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withdrawn from me.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
_un_pleasure, 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 _de_lusion, 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