Volume 2 — CHAPTER XIII NEW LIFE AND NEW FRIENDS 1816-1821

CHAPTER XIII NEW LIFE AND NEW FRIENDS 1816-1821

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

CCVIII. TO JAMES GILLMAN.

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

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

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

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

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

S. T. Coleridge.

CCIX. TO DANIEL STUART.

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

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

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

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

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

CCX. TO THE SAME.

Monday, May 13, 1816.

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

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

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

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

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

Your obliged and sincere friend,

S. T. Coleridge.

CCXI. TO JOHN MURRAY.

Highgate, February 27, 1817.

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

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

S. T. Coleridge.

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

Mr. Murray, Bookseller, Albemarle Street, Piccadilly.

CCXII. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

[May, 1817.]

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

Yours sincerely, S. T. Coleridge.

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

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

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

June, 1817.

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

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

God bless you!

S. T. Coleridge.

CCXIV. TO THOMAS POOLE.

[July 22, 1817.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

S. T. Coleridge.

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

Little Hampton, October [29], 1817.

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

Yours truly, S. T. Coleridge.

CCXVI. TO THE SAME.

Little Hampton, Sussex, November 6, 1817.

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

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

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

S. T. Coleridge.

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

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

Highgate, Friday morning, November 14, 1817.

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

Your obliged S. T. Coleridge.

CCXVIII. TO THE SAME.

[December 13, 1817.]

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

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

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

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

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

S. T. Coleridge.

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

CCXIX. TO CHARLES AUGUSTUS TULK.[163]

Highgate, Thursday evening, 1818.

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

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

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

S. T. Coleridge.

Thursday evening, Highgate.

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

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

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

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

S. T. C.

O means that I am perplexed and have no opinion.

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

CCXX. TO J. H. GREEN.

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

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

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

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

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

Yours, S. T. Coleridge.

CCXXI. TO MRS. GILLMAN.

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

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

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

S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. Not to put Essex after Maldon.

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

Highgate, December, 1818.

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

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

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

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

Your sincere S. T. Coleridge.

CCXXIII. TO THOMAS ALLSOP.

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

December 2, 1818.

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

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

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

CCXXIV. TO J. H. GREEN.

[Postmark, January 16, 1819.]

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

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

Your obliged friend, S. T. Coleridge.

CCXXV. TO JAMES GILLMAN.

[Ramsgate, Postmark, August 20, 1819.]

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

God bless you and S. T. C.

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

[Highgate, October 28, 1819.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CCXXVII. TO J. H. GREEN.

January 14, 1820.

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

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

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

Yours most affectionately, S. T. Coleridge.

CCXXVIII. TO THE SAME.

[May 25, 1820.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

S. T. Coleridge.

CCXXIX. TO CHARLES AUGUSTUS TULK.

February 12, 1821.

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

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

S. T. Coleridge.

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