, Sicily, 458;
C.’s visit to, 485 n., 486 n.

Table Talk, 81 n., 440 n., 624 n., 633 n., 684 n., 699 n., 756 n., 763 n., 764 n.

Table Talk and Omniana, 9 n., 554 n., 571 n., 718 n., 764 n.

Tatum, 53, 54.

Taunton, 220 n.;
C. preaches for Dr. Toulmin in, 247.

Taxation, C.’s Essay on, 629 and note.

Taxes, 757.

Taylor, Sir Henry, his Philip Van Artevelde, 774 and note.

Taylor, Jeremy, his Dissuasion from Popery, 639;
his Letter on Original Sin, 640;
a complete man, 640, 641.

Taylor, Samuel, 9.

Taylor, William, 310;
on double rhymes in English, 332;
488, 489.

Tea, 412, 413, 417.

Temperance, suggestions as to the furtherance of the cause of, 767-769.

Temple, The, by George Herbert, 694.

Teneriffe, 414, 417.

Terminology, C. wishes to form a better, 755.

Thalaba the Destroyer, by Southey, 414;
C.’s advice as to publishing, 319;
324, 357, 684.

The Hour when we shall meet again, 157.

Thelwall, John, his radicalism, 159, 160;
his criticisms of C.’s poetry, 163, 164, 194-197, 218;
on Burke, 166;
his Peripatetic, or Sketches of the Heart, of Nature, and of Society, 166 and note;
his Essay on Animal Vitality, 179, 212;
his Poems, 179, 197;
his contemptuous attitude towards the Christian Religion, 198-205;
two odes by, 218;
C. criticises a poem and a so-called sonnet by, 230;
C. advises him not to settle at Stowey, 232-234;
letter to Dr. Crompton on the Wedgwood annuity, 234 n.;
extract from a letter from C. on the Wedgwood annuity, 235 n.;
letters from C., 159, 166, 178, 193, 210, 214, 228-232.

Thelwall, Mrs. John (Stella, first wife of preceding), 181, 205, 206 n., 207, 214.

Theology, C.’s great interest in, 406;
C.’s projected great work on, 632 and note, 633.

Theory of Life, 711 n.

The piteous sobs which choke the virgin’s breast, a sonnet by C., 206 n.

This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison, 225 and note, 226 and notes, 227, 228 n.

Thompson, James, 343 and note.

Thornycroft, Hamo, R. A., 570 n.;
his bust of C., 695 n.

Thou gentle look, that didst my soul beguile, see O gentle look, etc.

Though king-bred rage with lawless tumult rude, a sonnet, 116 and note.

Thought, a rule for the regulation of, 244, 245.

Three Graves, The, 412 and note, 551, 606.

Thunder-storm, in December, 365, 366;
on Scafell, 400 and note.

Tieck, Ludwig, a letter of introduction from C. to Southey, 670;
two letters to C. from, 670 n.;
671, 672, 680;
his Sternbald’s Wanderungen, 663 and note;
699.

Times, The, 327 n.;
its notice of C.’s tragedy Remorse, 603 and note.

Tineum, by C. Valentine Le Grice, 111 and note.

Tiverton, 56.

To a Friend, together with an Unfinished Poem, 128 n., 454 n.

To a friend who had declared his intention of writing no more poetry, 206 n.

To a Gentleman, 647 n.
See To William Wordsworth.

To a Highland Girl, by Wordsworth, 459.

To a Young Ass; its mother being tethered near it, 119 and note, 120, 606 and note.

To a Young Lady, with a Poem on the French Revolution, 94 and note.

To a Young Man of Fortune who had abandoned himself to an indolent and causeless melancholy, 207 and note, 208 and note.

Tobin, Mr., his habit of advising 474, 475.

Tobin, James, 460 n.

Tobin, John, 460 n.

To Bowles, 111 and note.

To Disappointment, 28.

Tomalin, J., his Shorthand Report of Lectures, 11 n., 575 n.

To Matilda Betham. From a Stranger, 404 n.

Tomkins, Mr., 397, 402, 403.

To my own Heart, 92 n.

Tooke, Andrew, 455 n.;
his Pantheon, 455 and note.

Tooke, Horne, 218.

To one who published in print what had been intrusted to him by my fireside, 252 n.

Torbay, 305 n.

To R. B. Sheridan, Esq., 116 n., 118.

To the Spade of a Friend (an Agriculturist), by Wordsworth, in honor of Thomas Wilkinson, 538 n.

Totness, 305.

Toulmin, Rev. Dr., 220 n.;
tragic death of his daughter, 247, 248.

Tour in North Wales, by J. Hucks, 74 n., 81 n.

Tour over the Brocken, 257.

Tour through Parts of Wales, by William Sotheby, 396.

To Valentine, by Southey, 108 and note.

Towers, 321.

To William Wordsworth, 641, 644;
C. quotes from, 646, 647;
647 n.

Treaty of Vienna, 615 and note.

Trossachs, the, 431, 432, 440.

Tuckett, G. L., 57 n.;
letter from C., 57.

Tulk, Charles Augustus, 684 n.;
letters from C., 684, 712.

Turkey, 329.

Turner, Sharon, 425 n., 593.

Two Founts, The, 702 n.

Two Round Spaces on a Tombstone, The, the hero of, 455.

Two Sisters, To, 702 n.

Tychsen, Olaus, 398 and note.

Tyson, T., 393.

Ulpha Kirk, 393.

Understanding, as distinguished from reason, 712, 713.

Unitarianism, 415, 758, 759.

Upcott, C. visits Josiah Wedgwood at, 308.

Usk, the vale of, 410.

Valentine, To, by Southey, 108 and note.

Valetta, Malta, C.’s visit to, 481-484, 487-497.

Valette, General, 484;
given command of the Maltese Regiment, 554, 555.

Vane, Sir Frederick, his library, 296.

Velvet Cushion, The, by Rev. J. W. Cunningham, 651 and note.

Vienna, Treaty of, 615 and note.

Violin-teacher, C.’s, 49.

Virgil’s Æneid, Wordsworth’s unfinished translation of, 733 and note, 734.

Virgil’s Georgics, William Sotheby’s translation, 375.

Visions of the Maid of Orleans, The, 192, 206.

Vital power, definition of, 712.

Vogelstein, Karl Christian Vogel von, a letter of introduction from Ludwig Tieck to C., 670 n.

Von Axen, Messrs. P. and O., 269 n.

Voss, Johann Heinrich, his Luise, 203 n., 625, 627;
his Idylls, 398.

Voyage to Malta, C.’s, 469-481.

Wade, Josiah, 137 n., 145, 151 n., 152 n., 191, 288;
publication by Cottle of Coleridge’s letter of June 26, 1814, to, 616 n., 617 n.;
letters from C., 151, 623.

Waithman, a politician, 598.

Wakefield, Edward, his Account of Ireland, 638.

Wales, proposed colony of pantisocrats in, 121, 122, 140, 141.

Wales, Tour through Parts of, by William Sotheby, 396.

Wales, North, C.’s tour of, 72-81.

Wales, South, C.’s tour of, 410-414.

Walford, John, Poole’s narrative of, 553 and note.

Walker, Thomas, 162.

Walk into the country, a, 32, 33.

Wallenstein, by Schiller, C.’s translation of, 403, 608.

Wallis, Mr., 498-500, 523.

Wallis, Mrs., 392.

Wanderer’s Farewell to Two Sisters, The, 722 n.

Ward, C. A., 763 n.

Ward, Thomas, 170 n.

Wardle, Colonel, leads the attack on the Duke of York in the House of Commons, 543 and note.

Warren, Parson, 18.

Wastdale, 393, 401.

Watchman, The, 57 n.;
C.’s tour to procure subscribers for, 151 and note, 152-154;
155-157;
discontinued, 158;
174 n., 611.

Watson, Mrs. Henry, 698 n., 702 n.

Wat Tyler, by Southey, 506 n.

Wedgwood, Josiah, 260, 261, 268, 269 n.;
visit from C. at Upcott, 308;
his temporary residence at Upcott, 308 n.;
337 n., 350, 351 and note, 416 n.;
withdraws his half of the Wedgwood annuity from C., 602, 611 and note;
C.’s regard and love for, 611, 612.

Wedgwood, Josiah and Thomas, settle on C. an annuity for life of £150, 234 and note, 235 and note;
269 n., 321.

Wedgwood, Miss Sarah, 412, 416, 417.

Wedgwood, Thomas, 323, 379 n.;
with C. in South Wales, 412, 413;
his fine and subtle mind, 412;
proposes to pass the winter in Italy with C., 413, 414, 418;
415, 416;
a genuine philosopher, 448, 449;
C.’s gratitude towards, 451;
456 n., 493;
C.’s love for, mingled with fear, 612;
letter from C., 417.

Welles, A., 462.

Wellesley, Marquis of, 674.

Welsh clergyman, a, 79, 80.

Wensley, Miss, an actress, and her father, 704.

Wernigerode Inn, 298 n.

West, Mr., 633.

Whitbread, Samuel, 598.

White, Blanco, 741, 744.

White, J. N., extract from a letter from Southey, 545 n.

White Water Dash, 375 and note, 376 n.

Wilberforce, William, 535.

Wilkie, Sir David, his portraits of Hartley C., 511 n.;
his Blind Fiddler, 511 n.

Wilkinson, Thomas, 538 n.;
letter from C., 538.

Will, lunacy or idiocy of the, 768.

Williams, Edward (Iolo Morgangw), 162 and note.

Williams, John (“Antony Pasquin”), 603 n.

Wilson, Mrs., housekeeper for Mr. Jackson of Greta Hall, 461 and note, 491;
Hartley C.’s attachment for, 510.

Wilson, Professor, 756.

Windy Brow, 346.

Wish written in Jesus Wood, February 10, 1792, A, 35.

With passive joy the moment I survey, an anonymous sonnet, 177, 178.

With wayworn feet, a pilgrim woe-begone, a sonnet by Southey, 127 and note.

Wolf, Freiherr Johann Christian von, 735.

Wollstonecraft, Mary, 316, 318 n., 321.

Woodlands, 271.

Woolman, John, 540.

Woolman, John, the Journal of, 4 and note.

Worcester, 154.

Wordsworth, Catherine, 563.

Wordsworth, Rev. Christopher, D. D., 225 n.;
Charles Lloyd reads Greek with, 311.

Wordsworth, Rev. Christopher, M. A., his Social Life at the English Universities in the Eighteenth Century, 225 n.

Wordsworth, Rt. Rev. Christopher, D. D., his Memoirs of William Wordsworth, 432 n., 585 n.

Wordsworth, Dorothy, 10 n.;
C.’s description of, 218 n.;
visits C. with her brother, 224-227;
228, 231, 245 n., 249;
goes to Germany with William Wordsworth, Coleridge, and John Chester, 259;
with her brother at Goslar, 272, 273;
returns with him to England, 288, 296;
311 n., 346, 367, 373, 385;
accompanies her brother and C. on a tour in Scotland, 431, 432 and note;
577, 599 n.

Wordsworth, John, son of William W., 545.

Wordsworth, Captain John, and the effect of his death on C.’s spirits, 494 and note, 495 and note, 497.

Wordsworth, Thomas, death of, 599 n.;
C.’s love of, 600.

Wordsworth, William, 10 n., 163 and note, 164 and note, 218 n.;
visit from C. at Racedown, 220 and note, 221;
greatness of, 221, 224;
settles at Alfoxden, near Stowey, 224;
at C.’s cottage, 224-227;
C. visits him at Alfoxden, 227;
228, 231, 232;
suspected of conspiracy against the government, 232 n., 233;
memoranda scribbled on the outside sheet of a letter from C., 238 n.;
his greatness and amiability, 239;
his Excursion, 244 n., 337 n., 585 n., 641, 642, 645-650;
245;
C.’s admiration for, 246;
250 n.;
accompanies C. to Germany, 259;
268, 269 n.;
considers settling near the Lakes, 270;
271;
at Goslar with his sister, 272, 273;
an Epitaph by, 284;
returns to England, 288, 296;
wishes C. to live near him in the North of England, 296;
his grief at C.’s refusal, 296, 297;
304, 313;
his and C.’s Lyrical Ballads, 336, 337, 341, 350 and note, 387;
his admiration for Christabel, 337;
338, 342;
proposal from William Calvert in regard to sharing his house and studying chemistry with him, 345, 346;
his Stanzas written in my Pocket Copy of Thomson’s Castle of Indolence, 345 n.;
348, 350;
marries Miss Mary Hutchinson, 359 n.;
363, 367, 370, 373;
his opinion of poetic license, 373-375;
C. addresses his Ode to Dejection to, 378 and note, 379 and note, 380-384;
385-387;
his Ruth, 387;
400, 418, 428;
with C. on a Scotch tour, 431-434;
his Peter Bell, 432 and note;
441, 443;
receives a visit at Grasmere from C., who is taken ill there, 447;
his hypochondria, 448;
his happiness and philosophy, 449, 450;
a most original poet, 450;
451;
his To a Highland Girl, 459;
464, 468;
his reference to C. in The Prelude, 386 n.;
452;
his Brothers, 494 n., 609 n.;
his Happy Warrior, 494 n.;
extract from a letter to Sir George Beaumont on John Wordsworth’s death, 494 n.;
511 and note, 522;
his essays on the Convention of Cintra, 534 and note, 543 and note, 548-550;
535;
his To the Spade of a Friend, 558 n.;
543 and note, 546, 522, 553 n., 556;
C.’s misunderstanding with, 576 n., 577, 578, 586-588, 612;
his Essays upon Epitaphs, 585 and note;
a long-delayed explanation from C., 588-595;
reconciled with C., 596, 597, 599, 612;
death of his son Thomas, 599 n.;
second rupture with C., 599 n., 600 n.;
his projected poem, The Recluse, 646, 647 and note, 648-650;
678;
on William Blake as a poet, 686 n.;
his unfinished translation of the Æneid, 733 and note, 734;
felicities and unforgettable lines and stanzas in his poems, 734;
influence of the Edinburgh Review on the sale of his works in Scotland, 741, 742;
759 n.;
letters from C., 234, 588, 596, 599, 643, 733.

Wordsworth, William, Life of, by Rev. William Angus Knight, LL. D., 164 n., 220 n., 447 n., 585 n., 591 n., 596 n., 599 n., 600 n., 733 n., 759 n.

Wordsworth, William, Memoirs of, by Christopher Wordsworth, 432 n., 550 n., 585 n.

Wordsworth, William, To, 641, 644;
C. quotes from, 646, 647;
647 n.

Wordsworth, Mrs. William, extract from a letter to Sara Coleridge, 220;
525.
See Hutchinson, Mary.

Wordsworths, the, visit from C. and his son Hartley at Coleorton Farmhouse, 509-514;
545;
letter from C., 456.

Wrangham, Francis, 363 and note.

Wrexham, 77, 78.

Wright, Joseph, A. R. A. (Wright of Derby), 152 and note.

Wright, W. Aldis, 174 n.

Wynne, Mr., an old friend of Southey’s, 639 n.

Wyville’s proofs of C.’s portrait, 770.

Yarmouth, 258, 259.

Yates, Miss, 39.

Yews near Brecon, 411.

York, Duke of, 543 n., 555 n., 567 and note.

Young, Edward, 404.

Youth and Age, 730 n.

Zapolya: A Christmas Tale, in two Parts, its publication in book form after rejection by the Drury Lane Committee, 666 and note, 667-669.

Footnotes:

[1] Richard Sharp, 1759-1835, known as “Conversation Sharp,” a banker, Member of Parliament, and distinguished critic. He was a friend of Wordsworth’s, and on intimate terms with Coleridge and Southey. Life of W. Wordsworth, i. 377; Letters of R. Southey, i. 279, et passim.

[2] Jean Victor Moreau, 1763-1813. The “retreat” took place in October, 1796, after his defeat of the Archduke Charles at Neresheim, in the preceding August. Biographical Dictionary.

[3] This phrase reappears in the first issue (1808) of the Prospectus of The Friend. Jeffrey, to whom the Prospectus was submitted, objected to the wording, and it was changed, in the first instance, to “mental gloom” and finally to “dejection of mind.” See letter to F. Jeffrey, December 14, 1808, published in the Illustrated London News, June 10, 1893. Letter CLXXI.

[4] See concluding paragraph of Introductory Address of Conciones ad Populum (February, 1795); The Friend, Section I., Essay xvi.; Coleridge’s Works, 1853, ii. 307. For recantation of Necessitarianism, see footnote (1797) to lines “To a Friend, together with an Unfinished Poem.” Poetical Works, p. 38.

[5] Stuart is responsible for a story that Coleridge’s dislike and distrust of the “fellow from Aberdeen,” the hero of The Two Round Spaces on a Tombstone, dated from a visit to the Wedgwoods at Cote House, when Mackintosh outtalked and outshone his fellow protégé, and drove him in dudgeon from the party. But in 1838, when he contributed his articles to the Gentleman’s Magazine, Stuart had forgotten much and looked at all things from a different point of view. For instance, he says that the verses attacking Mackintosh were never published, whereas they appeared in the Morning Post of December 4, 1800. A more probable explanation is that Stuart, who was not on good terms with his brother-in-law, was in the habit of confiding his grievances, and that Coleridge, more suo, espoused his friend’s cause with unnecessary vehemence. Gentleman’s Magazine, May, 1838, p. 485.

[6] The Pantheon. By Andrew Tooke. Revised, etc., for the use of schools. London: 1791.

“Tooke was a prodigious favourite with us (at Christ’s Hospital). I see before me, as vividly now as ever, his Mars and Apollo, his Venus and Aurora—the Mars coming on furiously in his car; Apollo, with his radiant head, in the midst of shades and fountains; Aurora with hers, a golden dawn; and Venus, very handsome, we thought, and not looking too modest in ‘a slight cymar.’” Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, p. 75.

[7] See note infra.

[8] George Rose, 1744-1818, statesman and political writer. He had recently brought in a bill which “authorised the sending to all the Parish Overseers in the country a paper of questions on the condition of the poor.” Poole, at the instance of John Rickman, secretary to Speaker Abbot, was at this time engaged at Westminster in drawing up an abstract of the various returns which had been made in accordance with Sir George Rose’s bill. See Letter from T. Poole to T. Wedgwood, dated September 14, 1803. Cottle’s Reminiscences, pp. 477, 478; Thomas Poole and his Friends, ii. 107-114.

[9] See Letter to Southey of February 20, 1804. Letter CXLIX.

[10] John Dalton, 1766-1844, chemist and meteorologist. He published his researches on the atomic theory, which he had begun in 1803, in his New System of Chemical Philosophy, in 1808. Biographical Dictionary.

[11] His old fellow-student at Göttingen.

[12]

“O for a single hour of that Dundee,
Who on that day the word of onset gave.”

“In the Pass of Killicranky.” Wordsworth’s Poetical Works, 1889, p. 201.

[13] John Tobin the dramatist (or possibly his brother James), with whom Coleridge spent the last weeks of his stay in London, before he left for Portsmouth on the 27th of March, on his way to Malta.

[14] The misspelling, which was intentional, was an intimation to Lamb that the letter was not to be opened.

[15] A retired carrier, the owner of Greta Hall, who occupied “the smaller of the two houses inter-connected under one roof.” He was godfather to Hartley Coleridge, and left him a legacy of fifty pounds. Mrs. Wilson, the “Wilsy” of Hartley’s childhood, was Jackson’s housekeeper. Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge, 1873, i. 13.

[16] Coleridge had already attended Davy’s Lectures at the Royal Institution in 1802, and, possibly, in 1803. It is probable that allusions in his correspondence to Davy’s Lectures gave rise to the mistaken supposition that he delivered public lectures in London before 1808.

[17]

“He said, and, gliding like a snake,
Where Caradoc lay sleeping made his way.
Sweetly slept he, and pleasant were his dreams
Of Britain, and the blue-eyed maid he loved.
The Azteca stood over him; he knew
His victim, and the power of vengeance gave
Malignant joy. ‘Once hast thou ’scaped my arm:
But what shall save thee now?’ the Tyger thought,
Exulting; and he raised his spear to strike.
That instant, o’er the Briton’s unseen harp
The gale of morning past, and swept its strings
Into so sweet a harmony, that sure
It seem’d no earthly tone. The savage man
Suspends his stroke; he looks astonished round;
No human hand is near: ... and hark! again
The aërial music swells and dies away.
Then first the heart of Tlalala felt fear:
He thought that some protecting spirit watch’d
Beside the Stranger, and, abash’d, withdrew.”

“Madoc in Aztlan,” Book XI. Southey’s Poetical Works, 1838, v. 274, 275.

[18] Mrs. E. Fenwick, author of Secrecy, a novel (1799); a friend of Godwin’s first wife, Mary Wollstonecraft. William Godwin, by C. Kegan Paul, i. 282, 283. See, also, Lamb’s Letters (ed. Ainger), i. 331; and Lamb’s essays, “Two Races of Men,” and “Newspapers Thirty-five Years ago.”

[19] Lamb’s “bad baby”—“a disgusting woman who wears green spectacles.” Letters, passim.

[20] Afterwards Sir John Stoddart, Chief Justice of Malta, 1826-39.

[21] A note dated “Treasury, July 20th, 1805,” gives vent to his feelings on this point. “Saturday morning ½ past nine o’clock, and soon I shall have to brace up my hearing in toto, (for I hear in my brain—I hear, that is, I have an immediate and peculiar feeling instantly co-adunated with the sense of external sound = (exactly) to that which is experienced when one makes a wry face, and putting one’s right hand palm-wise to the right ear, and the left palm pressing hard on the forehead, one says to a bawler, ‘For mercy’s sake, man! don’t split the drum of one’s ear’—sensations analogous to this of various degrees of pain, even to a strange sort of uneasy pleasure. I am obnoxious to pure sound and therefore was saying—[N. B. Tho’ I ramble, I always come back to sense—the sense alive, tho’ sometimes a limb of syntax broken]—was saying that I hear in my brain, and still more hear in my stomach). For this ubiquity, almost (for I might safely add my toes—one or two, at least—and my knees) for this ubiquity of the Tympanum auditorium I am now to wind up my courage, for in a few seconds that accursed Reveille, the horrible crash and persevering malignant torture of the Pare-de-Drum, will attack me, like a party of yelling, drunken North American Indians attacking a crazy fort with a tired garrison, out of an ambush. The noisiness of the Maltese everybody must notice; but I have observed uniformly among them such utter impassiveness to the action of sounds as that I am fearful that the verum will be scarcely verisimile. I have heard screams of the most frightful kind, as of children run over by a cart, and running to the window I have seen two children in a parlour opposite to me (naked, except a kerchief tied round the waist) screaming in their horrid fiendiness—for fun! three adults in the room perfectly unannoyed, and this suffered to continue for twenty minutes, or as long as their lungs enabled them. But it goes thro’ everything, their street-cries, their priests, their advocates, their very pigs yell rather than squeak, or both together, rather, as if they were the true descendants of some half-dozen of the swine into which the Devils went, recovered by the Royal Humane Society. The dogs all night long would draw curses on them, but that the Maltese cats—it surpasses description, for he who has only heard caterwauling on English roofs can have no idea of a cat-serenade in Malta. In England it has often a close and painful resemblance to the distressful cries of young children, but in Malta it is identical with the wide range of screams uttered by imps while they are dragging each other into hotter and still hotter pools of brimstone and fire. It is the discord of Torment and of Rage and of Hate, of paroxysms of Revenge, and every note grumbles away into Despair.”

[22] The first Sicilian tour extended from the middle of August to the 7th of November, 1804. Two or three days, August 19-21, were spent in the neighbourhood of Etna. He slept at Nicolosi and visited the Hospice of St. Nicola dell’ Arena. It is unlikely that he reached the actual summit, but two ascents were made, probably to the limit of the wooded region. A few days later, August 24, he reached Syracuse, where he was hospitably entertained by H. M. Consul G. F. Lecky. The notes which he took of his visit to Etna are fragmentary and imperfect, but the description of Syracuse and its surroundings occupies many pages of his note-book. Under the heading, “Timoleon’s, Oct. 18, 1804, Wednesday, noon,” he writes: “The Gaza and Tree at Tremiglia. Rocks with cactus, pendulous branches, seed-pods black at the same time with the orange-yellow flower, and little daisy-like tufts of silky hair.... Timoleon’s villa, supposed to be in the field above the present house, from which you ascend to fifty stairs. Grand view of the harbour and sea, over that tongue of land which forms the anti-Ortygian embracing arm of the harbour, the point of Plemmyrium where Alcibiades and Nicias landed. I left the aqueduct and walked ascendingly to some ruined cottages, beside a delve, with straight limestone walls of rock, on which there played the shadows of the fig-tree and the olive. I was on part of Epipolæ, and a glorious view indeed! Before me a neck of stony common and fields—Ortygia, the open sea and the ships, and the circular harbour which it embraces, and the sea over that again. To my right that large extent of plain, green, rich, finely wooded; the fields so divided and enclosed that you, as it were, knew at the first view that they are all hedged and enclosed, and yet no hedges nor enclosings obtrude themselves—an effect of the vast number of trees of the same sort. On my left, stony fields, two harbours, Magnisi and its sand isle, and Augusta, and Etna, whose smoke mingles with the clouds even as they rise from the crater.... Still as I walk the lizard gliding darts along the road, and immerges himself under a stone, and the grasshopper leaps and tumbles awkwardly before me.”

It must have been in anticipation of this visit to Sicily, or after some communication with Coleridge, that Wordsworth, after alluding to his friend’s abode,—

“Where Etna over hill and valley casts
His shadow stretching towards Syracuse,
The city of Timoleon,”

gives utterance to that unusual outburst of feeling:—

“Oh! wrap him in your shades, ye giant woods,
On Etna’s side; and thou, O flowery field
Of Enna! is there not some nook of thine,
From the first play-time of the infant world
Kept sacred to restorative delight,
When from afar invoked by anxious love?”

Wordsworth’s Poetical Works, 1889, “The Prelude,” Book XI. p. 319.

[23] A short treatise entitled Observations on Egypt, which is extant in MS., may have been among the papers sent to Stuart with a view to publication.

[24] Shakespeare, Richard III., Act I. Scene 4.

[25] He had, perhaps, something more than a suspicion that Southey disliked these protestations. In the letter of friendly remonstrance (February, 1804), which Southey wrote to him after the affair with Godwin, he admits that he may be “too intolerant of these phrases,” but, indeed, he adds, “when they are true, they may be excused, and when they are not, there is no excuse for them.” Life and Correspondence, ii. 266.

[26] Cynocephalus, Dog-visaged. Compare Milton’s “Hymn on the Nativity:”—

“The brutish gods of Nile as fast,
Isis and Orus and the dog Anubis haste.”

[27] A printed slip, cut off from some public document, has been preserved in one of Coleridge’s note-books. It runs thus: “Segreteria del Governo li 29 Gennajo 1805. Samuel T. Coleridge Seg. Pub. del. Commis. Regio. G. N. Zammit Pro segretario.” His actual period of office extended from January 18 to September 6, 1805.

[28] John Wordsworth, the poet’s younger brother, the original of Leonard in “The Brothers,” and of “The Happy Warrior,” was drowned off the Bill of Portland, February 5, 1805. In a letter to Sir G. Beaumont, dated February 11, 1805, Wordsworth writes: “I can say nothing higher of my ever-dear brother than that he was worthy of his sister, who is now weeping beside me, and of the friendship of Coleridge; meek, affectionate, silently enthusiastic, loving all quiet things, and a poet in everything but words.” “We have had no tidings of Coleridge. I tremble for the moment when he is to hear of my brother’s death; it will distress him to the heart, and his poor body cannot bear sorrow. He loved my brother, and he knows how we at Grasmere loved him.” The report of the wreck of the Earl of Abergavenny and of the loss of her captain did not reach Malta till the 31st of March. It was a Sunday, and Coleridge, who had been sent for to the Palace, first heard the news from Lady Ball. His emotion at the time, and, perhaps, a petition to be excused from his duties brought from her the next day “a kindly letter of apology.” “Your strong feelings,” she writes, “are too great for your health. I hope that you will soon recover your spirits.” But Coleridge took the trouble to heart. It was the first death in the inner circle of his friends; it meant a heavy sorrow to those whom he best loved, and it seemed to confirm the haunting presentiment that death would once more visit his family during his absence from home. Ten days later he writes (in a note-book): “O dear John Wordsworth! What joy at Grasmere that you were made Captain of the Abergavenny! now it was next to certain that you would in a few years settle in your native hills, and be verily one of the concern. Then came your share in the brilliant action at Linois. I was at Grasmere in spirit only! but in spirit I was one of the rejoicers ... and all these were but decoys of death! Well, but a nobler feeling than these vain regrets would become the friend of the man whose last words were, ‘I have done my duty! let her go!’ Let us do our duty; all else is a dream—life and death alike a dream! This short sentence would comprise, I believe, the sum of all profound philosophy, of ethics and metaphysics, and conjointly from Plato to Fichte. S. T. C.”

[29] An island midway between Malta and Tunis, ceded by Naples to Don Fernandez in 1802.

[30] A description of the cottage at Stowey and its inmates, contained in a letter written by Mr. Richard Reynell (in August, 1797) to his sister at Thorveston, was published in the Illustrated London News, April 22, 1893.

[31] Coleridge left Rome with his friend Mr. Russell on Sunday, May 18, 1806. He had received, so he tells us in the Biographia Literaria, a secret warning from the Pope that Napoleon, whose animosity had been roused by articles in the Morning Post, had ordered his arrest. A similar statement is made in a footnote to a title-page of a proposed reprint of newspaper articles (an anticipation of Essays on His Own Times), which was drawn up in 1817. “My essays,” he writes, “in the Morning Post, during the peace of Amiens, brought my life into jeopardy when I was at Rome. An order for my arrest came from Paris to Rome at twelve at night—by the Pope’s goodness I was off by one—and the arrest of all the English took place at six.” In a letter to his brother George, which he wrote about six months after he returned to England, he says that he was warned to leave Rome, but does not enter into particulars. It is a well-known fact that Napoleon read the leading articles in the Morning Post, and deeply resented their tone and spirit, but whether Coleridge was rightly informed that an order for his arrest had come from Paris, or whether he was warned that, if with other Englishmen he should be arrested, his connection with the Morning Post would come to light, must remain doubtful. Coleridge’s Works, 1853, iii. 309.

[32] An entry in a note-book, dated June 7, 1806, expresses this at greater length: “O my children! whether, and which of you are dead, whether any and which among you are alive I know not, and were a letter to arrive this moment from Keswick I fear that I should be unable to open it, so deep and black is my despair. O my children! My children! I gave you life once, unconscious of the life I was giving, and you as unconsciously have given life to me.” A fortnight later, he ends a similar outburst of despair with a cry for deliverance:—

Come, come thou bleak December wind,
And blow the dry leaves from the tree!
Flash, like a love-thought thro’ me, Death!
And take a life that wearies me.

[33] It is difficult to trace his movements during his last week in Italy. He reached Leghorn on Saturday, June 7. Thence he made his way to Florence and returned to Pisa on a Thursday, probably Thursday, June 19, the date of this letter. On Sunday, June 22, he was still at Pisa, but, I take it, on the eve of setting sail for England. Fifty-five days later, August 17, he leaped on shore at Stangate Creek. His account of Pisa is highly characteristic. “Of the hanging Tower,” he writes, “the Duomo, the Cemetery, the Baptistery, I shall say nothing, except that being all together they form a wild mass, especially by moonlight, when the hanging Tower has something of a supernatural look; but what interested me with a deeper interest were the two hospitals, one for men, one for women,” etc., and these he proceeds to describe. Nevertheless he must have paid more attention to the treasures of Pisan art than his note implies, for many years after in a Lecture on the History of Philosophy, delivered January 19, 1819, he describes minutely and vividly the “Triumph of Death,” the great fresco in the Campo Santo at Pisa, which was formerly assigned to Oreagna, but is now, I believe, attributed to Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti. MS. Journal; MS. Report of Lecture.

[34] Mr. Russell was an artist, an Exeter man, whom Coleridge met in Rome. They were fellow-travellers in Italy, and returned together to England.

[35] William Smith, M. P. for Norwich, who lived at Parndon House, near Harlow, in Essex. It was in a great measure through his advice and interest that Coleridge obtained his Lectureship at the Royal Institution. Ten years later (1817), on the occasion of the surreptitious publication of Wat Tyler, Mr. Smith, who was a staunch liberal, denounced the Laureate as a “renegade,” and Coleridge with something of his old vigour gave battle on behalf of his brother-in-law in the pages of The Courier. Essays on His Own Times, iii. 939-950.

[36] Charles James Fox died on September 13, 1806.

[37] An unpublished letter from Sir Alexander Ball to His Excellency H. Elliot, Esq. (Minister at the Court of Naples), strongly recommends Coleridge to his favourable notice and consideration. Nothing that Coleridge ever said in favour of “Ball” exceeds what Sir Alexander says of Coleridge, but the Minister, whose hands must have been pretty full at the time, failed to be impressed, and withheld his patronage.

[38] “The Foster-Mother’s Tale,” Poetical Works, 1893, p. 83.

[39] Hartley Coleridge, now in his eleventh year, was under his father’s sole care from the end of December, 1806, to May, 1807. The first three months were spent in the farmhouse near Coleorton, which Sir G. Beaumont had lent to the Wordsworths, and it must have been when that visit was drawing to a close that this letter was written for Hartley’s benefit. The remaining five or six weeks were passed in the company of the Wordsworths at Basil Montagu’s house in London. Then it was that Hartley saw his first play, and was taken by Wordsworth and Walter Scott to the Tower. “The bard’s economy,” says Hartley, “would not allow us to visit the Jewel Office, but Mr. Scott, then no anactolater, took an evident pride in showing me the claymores and bucklers taken from the Loyalists at Culloden.” Whilst he was at Coleorton, Hartley was painted by Sir David Wilkie. It is the portrait of a child “whose fancies from afar are brought,” but the Hartley of this letter is better represented by the grimacing boy in Wilkie’s “Blind Fiddler,” for which, I have been told, he sat as a model. Poems of Hartley Coleridge, 1851, i. ccxxii.

[40] Scott had proposed to Southey that he should use his influence with Jeffrey to get him placed on the staff of the Edinburgh Review. Southey declined the offer alike on the score of political divergence from the editor, and disapproval of “that sort of bitterness [in criticism] which tends directly to wound a man in his feelings, and injure him in his fame and fortune.” Life and Correspondence, iii. 124-128. See, too, Lockhart’s Life of Sir Walter Scott, 1837, ii. 130.

[41] Sir John Acland. The property is now in the possession of a descendant in the female line, Sir Alexander Hood, of Fairfield, Dodington.

[42] To receive him and his family at Ottery as had been originally proposed. George Coleridge disapproved of his brother’s intended separation from his wife, and declined to countenance it in any way whatever.

[43] Faulkner: a Tragedy, 1807-1808, 8vo.

[44] I presume that the reference is to the Conciones ad Populum, published at Bristol, November 16, 1795.

[45] Coleridge’s article on Clarkson’s History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade was published in the Edinburgh Review, July, 1808. It has never been reprinted. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, by J. Dykes Campbell, London, 1894, p. 168; Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 180; Allsop’s Letters, 1836, ii. 112.

[46] Of this pamphlet or the translation of Palm’s Deutschland in seiner tiefsten Erniedrigung, I know nothing. The author, John Philip Palm, a Nuremberg bookseller, was shot August 26, 1806, in consequence of the publication of the work, which reflected unfavorably on the conduct and career of Napoleon.

[47] Compare his letter to Poole, dated December 4, 1808. “Begin to count my life, as a friend of yours, from 1st January, 1809;” and a letter to Davy, of December, 1808, in which he speaks of a change for the better in health and habits. Thomas Poole and his Friends, ii. 227; Fragmentary Remains of Sir H. Davy, p. 101.

[48] The Convention of Cintra was signed August 30, 1808. Wordsworth’s Essays were begun in the following November. “For the sake of immediate and general circulation I determined (when I had made a considerable progress in the manuscript) to print it in different portions in one of the daily newspapers. Accordingly two portions of it were printed, in the months of December and January, in the Courier. An accidental loss of several sheets of the manuscript delayed the continuance of the publication in that manner till the close of the Christmas holidays; and this plan of publication was given up.” Advertisement to Wordsworth’s pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra, May 20, 1809: Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 385.

[49] “In the place of some just eulogiums due to Mr. Pitt was substituted some abuse and detraction.” Allsop’s Letters, 1836, ii. 112.

[50] A preliminary prospectus of The Friend was printed at Kendal and submitted to Jeffrey and a few others. A copy of this “first edition” is in my possession, and it is interesting to notice that Coleridge has directed his amanuensis, Miss Hutchinson, to amend certain offending phrases in accordance with Jeffrey’s suggestions. “Speculative gloom” and “year-long absences” he gives up, but, as the postscript intimates, “moral impulses” he has the hardihood to retain. See The Friend’s Quarterly Examiner for July, 1893, art. “S. T. Coleridge on Quaker Principles;” and Athenæum for September 16, 1893, art. “Coleridge on Quaker Principles.”

[51] Thomas Wilkinson, of Yanwath, near Penrith, was a member of the Society of Friends. He owned and tilled a small estate on the banks of the Emont, which he laid out and ornamented “after the manner of Shenstone at his Leasowes.” As a friend and neighbour of the Clarksons and of Lord Lonsdale he was well known to Wordsworth, who, greatly daring, wrote in his honour his lines “To the Spade of a Friend (an Agriculturist).”

Alas! for the poor Prospectus! “Speculative gloom” and “year-long absence” had been sacrificed to Jeffrey, and now “Architecture, Dress, Dancing, Gardening, Music, Poetry, and Painting” were erased in obedience to Wilkinson. Most of these articles, however, “Architecture, Dress,” etc., reappeared in a second edition of the Prospectus, attached to the second number of The Friend, but Dancing, “Greek statuesque dancing,” on which Coleridge might have discoursed at some length, was gone forever. Wordsworth’s Works, p. 211 (Fenwick Note); The Friend’s Quarterly Examiner, July, 1893; Records of a Quaker Family, by Anne Ogden Boyce, London, 1889, pp. 30, 31, 55.

[52] The original draft of the prospectus of The Friend, which was issued in the late autumn of 1808, was printed at Kendal by W. Pennington. Certain alterations were suggested by Jeffrey and others (Southey in a letter to Rickman dated January 18, 1809, complains that Coleridge had “carried a prospectus wet from the pen to the publisher, without consulting anybody”), and a fresh batch of prospectuses was printed in London. A third variant attached to the first number of the weekly issue, June 1, 1809, was printed by Brown, a bookseller and stationer at Penrith, who, on Mr. Pennington’s refusal, undertook to print and publish The Friend. Some curious letters which passed between Coleridge and his printer, together with the MS. of The Friend, in the handwriting of Miss Sarah Hutchinson, are preserved in the Forster Library at the South Kensington Museum. Letters from the Lake Poets, pp. 85-188; Selections from the Letters of R. Southey, ii. 120.

[53] Compare letters to Stuart (December), 1808. “You will long ere this have received Wordsworth’s second Essay, etc., rewritten by me, and in some parts recomposed.” Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 101.

[54] Colonel Wardle, who led the attack in the House of Commons against the Duke of York, with regard to the undue influence in military appointments of the notorious Mrs. Clarke.

[55] Coleridge’s friendship with Dr. Beddoes dated from 1795-96, and was associated with his happier days. It is possible that the recent amendment in health and spirits was due to advice and sympathy which he had met with in response to a confession made in writing to his old Bristol friend. His death, which took place on the 24th of December, 1808, would rob Coleridge of a newly-found support, and would “take out of his life” the hope of self-conquest. The letter implies that he had recently heard from or conversed with Beddoes.

[56] Compare letter from Southey to J. N. White dated April 21, 1809. “A ridiculous disorder called the Mumps has nearly gone through the house, and visited me on its way—a thing which puts one more out of humour than out of health; but my neck has now regained its elasticity, and I have left off the extra swathings which yesterday buried my chin, after the fashion of fops a few years ago.” Selections from the Letters of R. Southey, ii, 135, 136.

[57] The Parliamentary investigation of the charges and allegations with regard to the military patronage of the Duke of York.

[58] Bertha Southey, afterwards Mrs. Herbert Hill, was born March 27, 1809.

[59] “The Appendix (to the pamphlet On the Convention of Cintra), a portion of the work which Mr. Wordsworth regarded as executed in a masterly manner, was drawn up by Mr. De Quincey, who revised the proofs of the whole.” Memoirs of Wordsworth, i. 384.

[60] In Southey’s copy of the reprint of the stamped sheets of The Friend the passage runs thus: “However this may be, the Understanding or regulative faculty is manifestly distinct from Life and Sensation, its function being to take up the passive affections of the sense into distinct Thoughts and Judgements, according to its own essential forms. These forms, however,” etc. The Friend, No. 5, Thursday, September 14, 1809, p. 79, n.

[61] For extracts from Poole’s narrative of John Walford, see Thomas Poole and his Friends, ii. 235-237. Wordsworth endeavoured to put the narrative into verse, but was dissatisfied with the result. His lines have never been published.

[62] H. N. Coleridge included these lines, as they appear in a note-book, among the Omniana of 1809-1816. They are headed incorrectly, “Inscription on a Clock in Cheapside.” The MS. is not very legible, but there can be no doubt that Coleridge wrote, “On a clock in a market place (proposed).” Table Talk, etc., 1884, p. 401; Poetical Works, p. 181.

[63] The story of Maria Eleanora Schöning appeared in No. 13 of The Friend, Thursday, November 16, 1809, pp. 194-208. It was reprinted as the “Second Landing Place” in the revised edition of The Friend, published in 1818. The somewhat laboured description of the heroine’s voice, which displeased Southey, and the beautiful illustration of the “withered leaf” were allowed to remain unaltered, and appear in every edition. Coleridge’s Works, 1853, ii. 312-326.

[64] Jonas Lewis von Hess, 1766-1823. He was a friend and pupil of Kant, and author of A History of Hamburg.

[65] John of Milan, who flourished 1100 A. D., was the author of Medicina Salernitana. He also composed “versibus Leoninis,” a poem entitled Flos Medicinæ. Hoffmann’s Lexicon Universale, art. “Salernum.”

[66] Three letters on the Catholic Question appeared in the Courier, September 3, 21, and 26, 1811. Essays on His Own Times, iii. 891-896, 920-932.

[67] The Battle of Albuera. Articles on the battle appeared in the Courier on June 5 and 8, 1811. Essays on His Own Times, iii. 802-805.

[68] “That a Judge should have regarded as an aggravation of a libel on the British Army, the writer’s having written against Buonaparte, is an act so monstrous,” etc. “Buonaparte,” Courier, June 29, 1811; Essays on His Own Times, iii. 818.

[69] John Drakard, the printer of the Stamford News, was convicted at Lincoln, May 25, 1811, of the publication of an article against flogging in the army, and sentenced to a fine and imprisonment.

[70] Lord Milton, one of the members for Yorkshire, brought forward a motion on June 6, 1811, against the reappointment of the Duke of York as Commander-in-Chief.

[71] Clerk of the Courier. Letter to Gentleman’s Magazine, June, 1838, p. 586.

[72] Many years after the date of this letter, Dr. Spurzheim took a life-mask of Coleridge’s face, and used it as a model for a bust which originally belonged to H. N. Coleridge, and is now in the Library at Heath’s Court, Ottery St. Mary. Another bust of Coleridge, very similar to Spurzheim’s, belonged to my father, and is still in the possession of the family. I have been told that it was taken from a death-mask, but as Mr. Hamo Thornycroft, who designed the bust for Westminster Abbey, pointed out to me, it abounds in anatomical defects. In a letter which Henry Coleridge wrote to his father, Colonel Coleridge, on the day of his uncle’s death, he says that a death-mask had been taken of the poet’s features. Whether this served as a model for a posthumous bust, or not, I am unable to say. In the curious and valuable article on death-masks which Mr. Laurence Hutton contributed to the October number of Harper’s Magazine, for 1892, he gives a fac-simile of a death-mask which was said to be that of S, T. Coleridge. At the time that I wrote to him on the subject, I had not seen Henry Coleridge’s letter, but I came to the conclusion that this sad memorial of death was genuine. The “glorious forehead” is there, but the look has passed away, and the “rest is silence.” With regard to Allston’s bust of Coleridge, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1812, I possess no information. See Harper’s Magazine, October, 1892, pp. 782, 783.

[73] A favourite quip. Apropos of the bed on which he slept at Trinity College, Cambridge, in June, 1833, he remarks, “Truly I lay down at night a man, and awoke in the morning a bruise.” Table Talk, etc., Bell & Co., 1884, p. 231, note.

[74] “Crimen ingrati animi nil aliud est quam perspicacia quædam in causam collati beneficii.” De Augmentis Scientiarum, cap. iii. 15. If this is the passage which Coleridge is quoting, he has inserted some words of his own. The Works of Bacon, 1711, i. 183.

[75] A crayon sketch of Coleridge, drawn by George Dawe, R. A., is now in existence at Heath Court. The figure, which is turned sideways, the face looking up, the legs crossed, is that of a man in early middle life, somewhat too portly for his years. An engraving of the sketch forms the frontispiece to Lloyd’s History of Highgate. It was, in the late Lord Coleridge’s opinion, a most characteristic likeness of his great-uncle. A time came when, for some reason, Coleridge held Dawe in but light esteem. I possess a card of invitation to his funeral, which took place at St. Paul’s Cathedral, on October 27, 1829. It is endorsed thus:—

“I really would have attended the Grub’s Canonization in St. Paul’s, under the impression that it would gratify his sister, Mrs. Wright; but Mr. G. interposed a conditional but sufficiently decorous negative. ‘No! Unless you wish to follow his Grubship still further down.’ So I pleaded ill health. But the very Thursday morning I went to Town to see my daughter, for the first time, as Mrs. Henry Coleridge, in Gower Street, and, odd enough, the stage was stopped by the Pompous Funeral of the unchangeable and predestinated Grub, and I extemporised:—

As Grub Dawe pass’d beneath the Hearse’s Lid,
On which a large RESURGAM met the eye,
Col, who well knew the Grub, cried, Lord forbid!
I trust, he’s only telling us a lie!

S. T. Coleridge.”

Dawe, it may be remembered, is immortalised by Lamb in his amusing Recollections of a Late Royal Academician.

[76] This portrait, begun at Rome, was not finished when Coleridge left. It is now in the possession of Allston’s niece, Miss Charlotte Dana, of Boston, Mass., U. S. A. The portrait by Allston, now in the National Portrait Gallery, was taken at Bristol in 1814. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative, by J. Dykes Campbell, 1894, p. 150, footnote 5.

[77] The lectures were delivered at the rooms of “The London Philosophical Society, Scotch Corporation Hall, Crane Court, Fleet Street (entrance from Fetter Lane).” Of the lecture on “Love and the Female Character,” which was delivered on December 9, 1811, H. C. Robinson writes: “Accompanied Mrs. Rough to Coleridge’s seventh and incomparably best Lecture. He declaimed with great eloquence about love, without wandering from his subject, Romeo and Juliet.” Among the friends who took notes were John Payne Collier, and a Mr. Tomalin. Coleridge’s Lectures on Shakespeare, London, 1856, p. viii.; H. C. Robinson’s Diary, ii. 348, MS. notes by J. Tomalin.

[78] The visit to Greta Hall, the last he ever paid to the Lake Country, lasted about a month, from February 23 to March 26. On his journey southward he remained in Penrith for a little over a fortnight, rejoining the Morgans towards the middle of April.

[79] The Reverend John Dawes, who kept a day-school at Ambleside. Hartley and Derwent Coleridge, Robert Jameson, Owen Lloyd and his three brothers (sons of Charles Lloyd), and the late Edward Jefferies, afterwards Curate and Rector of Grasmere, were among his pupils. In the Memoir of Hartley Coleridge, his brother Derwent describes at some length the character of his “worthy master,” and adds: “We were among his earliest scholars, and deeming it, as he said, an honour to be entrusted with the education of Mr. Coleridge’s sons, he refused, first for the elder, and afterwards for the younger brother, any pecuniary remuneration.” Poems of Hartley Coleridge, 1851, i. liii.

[80] In an unpublished letter from Mrs. Coleridge to Poole, dated October 30, 1812, she tells her old friend that when “the boys” perceived that their father did not intend to turn aside to visit the Wordsworths at the Rectory opposite Grasmere Church, they turned pale and were visibly affected. No doubt they knew all about the quarrel and were mightily concerned, but their agitation was a reflex of the grief and passion “writ large” in their father’s face. One can imagine with what ecstasy of self-torture he would pass through Grasmere and leave Wordsworth unvisited.

[81] Sir Thomas Bernard, 1750-1818, the well-known philanthropist and promoter of national education, was one of the founders of the Royal Institution.

[82] It is probable that during his stay at Penrith he recovered a number of unbound sheets of the reprint of The Friend. His proposal to Gale and Curtis must have been to conclude the unfinished narrative of the life of Sir Alexander Ball, and to publish the whole as a complete work. A printed slip cut out of a page of publishers’ advertisements and forwarded to “H. N. Coleridge, Esq., from W. Pickering,” contains the following announcement:—

“Mr. Coleridge’s Friend, of which twenty-eight Numbers are published, may now be had, in one Volume, royal 8vo. boards, of Mess. Gale and Curtis, Paternoster Row. And Mr. C. intends to complete the Work, in from eight to ten similar sheets to the foregoing, which will be published together in one part, sewed. The Subscribers to the former part can obtain them through their regular Booksellers. Only 300 copies remain of the 28 numbers, and their being printed on unstamped paper will account to the Subscribers for the difference of price. 23, Paternoster Row, London, 1st February, 1812.”

[83] The full title of this work was The Origin, Nature and Object of the New System of Education. Southey’s Life of Dr. Bell, ii. 409.

[84] The Honourable and Right Reverend John Shute Barrington, 1734-1826, sixth son of the first Lord Barrington, was successively Bishop of Llandaff, Salisbury, and Durham. He was a warm supporter of the Madras system of education. It was no doubt Dr. Bell who helped to interest the Bishop in Coleridge’s Lectures.

[85] Herbert Southey, known in the family as “Dog-Lunus,” and “Lunus,” and “The Moon.” Letters of R. Southey, ii. 399.

[86] Readers of The Doctor will not be at a loss to understand the significance of the references to Dr. Daniel Dove and his horse Nobs. According to Cuthbert Southey, the actual composition of the book began in 1813, but the date of this letter (April, 1812) shows that the myth or legend of the “Doctor,” and his iron-grey, which had taken shape certainly as early as 1805, was fully developed in the spring of 1812, when Coleridge paid his last visit to Greta Hall. It was not till the winter of 1833-1834, that the first two volumes of The Doctor appeared in print, and, as they were published anonymously, they were, probably, by persons familiar with his contribution to Blackwood and the London Magazine, attributed to Hartley Coleridge. “No clue to the author has reached me,” wrote Southey to his friend Wynne. “As for Hartley Coleridge, I wish it were his, but am certain that it is not. He is quite clever enough to have written it—quite odd enough, but his opinions are desperately radical, and he is the last person in the world to disguise them. One report was that his father had assisted him; there is not a page in the book, wise or foolish, which the latter could have written, neither his wisdom nor his folly are of that kind.” There had been a time when Southey would have expressed himself differently, but in 1834 dissociation from Coleridge had become a matter alike of habit and of principle. Southey’s Life and Correspondence, ii. 355, vi. 225-229; Letters of R. Southey, iv. 373.

[87] The first of the series of “Essays upon Epitaphs” was published in No. 25 of the original issue of The Friend (Feb. 22, 1810), and republished by Wordsworth in the notes to The Excursion, 1814. “Two other portions of the ‘Series,’ of which the Bishop of Lincoln gives an outline and some extracts in the Memoirs (i. 434-445), were published in full in Prose Works of Wordsworth, 1876, ii. 41-75.” Life of W. Wordsworth, ii. 152; Poetical Works of Wordsworth, Bibliography, p. 907.

[88] To Miss Sarah Hutchinson, then living in Wales.

[89] That Wordsworth ever used these words, or commissioned Montagu to repeat them to Coleridge, is in itself improbable and was solemnly denied by Wordsworth himself. But Wordsworth did not deny that with the best motives and in a kindly spirit he took Montagu into his confidence and put him on his guard, that he professed “to have no hope” of his old friend, and that with regard to Coleridge’s “habits” he might have described them as a “nuisance” in his family. It was all meant for the best, but much evil and misery might have been avoided if Wordsworth had warned Coleridge that if he should make his home under Montagu’s roof he could not keep silence, or, better still, if he had kept silence and left Montagu to fight his own battles. The cruel words which Montagu put into Wordsworth’s mouth or Coleridge in his agitation and resentment put into Montagu’s, were but the salt which the sufferer rubbed into his own wound. The time, the manner, and the person combined to aggravate his misery and dismay. Judgment had been delivered against him in absentiâ, and the judge was none other than his own “familiar friend.” Henry Crabb Robinson’s Diary, May 3-10, 1812, first published in Life of W. Wordsworth, ii. 168, 187.

[90] The tickets were numbered and signed by the lecturer. Printed cards which were issued by way of advertisement contained the following announcement:—

“Lectures on the Drama.

“Mr. Coleridge proposes to give a series of Lectures on the Drama of the Greek, French, English and Spanish stage, chiefly with Reference to the Works of Shakespeare, at Willis’s Rooms, King Street, St. James’s, on the Tuesdays and Fridays in May and June at Three o’clock precisely. The Course will contain Six Lectures, at One Guinea. The Tickets Transferable. An Account is opened at Mess. Ransom Morland & Co., Bankers, Pall Mall, in the names of Sir G. Beaumont, Bart., Sir T. Bernard, Bart., W. Sotheby, Esq., where Subscriptions will be received, and Tickets issued. The First Lecture on Tuesday, the 12th of May.—S. T. C., 71, Berners St.”

For an account of the first four lectures, see H. C. Robinson’s Diary, i. 385-388.

[91] From Bombay.

[92] I have followed Professor Knight in omitting a passage in which “he gives a lengthened list of circumstances which seemed to justify misunderstanding.” The alleged facts throw no light on the relations between Coleridge and Wordsworth.

[93] The cryptogram which Coleridge invented for his own use was based on the arbitrary selection of letters of the Greek as equivalents to letters of the English alphabet. The vowels were represented by English letters, by the various points, and by algebraic symbols. An expert would probably decipher nine tenths of these memoranda at a glance, but here and there the words symbolised are themselves anagrams of Greek, Latin, and German words, and, in a few instances, the clue is hard to seek.

[94] The Right Honourable Spencer Perceval was shot by a man named Bellingham, in the lobby of the House of Commons, May 11, 1812.

[95] The occasion of this letter was the death of Wordsworth’s son, Thomas, which took place December 1, 1812. It would seem, as Professor Knight intimates, that the letter was not altogether acceptable to the Wordsworths, and that “no immediate reply was sent to Coleridge.” We have it, on the authority of Mr. Clarkson, that when Wordsworth and Dorothy did write, in the spring of the following year, inviting him to Grasmere, their letters remained unanswered, and that when the news came that Coleridge was about to leave London for the seaside, a fresh wound was inflicted, and fresh offence taken. As Mr. Dykes Campbell has pointed out, the consequences of this second rupture were fatal to Coleridge’s peace of mind and to his well-being generally. The brief spell of success and prosperity which attended the representation of “Remorse” inspired him for a few weeks with unnatural courage, but as the “pale unwarming light of Hope” died away, he was left to face the world and himself as best or as worst he could. Of the months which intervened between March and September, 1813, there is no record, and we can only guess that he remained with his kind and patient hosts, the Morgans, sick in body and broken-hearted. Life of W. Wordsworth, ii. 182; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative, by J. Dykes Campbell, 1894, pp. 193-197.

[96] See Letter CXCV., p. 611, note 2.

[97] The notice of “Remorse” in The Times, though it condemned the play as a whole, was not altogether uncomplimentary, and would be accepted at the present day by the majority of critics as just and fair. It was, no doubt, the didactic and patronising tone adopted towards the author which excited Coleridge’s indignation. “We speak,” writes the reviewer, “with restraint and unwillingly of the defects of a work which must have cost its author so much labour. We are peculiarly reluctant to touch the anxieties of a man,” etc. The notice in the Morning Post was friendly and flattering in the highest degree. The preface to Osorio, London, 1873, contains selections of press notices of “Remorse,” and other interesting matter. See, too, Poetical Works, Editor’s Note on “Remorse,” pp. 649-651.

[98] John Williams, described by Macaulay as “a filthy and malignant baboon,” who wrote under the pseudonym of “Anthony Pasquin,” emigrated to America early in this century. In 1804 he published a work in Boston, and there is, apparently, no reason to suppose that he subsequently returned to England. Either Coleridge was in error or he uses the term generally for a scurrilous critic.

[99] This note-book must have passed out of Coleridge’s possession in his lifetime, for it is not among those which were bequeathed to Joseph Henry Green, and subsequently passed into the hands of my father. The two folio volumes of the Greek Poets were in my father’s library, and are now in my possession.

[100] “Mr. Colridge (sic) will not, we fear, be as much entertained as we were with his ‘Playhouse Musings,’ which begin with characteristic pathos and simplicity, and put us much in mind of the affecting story of old Poulter’s mare.”

[101] The motto “Sermoni propriora,” translated by Lamb “properer for a sermon,” was prefixed to “Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement.” The lines “To a Young Ass” were originally published in the Morning Chronicle, December 30, 1794, under the heading, “Address to a Young Jack Ass, and its tethered Mother. In Familiar Verse.” Poetical Works, pp. 35, 36, Appendix C, p. 477. See, too, Biographia Literaria, Coleridge’s Works, 1853, iii. 161.

[102] The words, “Obscurest Haunt of all our mountains,” are to be found in the first act of “Remorse,” lines 115, 116. Their counterpart in Wordsworth’s poems occurs in “The Brothers,” l. 140. (“It is the loneliest place of all these hills.”) “De minimis non curat lex,” especially when there is a plea to be advanced, or a charge to be defended. Poetical Works, p. 362; Works of Wordsworth, p. 127.

[103] Many theories have been hazarded with regard to the broken friendship commemorated in these lines. My own impression is that Coleridge, if he had anything personal in his mind, and we may be sure that he had, was looking back on his early friendship with Southey and the bitter quarrel which began over the collapse of pantisocracy, and was never healed till the summer of 1799. In the late autumn of 1800, when the second part of “Christabel” was written, Southey was absent in Portugal, and the thought of all that had come and gone between him and his “heart’s best brother” inspired this outburst of affection and regret.

[104] The annuity of £150 for life, which Josiah Wedgwood, on his own and his brother Thomas’ behalf, offered to Coleridge in January, 1798. The letter expressly states that it is “an annuity for life of £150 to be regularly paid by us, no condition whatsoever being annexed to it.” “We mean,” he adds, “the annuity to be independent of everything but the wreck of our fortune.” It is extraordinary that a man of probity should have taken advantage of the fact that the annuity, as had been proposed, was not secured by law, and should have struck this blow, not so much at Coleridge, as at his wife and children, for whom the annuity was reserved. It is hardly likely that a man of business forgot the terms of his own offer, or that he could have imagined that Coleridge was no longer in need of support. Either in some fit of penitence or of passion Coleridge offered to release him, or once again “whispering tongues had poisoned truth,” and some one had represented to Wedgwood that the money was doing more harm than good. But a bond is a bond, and it is hard to see, unless the act and deed were Coleridge’s, how Wedgwood can escape blame. Thomas Poole and his Friends, i. 257-259.

[105] Dr. Southey, the poet’s younger brother Henry, and Daniel Stuart were afterwards neighbours in Harley Street. A close intimacy and lifelong friendship arose between the two families.

[106] Treaty of Vienna, October 9, 1809.

[107] This could only have been carried out in part. A large portion of the books which Coleridge possessed at his death consisted of those which he had purchased during his travels in Germany in 1799, and in Italy in 1805-1806.

[108] The publication by Cottle, in 1837, of this and the following letter, and still more of that to Josiah Wade of June 26, 1814 (Letter CC.), was deeply resented by Coleridge’s three children and by all his friends. In the preface to his Early Recollections Cottle defends himself on the plea that in the interests of truth these confessions should be revealed, and urges that Coleridge’s own demand that after his death “a full and unqualified narrative of my wretchedness and its guilty cause may be made public,” not only justified but called for his action in the matter. The law of copyright in the letters of parents and remoter ancestors was less clearly defined at that time than it is at present, and Coleridge’s literary executors contented themselves with recording their protest in the strongest possible terms. In 1848, when Cottle reprinted his Early Recollections, together with some additional matter, under the title of Reminiscences of S. T. Coleridge, etc., he was able to quote Southey as an advocate, though, possibly, a reluctant advocate, for publication. There can be no question that neither Coleridge’s request nor Southey’s sanction gave Cottle any right to wound the feelings of the living or to expose the frailties and remorse of the dead. The letters, which have been public property for nearly sixty years, are included in these volumes because they have a natural and proper place in any collection of Coleridge’s Letters which claims to be, in any sense, representative of his correspondence at large.

[109] At whatever time these lines may have been written, they were not printed till 1829, when they were prefixed to the “Monody on the Death of Chatterton.” Poetical Works, p. 61; Editor’s Note, pp. 562, 563.

[110] “The Picture; or The Lover’s Resolution,” lines 17-25. Poetical Works, p. 162.

[111] Solomon Grundy is a character, played by Fawcett, in George Colman the younger’s piece, Who wants a Guinea? produced at Covent Garden, 1804-1805.

[112] A character in Macklin’s play, Love à la Mode.

[113] A character in Macklin’s play, A Man of the World.

[114] It is needless to say that Coleridge never even attempted a translation of Faust. Whether there were initial difficulties with regard to procuring the “whole of Goethe’s works,” and other books of reference, or whether his heart failed him when he began to study the work with a view to translation, the arrangement with Murray fell through. A statement in the Table Talk for February 16, 1833, that the task was abandoned on moral grounds, that he could not bring himself to familiarise the English public with “language, much of which was,” he thought, “vulgar, licentious, and blasphemous,” is not borne out by the tone of his letters to Murray, of July 29, August 31, 1814. No doubt the spirit of Faust, alike with regard to theology and morality, would at all times have been distasteful to him, but with regard to what actually took place, he deceived himself in supposing that the feelings and scruples of old age would have prevailed in middle life. Memoirs of John Murray, i. 297 et seq.

[115] “The thoughts of Coleridge, even during the whirl of passing events, discovered their hidden springs, and poured forth, in an obscure style, and to an unheeding age, the great moral truths which were then being proclaimed in characters of fire to mankind.” Alison’s History of Europe, ix. 3 (ninth edition).

[116] The eight “Letters on the Spaniards,” which Coleridge contributed to the Courier in December, January, 1809-10, are reprinted in Essays on His Own Times, ii. 593-676.

[117] The character of Pitt appeared in the Morning Post, March 19, 1800; the letters to Fox, on November 4, 9, 1802; the Essays on the French Empire, etc., September 21, 25, and October 2, 1802; the Essay on the restoration of the Bourbons, October, 1802. They are reprinted in the second volume of Essays on His Own Times.

Six Letters to Judge Fletcher on Catholic Emancipation, which appeared at irregular intervals in the Courier, September-December, 1814, are reprinted in Essays on His Own Times, iii. 677-733.

The Essay on Taxation forms the seventh Essay of Section the First, on the Principles of Political Knowledge. The Friend; Coleridge’s Works, Harper & Brothers, 1853, ii. 208-222.

[118] Neither the original nor the transcript of this letter has, to my knowledge, been preserved.

[119] He reverts to this “turning of the worm” in a letter to Morgan dated January 5, 1818. He threatened to attack publishers and printers in “a vigorous and harmonious satire” to be called “Puff and Slander.” I am inclined to think that the remarkable verses entitled “A Character,” which were first printed in 1834, were an accomplished instalment of “these two long satires.” Letter in British Museum. MSS. Addit. 25612. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative by J. Dykes Campbell, p. 234, note; Poetical Works, pp. 195, 642.

[120] A work which should contain all knowledge and proclaim all philosophy had been Coleridge’s dream from the beginning, and, as no such work was ever produced, it may be said to have been his dream to the end. And yet it was something more than a dream. Besides innumerable fragments of metaphysical and theological speculation which have passed into my hands, he actually did compose and dictate two large quarto volumes on formal logic, which are extant. “Something more than a volume,” a portentous introduction to his magnum opus, was dictated to his amanuensis and disciple, J. H. Green, and is now in my possession. A commentary on the Gospels and some of the Epistles, of which the original MS. is extant, and of which I possess a transcription, was an accomplished fact. I say nothing of the actual or relative value of this unpublished matter, but it should be put on record that it exists, that much labour, ill-judged perhaps, and ineffectual labour, was expended on the outworks of the fortresses, and that the walls and bastions are standing to the present day.

[121] The appearance of these “Essays on the Fine Arts” was announced in the Bristol Journal of August 6, 1814. They were reprinted in 1837 by Cottle, in his Early Recollections, ii. 201-240, and by Thomas Ashe in 1885, in his Miscellanies, Æsthetic and Literary, pp. 5-35. Coleridge himself “set a high value” on these essays. See Table Talk of January 1, 1834.

[122] The working editor of the Courier.

[123] The third letter to Judge Fletcher on Ireland was published in the Courier, October 21, 1814. It is reprinted in Essays on His Own Times, iii. 690-697.

[124] John Cartwright, 1740-1824, known as Major Cartwright, was an ardent parliamentary reformer and an advocate of universal suffrage. He refused to fight against the United States and wrote Letters on American Independence (1774).

[125] Lord Erskine’s Bill for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was brought forward in the House of Lords May 15, 1809, and was passed without a division. The Bill was read a second time in the House of Commons but was rejected on going into committee, the opposition being led by Windham in a speech of considerable ability.

By “imperfect” duties Coleridge probably means “duties of imperfect obligation.”

[126] This article, a review of “The Letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton; with a Supplement of Interesting Letters by Distinguished Personages. 2 vols. 8vo. Lovewell and Co. London. 1814,” appeared in No. xxi. of The Quarterly Review, for April, 1814. The attack is mainly directed against Lady Hamilton, but Nelson, with every pretence of reluctance and of general admiration, is also censured on moral grounds, and his letters are held up to ridicule.

[127] A partner in the publishing firm of Ridgeway and Symonds. Letters of R. Southey, iii. 65.

[128] The reference is to Swift’s famous “Drapier” Letters. Swift wrote in the assumed character of a draper, and dated his letters “From my shop in St. Francis Street,” but why he adopted the French instead of the English spelling of the word does not seem to have been satisfactorily explained. Notes and Queries, III. Series, x. 55.

[129] The View of the State of Ireland, first published in 1633.

[130] John Kenyon, 1783-1856, a poet and philanthropist. He settled at Woodlands near Stowey in 1802, and became acquainted with Poole and Poole’s friends. He was on especially intimate terms with Southey, who writes of him (January 11, 1827) to his still older friend Wynne, as “one of the very best and pleasantest men whom I have ever known, one whom every one likes at first sight, and likes better the longer he is known.” With Coleridge himself the tie was less close, but he was, I know, a most kind friend to the poet’s wife during those anxious years, 1814-1819, when her children were growing up, and she had little else to depend upon but Southey’s generous protection and the moiety of the Wedgwood annuity. Kenyon’s friendship with the Brownings belongs to a later chapter of literary history.

[131] Poetical Works, p. 176; Appendix H, pp. 525, 526.

[132] Poetical Works, p. 450.

[133] In 1815 an act was brought in by Mr. Robinson (afterwards Lord Ripon) and passed, permitting the importation of corn when the price of home-grown wheat reached 80s. a quarter. During the spring of the year, January-March, while the bill was being discussed, bread-riots took place in London and Westminster.

[134] It would seem that Coleridge had either overlooked or declined to put faith in Wordsworth’s Apology for The Excursion, which appeared in the Preface to the First Edition of 1814. He was, of course, familiar with the “poem on the growth of your mind,” the hitherto unnamed and unpublished Prelude, and he must have been at least equally familiar with the earlier books of The Excursion. Why then was he disappointed with the poem as a whole, and what had he looked for at Wordsworth’s hands? Not, it would seem, for an “ante-chapel,” but for the sanctuary itself. He had been stirred to the depths by the recitation of The Prelude at Coleorton, and in his lines “To a Gentleman,” which he quotes in this letter, he recapitulates the arguments of the poem. This he considered was The Excursion, “an Orphic song indeed”! and as he listened the melody sank into his soul. But that was but an exordium, a “prelusive strain” to The Recluse, which might indeed include the Grasmere fragment, the story of Margaret and so forth, but which in the form of poetry would convey the substance of divine philosophy. He had looked for a second Milton who would put Lucretius to a double shame, for a “philosophic poem,” which would justify anew “the ways of God to men;” and in lieu of this pageant of the imagination there was Wordsworth prolific of moral discourse, of scenic and personal narrative—a prophet indeed, but “unmindful of the heavenly Vision.”

[135] The Rev. William Money, a descendant of John Kyrle, the “Man of Ross,” eulogised alike by Pope and Coleridge, was at this time in possession of the family seat of Whetham, a few miles distant from Calne, in Wiltshire. Coleridge was often a guest at his house.

[136] A controversial work on the inspiration of Scripture. A thin thread of narrative runs through the dissertation. It was the work of the Rev. J. W. Cunningham, Vicar of Harrow, and was published in 1813.

[137] The Hon. and Rev. T. A. Methuen, Rector of All Cannings, was the son of Paul Methuen, Esq., M. P., afterward Lord Methuen of Corsham House. He contributed some reminiscences of Coleridge at this period to the Christian Observer of 1845. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative, by J. Dykes Campbell, 1894, p. 208.

[138] The annual payments for board and lodging, which were made at first, for some time before Coleridge’s death fell into abeyance. The approximate amount of the debt so incurred, and the circumstances under which it began to accumulate, are alike unknown to me. The fact that such a debt existed was, I believe, a secret jealously guarded by his generous hosts, but as, with the best intentions, statements have been made to the effect that there was no pecuniary obligation on Coleridge’s part, it is right that the truth should be known. On the other hand, it is only fair to Coleridge’s memory to put it on record that this debt of honour was a sore trouble to him, and that he met it as best he could. We know, for instance, on his own authority, that the profits of the three volume edition of his poems, published in 1828, were made over to Mr. Gillman.

[139] Zapolya: A Christmas Tale, in two Parts, was published by Rest Fenner late in 1817. A year before, after the first part had been rejected by the Drury Lane Committee, Coleridge arranged with Murray to publish both parts as a poem, and received an advance of £50 on the MS. He had, it seems, applied to Murray to be released from this engagement, and on the strength of an ambiguous reply, offered the work to the publishers of Sybilline Leaves. From letters to Murray, dated March 26 and March 29, 1817, it is evident that the £50 advanced on A Christmas Tale was repaid. In acknowledging the receipt of the sum, Murray seems to have generously omitted all mention of a similar advance on “a play then in composition.” In his letter of March 29, Coleridge speaks of this second debt, which does not appear to have been paid. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative, by J. Dykes Campbell, p. 223; Memoirs of John Murray, i. 301-306.

[140] Murray had offered Coleridge two hundred guineas for “a small volume of specimens of Rabbinical Wisdom,” but owing to pressure of work the project was abandoned. “Specimens of Rabbinical Wisdom selected from the Mishna” had already appeared in the original issue of The Friend (Nos. x., xi.), and these, with the assistance of his friend Hyman Hurwitz, Master of the Hebrew Academy at Highgate, he intended to supplement and expand into a volume. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative, by J. Dykes Campbell, p. 224 and note.

[141] Apart from internal evidence, there is nothing to prove that this article, a review of “Christabel,” which appeared in the Edinburgh Review, December, 1816, was written by Hazlitt. It led, however, to the insertion of a footnote in the first volume of the Biographia Literaria, in which Coleridge accused Jeffrey of personal and ungenerous animosity against himself, and reminded him of hospitality shown to him at Keswick, and of the complacent and flattering language which he had employed on that occasion. Not content with commissioning Hazlitt to review the book, Jeffrey appended a long footnote signed with his initials, in which he indignantly repudiates the charge of personal animus, and makes bitter fun of Coleridge’s susceptibility to flattery, and of his boasted hospitality. Southey had offered him a cup of coffee, and Coleridge had dined with him at the inn. Voila tout. Both footnotes are good reading. Biographia Literaria, ed. 1817, i. 52 note; Edinburgh Review, December, 1817.

[142] Two letters from Tieck to Coleridge have been preserved, a very long one, dated February 20, 1818, in which he discusses a scheme for bringing out his works in England, and asks Coleridge if he has succeeded in finding a publisher for him, and the following note, written sixteen years later, to introduce the German painter, Herr von Vogelstein. I am indebted to my cousin, Miss Edith Coleridge, for a translation of both letters.

Dresden, April 30, 1834.

I hope that my dear and honoured friend Coleridge still remembers me. To me those delightful hours at Highgate remain unforgettable. I have seen your friend Robinson, once here in Dresden, but you—At that time I believed that I should come again to England—and in such hopes we grow old and wear away.

My kindest remembrances to your excellent hosts at Highgate. It is with especial emotion that I look again and again at the Anatomy of Melancholy [a present from Mr. Gillman], as well as the Lay Sermons, Christabel, and the Biographia Literaria. Herr von Vogelstein, one of the most esteemed historical painters of Germany, brings you this letter from your loving

Ludwig Tieck.

[143] Henry Crabb Robinson, whose admirable diaries, first published in 1869, may, it is hoped, be reëdited and published in full, died at the age of ninety-one in 1867. He was a constant guest at my father’s house in Chelsea during my boyhood. I have, too, a distinct remembrance of his walking over Loughrigg from Rydal Mount, where he was staying with Mrs. Wordsworth, and visiting my parents at High Close, between Grasmere and Langdale, then and now the property of Mr. Wheatley Balme. This must have been in 1857, when he was past eighty years of age. My impression is that his conversation consisted, for the most part, of anecdotes concerning Wieland and Schiller and Goethe. Of Wordsworth and Coleridge he must have had much to say, but his words, as was natural, fell on the unheeding ears of a child.

[144] The Right Hon. John Hookham Frere, 1769-1846, now better known as the translator of Aristophanes than as statesman or diplomatist, was a warm friend to Coleridge in his later years. He figures in the later memoranda and correspondence as ὁ καλοκάγαθος, the ideal Christian gentleman.

[145] Samuel Purkis, of Brentford, tanner and man of letters, was an early friend of Poole’s, and through him became acquainted with Coleridge and Sir Humphry Davy. When Coleridge went up to London in June, 1798, to stay with the Wedgwoods at Stoke House, in the village of Cobham, he stayed a night at Brentford on the way. In a letter to Poole of the same date, he thus describes his host: “Purkis is a gentleman, with the free and cordial and interesting manners of the man of literature. His colloquial diction is uncommonly pleasing, his information various, his own mind elegant and acute.” Thomas Poole and his Friends, i. 271, et passim.

[146] For an account of Coleridge’s relations with his publishers, Fenner and Curtis, see Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative, by J. Dykes Campbell, p. 227. See, too, Lippincott’s Mag. for June, 1870, art. “Some Unpublished Correspondence of S. T. Coleridge,” and Brandl’s Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Romantic School, 1887, pp. 351-353.

[147] J. H. Frere was, I believe, one of those who assisted Coleridge to send his younger son to Cambridge.

[148] John Taylor Coleridge (better known as Mr. Justice Coleridge), and George May Coleridge, Vicar of St. Mary Church, Devon, and Prebendary of Wells. Another cousin who befriended Hartley, when he was an undergraduate at Merton, and again later when he was living with the Montagus, in London, was William Hart Coleridge, afterward Bishop of Barbados. The poet’s own testimony to the good work of his nephews should be set against Allsop’s foolish and uncalled for attack on “the Bishop and the Judge.” Letters, etc., of S. T. Coleridge, 1836, i. 225, note.

[149] Poole’s reply to this letter, dated July 31, 1817, contained an invitation to Hartley to come to Nether Stowey. Mrs. Sandford tells us that it was believed that “the young man spent more than one vacation at Stowey, where he was well-known and very popular, though the young ladies of the place either themselves called him the Black Dwarf, or cherished a conviction that that was his nickname at Oxford.” Thomas Poole and his Friends, ii. 256-258.

[150] The Rev. H. F. Cary, 1772-1844, the well-known translator of the Divina Commedia. His son and biographer, the Rev. Henry Cary, gives the following account of his father’s first introduction to Coleridge, which took place at Littlehampton in the autumn of 1817:—

“It was our custom to walk on the sands and read Homer aloud, a practice adopted partly for the sake of the sea-breezes.... For several consecutive days Coleridge crossed us in our walk. The sound of the Greek, and especially the expressive countenance of the tutor, attracted his notice; so one day, as we met, he placed himself directly in my father’s way and thus accosted him: ‘Sir, yours is a face I should know. I am Samuel Taylor Coleridge.’” Memoir of H. F. Cary, ii. 18.

[151] It appears, however, that he underrated his position as a critic. A quotation from Cary’s Dante, and a eulogistic mention of the work generally, in a lecture on Dante, delivered by Coleridge at Flower-de-Luce Court, on February 27, 1818, led, so his son says, to the immediate sale of a thousand copies, and notices “reëchoing Coleridge’s praises” in the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews. Memoir of H. F. Cary, ii. 28.

[152] From the Destiny of Nations.

[153] Joseph Henry Green, 1791-1863, an eminent surgeon and anatomist. In his own profession he won distinction as lecturer and operator, and as the author of the Dissector’s Manual, and some pamphlets on medical reform and education. He was twice, 1849-50 and 1858-59, President of the College of Surgeons. His acquaintance with Coleridge, which began in 1817, was destined to influence his whole career. It was his custom for many years to pass two afternoons of the week at Highgate, and on these occasions as amanuensis and collaborateur, he helped to lay the foundations of the Magnum Opus. Coleridge appointed him his literary executor, and bequeathed to him a mass of unpublished MSS. which it was hoped he would reduce to order and publish as a connected system of philosophy. Two addresses which he delivered, as Hunterian Orations in 1841 and 1847, on “Vital Dynamics” and “Mental Dynamics,” were published in his lifetime, and after his death two volumes entitled Spiritual Philosophy, founded on the Teaching of S. T. Coleridge, were issued, together with a memoir, by his friend and former pupil, Sir John Simon.

His fame has suffered eclipse owing in great measure to his chivalrous if unsuccessful attempt to do honour to Coleridge. But he deserves to stand alone. Members of his own profession not versed in polar logic looked up to his “great and noble intellect” with pride and delight, and by those who were honoured by his intimacy he was held in love and reverence. To Coleridge he was a friend indeed, bringing with him balms more soothing than “poppy or mandragora,” the healing waters of Faith and Hope. Spiritual Philosophy, by J. H. Green; Memoir of the author’s life, i.-lix.

[154] This must have been the impromptu lecture “On the Growth of the Individual Mind,” delivered at the rooms of the London Philosophical Society. According to Gillman, who details the circumstances under which the address was given, but does not supply the date, the lecturer began with an “apologetic preface”: “The lecture I am about to give this evening is purely extempore. Should you find a nominative case looking out for a verb—or a fatherless verb for a nominative case, you must excuse it. It is purely extempore, though I have thought and read much on this subject.” Life of Coleridge, pp. 354-357.

[155] The “Essay on the Science of Method” was finished in December, 1817, and printed in the following January. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative, by J. Dykes Campbell, 1894, p. 232.

[156] The Hebrew text and Coleridge’s translation were published in the form of a pamphlet, and sold by “T. Boosey, 4 Old Broad Street, 1817.” The full title was “Israel’s Lament. Translation of a Hebrew dirge, chaunted in the Great Synagogue, St. James’ Place, Aldgate, on the day of the Funeral of her Royal Highness the Princess Charlotte. By Hyman Hurwitz, Master of the Hebrew Academy, Highgate, 1817.”

The translation is below Coleridge at his worst. The “Harp of Quantock” must, indeed, have required stringing before such a line as “For England’s Lady is laid low” could have escaped the file, or “worn her” be permitted to rhyme with “mourner”! Poetical Works, p. 187; Editor’s Note, p. 638.

[157] The Kritik der praktischen Vernunft was published in 1797.

[158] This statement requires explanation. Franz Xavier von Baader, 1765-1841, was a mystic of the school of Jacob Böhme, and wrote in opposition to Schelling.

[159] Ludwig Tieck published his Sternbald’s Wanderungen in 1798.

[160] Heinse’s Ardinghello was published in 1787.

[161] Richter’s Vorschule der Aisthetik was published in 1804 (3 vols.).

[162] See Table Talk for January 3 and May 1, 1823. See, also, The Friend, Essay iii. of the First Landing Place. Coleridge’s Works, Harper & Brothers, 1853, ii. 134-137, and “Notes on Hamlet,” Ibid. iv. 147-150.

[163] Charles Augustus Tulk, described by Mr. Campbell as “a man of fortune with an uncommon taste for philosophical speculation,” was an eminent Swedenborgian, and mainly instrumental in establishing the “New Church” in Great Britain. It was through Coleridge’s intimacy with Mr. Tulk that his writings became known to the Swedenborgian community, and that his letters were read at their gatherings. I possess transcripts of twenty-five letters from Coleridge to Tulk, in many of which he details his theories of ontological speculation. The originals were sold and dispersed in 1882.

A note on Swedenborg’s treatise, “De Cultu et Amore Dei,” is printed in Notes Theological and Political, London, 1853, p. 110, but a long series of marginalia on the pages of the treatise, “De Cœlo et Inferno,” of which a transcript has been made, remains unpublished.

For Coleridge’s views on Swedenborgianism, see “Notes on Noble’s Appeal,” Literary Remains; Coleridge’s Works, Harper & Brothers, 1853, v. 522-527.

[164] It may be supposed that it was Blake, the mystic and the spiritualist, that aroused Tulk’s interest, and that, as an indirect consequence, the original edition of his poems, “engraved in writing-hand,” was sent to Coleridge for his inspection and criticism. The Songs of Innocence were published in 1787, ten years before the Lyrical Ballads appeared, and more than thirty years before the date of this letter, but they were known only to a few. Lamb, writing in 1824, speaks of him as Robert Blake, and after praising in the highest terms his paintings and engravings, says that he has never read his poems, “which have been sold hitherto only in manuscript.” It is strange that Coleridge should not have been familiar with them, for in 1812 Crabb Robinson, so he tells us, read them aloud to Wordsworth, who was “pleased with some of them, and considered Blake as having the elements of poetry, a thousand times more than either Byron or Scott.” None, however, of these hearty and genuine admirers appear to have reflected that Blake had “gone back to nature,” a while before Wordsworth or Coleridge turned their steps in that direction. Letters of Charles Lamb, 1886, ii. 104, 105, 324, 325; H. C. Robinson’s Diary, i. 385.

[165] In the Aids to Reflection, at the close of a long comment on a passage in Field, Coleridge alludes to “discussions of the Greek Fathers, and of the Schoolmen on the obscure and abysmal subject of the divine A-seity, and the distinction between the θέλημα and the βουλή, that is, the Absolute Will as the universal ground of all being, and the election and purpose of God in the personal Idea, as Father.” Coleridge’s Works, 1853, i. 317.

[166] The bill in which Coleridge interested himself, and in favour of which he wrote two circulars which were printed and distributed, was introduced in the House of Commons by the first Sir Robert Peel. The object of the bill was to regulate the employment of children in cotton factories. A bill for prohibiting the employment of children under nine was passed in 1833, but it was not till 1844 that the late Lord Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, succeeded in passing the Ten Hours Bills. In a letter of May 3d to Crabb Robinson, Coleridge asks: “Can you furnish us with any other instances in which the legislature has interfered with what is ironically called ‘Free Labour’ (i. e. dared to prohibit soul-murder on the part of the rich, and self-slaughter on that of the poor!), or any dictum of our grave law authorities from Fortescue—to Eldon: for from the borough of Hell I wish to have no representatives.” Henry Crabb Robinson’s Diary, ii. 93-95.

[167] James Maitland, 1759-1839, eighth Earl of Lauderdale, belonged to the party of Charles James Fox, and, like Coleridge, opposed the first war with France, which began in 1793. In the ministry of “All the Talents” he held the Great Seal of Scotland. Coleridge calls him plebeian because he inherited the peerage from a remote connection. He was the author of several treatises on finance and political economy.

[168] It was, I have been told by an eyewitness, Coleridge’s habit to take a pinch of snuff, and whilst he was talking to rub it between his fingers. He wasted so much snuff in the process that the maid servant had directions to sweep up these literary remains and replace them in the canister.

[169] A pet name for the Gillmans’ younger son, Henry.

[170] Coleridge was fond of quoting these lines as applicable to himself.

[171] Washington Allston.

[172] Charles Robert Leslie, historical painter, 1794-1859, was born of American parents, but studied art in London under Washington Allston. A pencil sketch, for which Coleridge sat to him in 1820, is in my possession. Mr. Hamo Thornycroft, R. A., after a careful inspection of other portraits and engravings of S. T. Coleridge, modelled the bust which now (thanks to American generosity) finds its place in Poets’ Corner, mainly in accordance with this sketch.

[173] Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge, London, 1836, i. 1-3.

[174] The Prospectus of the Lectures on the History of Philosophy was printed in Allsop’s Letters, etc., as Letter xliv., November 26, 1818, but the announcement of the time and place has been omitted. A very rare copy of the original prospectus, which has been placed in my hands by Mrs. Henry Watson, gives the following details:—

“This course will be comprised in Fourteen Lectures, to commence on Monday evening, December 7, 1818, at eight o’clock, at the Crown and Anchor, Strand; and be continued on the following Mondays, with the intermission of Christmas week—Double Tickets, admitting a Lady and Gentleman, Three Guineas. Single Tickets, Two Guineas. Admission to a Single Lecture, Five Shillings. An Historical and Chronological Guide to the course will be printed.”

A reporter was hired at the expense of Hookham Frere to take down the lectures in shorthand. A transcript, which I possess, contains numerous errors and omissions, but is interesting as affording proof of the conversational style of Coleridge’s lectures. See, for further account of Lectures of 1819, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative, by J. Dykes Campbell, pp. 238, 239.

[175] Thomas Phillips, R. A., 1770-1845, painted two portraits of Coleridge, one of which is in the possession of Mr. John Murray, and was engraved as the frontispiece of the first volume of the Table Talk; and the other in that of Mr. William Rennell Coleridge, of Salston, Ottery St. Mary. The late Lord Chief Justice used to say that the Salston picture was “the best presentation of the outward man.” No doubt it recalled his great-uncle as he remembered him. It certainly bears a close resemblance to the portraits of Coleridge’s brothers, Edward and George, and of other members of the family.

[176] My impression is that this letter was written to Mrs. Aders, the beautiful and accomplished daughter of the engraver Raphael Smith, but the address is wanting and I cannot speak with any certainty.

[177] Compare lines 16-20 of The Two Founts:—

“As on the driving cloud the shiny bow,
That gracious thing made up of tears and light.”

The poem as a whole was composed in 1826, and, as I am assured by Mrs. Henry Watson (on the authority of her grandmother, Mrs. Gillman), addressed to Mrs. Aders; but the fifth and a preceding stanza, which Coleridge marked for interpolation, in an annotated copy of Poetical Works, 1828 (kindly lent me by Mrs. Watson), must have been written before that date, and were, as I gather from an insertion in a note-book, originally addressed to Mrs. Gillman. Poetical Works, p. 196. See, too, for unprinted stanza, Ibid. Editor’s Note, p. 642.

[178] “To Two Sisters.” Poetical Works, p. 179.

[179] The so-called “Manchester Massacre,” nicknamed Peterloo, took place August 16, 1819. Towards the middle of October dangerous riots broke out at North Shields. Cries of “Blood for blood,” “Manchester over again,” were heard in the streets, and “so daring have the mob been that they actually threatened to burn or destroy the ships of war.” Annual Register, October 15-23, 1819.

[180] “Fears in Solitude.” Poetical Works, p. 127.

[181] Mrs. Gillman’s sister.

[182] A collection of casts of antique gems, once, no doubt, the property of S. T. C., is now in the possession of Alexander Gillman, Esq., of Sussex Square, Brighton.

[183] Edward Dubois, satirist, 1775-1850, was the author of The Wreath, a Translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron, 1804, and other works besides those mentioned in the text. Biographical Dictionary.

[184] A late note-book of the Highgate period contains the following doggerel:—

To the most veracious Anecdotist and
Small-Talk Man, Thomas Hill, Esq.

Tom Hill who laughs at cares and woes,
As nanci—nili—pili—
What is he like as I suppose?
Why to be sure, a Rose, a Rose.
At least no soul that Tom Hill knows,
Could e’er recall a Li-ly.
S. T. C.

“The first time,” writes Miss Stuart, in a personal remembrance of Coleridge, headed “A Farewell, 1834,” “I dined in company at my father’s table, I sat between Coleridge and Mr. Hill (known as ‘Little Tommy Hill’) of the Adelphi, and Ezekiel then formed the theme of Coleridge’s eloquence. I well remember his citing the chapter of the Dead Bones, and his sepulchral voice as he asked, ‘Can these bones live?’ Then, his observation that nothing in the range of human thought was more sublime than Ezekiel’s reply, ‘Lord, thou knowest,’ in deepest humility, not presuming to doubt the omnipotence of the Most High.” Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 322. See, too, Letters from Hill to Stuart, Ibid. p. 435.

[185] William Elford Leach, 1790-1836, a physician and naturalist, was at this time Curator of the Natural History Department at the British Museum.

By Lawrencian, Coleridge means a disciple of the eminent surgeon William Lawrence, whose “Lectures on the Physiology, Zoölogy, and Natural History of Man,” which were delivered in 1816, are alluded to more than once in his “Theory of Life.” “Theory of Life” in Miscellanies, Æsthetic and Literary, Bohn’s Standard Library, pp. 377, 385.

[186] Included in the Omniana of 1809-1816. Table Talk, etc., Bell & Sons, 1884, p. 400.

[187] Compare a letter of Coleridge to Allsop, dated October 8, 1822, in which he details “the four griping and grasping sorrows, each of which seemed to have my very heart in its hands, compressing or wringing.”

It was the publication of this particular letter, with its thinly-veiled allusions to Wordsworth, Southey, and to Coleridge’s sons, which not only excited indignation against Allsop, but moved Southey to write a letter to Cottle. Letters, Conversation, etc., 1836, ii. 140-146.

[188] Compare “The Wanderer’s Farewell to Two Sisters” (Mrs. Morgan and Miss Brent), 1807. Miss Brent made her home with her married sister, Mrs. J. J. Morgan, and during the years 1810-1815, when Coleridge lived under the Morgans’ roof at Hammersmith, in London, and in the West of England, he received from these ladies the most affectionate care and attention, both in sickness and in health. Poetical Works, pp. 179, 180.

[189] The Reverend Edward Coleridge, 1800-1883, the sixth and youngest son of Colonel James Coleridge, was for many years a Master and afterwards a Fellow of Eton. He also held the College living of Mapledurham near Reading. He corresponded with his uncle, who was greatly attached to him, on philosophical and theological questions. It was to him that the “Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit” were originally addressed in the form of letters.

[190] Colonel Coleridge’s only daughter, Frances Duke, was afterwards married to the Honourable Mr. Justice Patteson, a Judge of the Queen’s Bench.

[191]

Like those trim skiffs, unknown of yore
On winding lake, or rivers wide,
That ask no aid of sail or oar,
That fear no spite of wind or tide.

“Youth and Age,” ll. 12-15. Poetical Works, p. 191. A MS. copy of “Youth and Age” in my possession, of which the probable date is 1822, reads “boats” for “skiffs.”

[192] Sir Alexander Johnston, 1775-1849, a learned orientalist. He was Advocate General (afterwards Chief Justice) of Ceylon, and had much to do with the reorganisation of the constitution of the island. He was one of the founders of the Royal Asiatic Society. Dict. of Nat. Biog. art. “Johnston, Sir Alexander.”

[193] Gabriele Rossetti, 1783-1854, the father of Dante G. Rossetti, etc., first visited England as a political exile in 1824. In 1830 he was appointed Professor of the Italian language at King’s College. He is best known as a commentator on Dante. He presented Coleridge with a copy of his work, Dello Spirito Antipapale che Produsse la Riforma, and some of his verses in MS., which are in my possession.

[194] From the letter of Wordsworth to Lord Lonsdale, of February 5, 1819, it is plain that the translation of three books of the Æneid had been already completed at that date. Another letter written five years later, November 3, 1824, implies that the work had been put aside, and, after a long interval, reattempted. In the mean time a letter of Coleridge to Mrs. Allsop, of April 8, 1824, tells us that the three books had been sent to Coleridge and must have remained in his possession for some time. The MS. of this translation appears to have been lost, but “one of the books,” Professor Knight tells us, was printed in the Philological Museum, at Cambridge, in 1832. Life of W. Wordsworth, ii. 296-303.

[195] Coleridge was at this time (1824) engaged in making a selection of choice passages from the works of Archbishop Leighton, which, together with his own comment and corollaries, were published as Aids to Reflection, in 1825. See Letter CCXXX.

[196] Conversations of Lord Byron, etc., by Captain Medwin.

[197] The frontispiece of the second volume of the Antiquary represents Dr. Dousterswivel digging for treasure in Misticot’s grave. The resemblance to Coleridge is, perhaps, not wholly imaginary.

[198] John Taylor Coleridge was editor of the Quarterly Review for one year, 1825-1826. Southey’s Life and Correspondence, v. 194, 201, 204, 239, etc.; Letters of Robert Southey, iii. 455, 473, 511, 514, etc.

[199] Henry Hart Milman, 1791-1868, afterwards celebrated as historian and divine (Dean of St. Paul’s, 1849), was, at this time, distinguished chiefly as a poet. His Fall of Jerusalem was published in 1820. He was a contributor to the Quarterly Review.

[200] Afterward the wife of Sir George Beaumont, the artist’s son and successor in the baronetcy.

[201] Almost the same sentence with regard to his address as Royal Associate occurs in a letter to his nephew, John Taylor Coleridge, of May 20, 1825. The “Essay on the Prometheus of Æschylus,” which was printed in Literary Remains, was republished in Coleridge’s Works, Harper & Brothers, 1853, iv. 344-365. See, also, Brandl’s Life of Coleridge, p. 361.

[202] The portrait of William Hart Coleridge, Bishop of Barbadoes and the Leeward Islands, by Thomas Phillips, R. A., is now in the Hall of Christ Church, Oxford.

[203] A sprig of this myrtle (or was it a sprig of myrtle in a nosegay?) grew into a plant. At some time after Coleridge’s death it passed into the hands of the late S. C. Hall, who presented it to the late Lord Coleridge. It now flourishes, in strong old age, in a protected nook outside the library at Heath’s Court, Ottery St. Mary.

[204] George Dyer, 1755-1841, best remembered as the author of The History of the University of Cambridge, and a companion work on The Privileges of the University of Cambridge, began life as a Baptist minister, but settled in London as a man of letters in 1792. As a “brother-Grecian” he was introduced to Coleridge in 1794, in the early days of pantisocracy, and probably through him became intimate with Lamb and Southey. He contributed “The Show, an English Eclogue,” and other poems, to the Annual Anthology of 1799 and 1800. His poetry was a constant source of amused delight to Lamb and Coleridge. A pencil sketch of Dyer by Matilda Betham is in the British Museum. Letters of Charles Lamb, i. 125-128 et passim; Southey’s Life and Correspondence, i. 218 et passim.

[205] George Cattermole, 1800-1868, to whose “peculiar gifts and powerful genius” Mr. Ruskin has borne testimony, was eminent as an architectural draughtsman and water-colour painter. With his marvellous illustrations of “Master Humphrey’s Clock” all the world is familiar. Dict. of Nat. Biog. art. “George Cattermole.” His brother Richard was Secretary of the Royal Society of Literature, of which Coleridge was appointed a Royal Associate in 1825. Copies of this and of other letters from Coleridge to Cattermole were kindly placed at my disposal by Mr. James M. Menzies of 24, Carlton Hill, St. John’s Wood.

[206] Harriet Macklin, Coleridge’s faithful attendant for the last seven or eight years of his life. On his deathbed he left a solemn request in writing that his family should make a due acknowledgment of her services. It was to her that Lamb, when he visited Highgate after Coleridge’s death, made a present of five guineas.

[207] Dr. Chalmers represented the visit as having lasted three hours, and that during that “stricken” period he only got occasional glimpses of what the prophet “would be at.” His little daughter, however, was so moved by the “mellifluous flow of discourse” that, when “the music ceased, her overwrought feelings found relief in tears.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative, by J. Dykes Campbell, 1894, p. 260, footnote.

[208] A disciple and amanuensis, to whom, it is believed, he dictated two quarto volumes on “The History of Logic” and “The Elements of Logic,” which originally belonged to Joseph Henry Green, and are now in the possession of Mr. C. A. Ward of Chingford Hatch. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative, by J. Dykes Campbell, 1894, pp. 250, 251; Athenæum, July 1, 1893, art. “Coleridge’s Logic.”

[209] Henry Nelson Coleridge, 1798-1843, was the fifth son of Colonel James Coleridge of Heath’s Court, Ottery St. Mary. His marriage with the poet’s daughter took place on September 3, 1829. He was the author of Six Months in the West Indies, 1825, and an Introduction to the Study of the Greek Poets, 1830. He practised as a chancery barrister and won distinction in his profession. The later years of his life were devoted to the reëditing of his uncle’s published works, and to throwing into a connected shape the literary as distinguished from the philosophical section of his unpublished MSS. The Table Talk, the best known of Coleridge’s prose works, appeared in 1835. Four volumes of Literary Remains, including the “Lectures on Shakespeare and other Dramatists,” were issued 1836-1839. The third edition of The Friend, 1837, the Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, 1840, and the fifth edition of Aids to Reflection, 1843, followed in succession. The second edition of the Biographia Literaria, which “he had prepared in part,” was published by his widow in 1847.

A close study of the original documents which were at my uncle’s disposal enables me to bear testimony to his editorial skill, to his insight, his unwearied industry, his faithfulness. Of the charm of his appearance, and the brilliance of his conversation, I have heard those who knew him speak with enthusiasm. He died, from an affection of the spine, in January, 1843.

[210] This lady was for many years governess in the family of Dr. Crompton of Eaton Hall, near Liverpool. Memoirs and Letters of Sara Coleridge, London, 1873, i. 8 109-116.

[211] Sir William Rowan Hamilton, 1805-1865, the great mathematician, was at this time Professor of Astronomy at Dublin. He was afterwards appointed Astronomer Royal of Ireland. He was, as is well known, a man of culture and a poet; and it was partly to ascertain his views on scientific questions, and partly to interest him in his verses, that Hamilton was anxious to be made known to Coleridge. He had begun a correspondence with Wordsworth as early as 1827, and Wordsworth, on the occasion of his tour in Ireland in 1829, visited Hamilton at the Observatory. Miss Lawrence’s introduction led to an interview, but a letter which Hamilton wrote to Coleridge in the spring of 1832 remained unanswered. In a second letter, dated February 3, 1833, he speaks of a “Lecture on Astronomy” which he forwards for Coleridge’s acceptance, and also of “some love-poems to a lady to whom I am shortly to be married.” The love-poems, eight sonnets, which are smoothly turned and are charming enough, have survived, but the lecture has disappeared. The interest of this remarkable letter lies in the double appeal to Coleridge as a scientific authority and a literary critic. Coleridge’s reply, if reply there was, would be read with peculiar interest. In a letter to Mr. Aubrey de Vere, May 28, 1832, he thus records his impressions of Coleridge: “Coleridge is rather to be considered as a Faculty than as a Mind; and I did so consider him. I seemed rather to listen to an oracular voice, to be circumfused in a Divine ὀμφὴ, than—as in the presence of Wordsworth—to hold commune with an exalted man.” Life of W. Wordsworth, iii. 157-174, 210, etc.

[212] He is referring to a final effort to give up the use of opium altogether. It is needless to say that, after a trial of some duration, the attempt was found to be impracticable. It has been strenuously denied, as though it had been falsely asserted, that under the Gillmans’ care Coleridge overcame the habit of taking laudanum in more or less unusual quantities. Gillman, while he maintains that his patient in the use of narcotics satisfied the claims of duty, makes no such statement; and the confessions or outpourings from the later note-books which are included in the Life point to a different conclusion. That after his settlement at Highgate, in 1816, the habit was regulated and brought under control, and that this change for the better was due to the Gillmans’ care and to his own ever-renewed efforts to be free, none can gainsay. There was a moral struggle, and into that “sore agony” it would be presumption to intrude; but to a moral victory Coleridge laid no claim. And, at the last, it was “mercy,” not “praise,” for which he pleaded.

[213] The notes on Asgill’s Treatises were printed in the Literary Remains, Coleridge’s Works, 1853, v. 545-550, and in Notes Theological and Political, London, 1853, pp. 103-109.

[214] Admirers of Dr. Magee, 1765-1831, who was successively Bishop of Raphoe, 1819, and Archbishop of Dublin, 1822. He was the author of Discourses on the Scriptural Doctrines of the Atonement. He was grandfather of the late Archbishop of York, better known as Bishop of Peterborough.

[215] I am indebted to Mr. John Henry Steinmetz, a younger brother of Coleridge’s friend and ardent disciple, for a copy of this letter. It was addressed, he informs me, to his brother’s friend, the late Mr. John Peirse Kennard, of Hordle Cliff, Hants, father of the late Sir John Coleridge Kennard, Bart., M. P. for Salisbury, and of Mr. Adam Steinmetz Kennard, of Crawley Court Hants, at whose baptism the poet was present, and to whom he addressed the well-known letter (Letter CCLX.), “To my Godchild, Adam Steinmetz Kennard.”

[216] See Table Talk, August 14, 1832.

[217] So, too, of Keats. See Table Talk, etc., Bell & Sons. 1884, Talk for August 14, 1832. Table p. 179.

[218] “The sot would reject the poisoned cup, yet the trembling-hand with which he raises his daily or hourly draught to his lips has not left him ignorant that this, too, is altogether a poison.” The Friend, Essay xiv.; Coleridge’s Works, ii. 100.

[219] The motto of this theme, (January 19, 1794), of which I possess a transcript in Coleridge’s handwriting, or perhaps the original copy, is—

Quid fas
Atque nefas tandem incipiunt sentire peractis
Criminibus.

The theme was selected by Boyer for insertion in his Liber Aureus of school exercises in prose and verse, now in the possession of James Boyer, Esq., of the Coopers’ Company. The sentence to which Coleridge alludes ran thus: “As if we were in some great sea-vortex, every moment we perceive our ruin more clearly, every moment we are impelled towards it with greater force.”

The essay was printed for the first time in the Illustrated London News, April 1, 1893.

[220] This letter, which is addressed in Coleridge’s handwriting, “Mrs. Aders, favoured by H. Gillman,” and endorsed in pencil, “S. T. C.’s letter for Miss Denman,” refers to the new edition of his poetical works which Coleridge had begun to see through the press. Apparently he had intended that the “Epitaph” should be inscribed on the outline of a headstone, and that this should illustrate, by way of vignette, the last page of the volume.

[221] Of the exact date of Sterling’s first visit to Highgate there is no record. It may, however, be taken for granted that his intimacy with Coleridge began in 1828, when he was in his twenty-third year, and continued until the autumn of 1833,—perhaps lasted until Coleridge’s death. Unlike Maurice, and Maurice’s disciple, Kingsley, Sterling outlived his early enthusiasm for Coleridge and his acceptance of his teaching. It may be said, indeed, that, thanks to the genius of his second master, Carlyle, he suggests both the reaction against and the rejection of Coleridge. Of that rejection Carlyle, in his Life of Sterling, made himself the mouth-piece. It is idle to say of that marvellous but disillusioning presentment that it is untruthful, or exaggerated, or unkind. It is a sketch from the life, and who can doubt that it is lifelike? But other eyes saw another Coleridge who held them entranced. To them he was the seer of the vision beautiful, the “priest of invisible rites behind the veil of the senses,” and to their ears his voice was of one who brought good tidings of reconciliation and assurance. Many, too, who cared for none of these things, were attracted to the man. Like the wedding-guest in the Ancient Mariner, they stood still. No other, they felt, was so wise, so loveable. They, too, were eye-witnesses, and their portraiture has not been outpainted by Carlyle. Apart from any expression of opinion, it is worth while to note that Carlyle saw Coleridge for the last time in the spring of 1825, and that the Life of Sterling was composed more than a quarter of a century later. His opinion of the man had, indeed, changed but little, as the notes and letters of 1824-25 clearly testify, but his criticism of the writer was far less appreciative than it had been in Coleridge’s lifetime. The following extracts from a letter of Sterling to Gillman, dated “Hurstmonceaux, October 9, 1834,” are evidence that his feelings towards Coleridge were at that time those of a reverent disciple:—

“The Inscription [in Highgate Church] will forever be enough to put to shame the heartless vanity of a thousand such writers as the Opium Eater. As a portrait, or even as a hint for one, his papers seem to me worse than useless.

“If it is possible, I will certainly go to Highgate, and wait on Mrs. Gillman and yourself. I have travelled the road thither with keen and buoyant expectation, and returned with high and animating remembrances oftener than any other in England. Hereafter, too, it will not have lost its charm. There is not only all this world of recollection, but the dwelling of those who best knew and best loved his work.” Life of Sterling, 1871, pp. 46-54; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative, by J. Dykes Campbell, pp. 259-261; British Museum, add. MS. 34,225, f. 194.

[222] The following unpublished lines were addressed by Coleridge to this young lady, a neighbour, I presume, and friend of the Gillmans. They must be among the last he ever wrote:—

ELISA.
Translation of Claudian.

Dulcia dona mihi tu mittis semper Elisa!
Sweet gifts to me thou sendest always, Elisa!

Et quicquid mittis, Thura putare decet.
And whatever thou sendest, Sabean odours to think it it behoves me.

The whole adapted from an epigram of Claudius by substituting Thura for mella, the original distich being in return for a Present of Honey.

Imitation.
Sweet Gift! and always doth Eliza send
Sweet Gifts and full of fragrance to her Friend.
Enough for Him to know they come from Her,
Whate’er she sends is Frankincense and Myrrh.

Another on the same subject by S. T. C. himself:—

Semper, Eliza! mihi tu suaveolentia donas:
Nam quicquid donas, te redolere puto.

Literal translation: Always, Eliza! to me things of sweet odour thou presentest. For whatever thou presentest, I fancy redolent of thyself.

Whate’er thou giv’st, it still is sweet to me,
For still I find it redolent of thee!

[223] Philip Van Artevelde.

[224] Sir Henry Taylor.

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