Wordsworth, and me, on the top of them! I pray you do write to me immediately, and tell me what you mean by the possibility of your assuming a new occupation; [1] have you been successful to the extent of your expectations in your late chemical inquiries?
In your poem,[2] “impressive” is used for “impressible” or passive, is it not? If so, it is not English; life “diffusive” likewise is not English. The last stanza introduces “confusion” into my mind, and despondency–and has besides been so often said by the materialists, etc., that it is not worth repeating. If the poem had ended more originally, in short, but for the last stanza, I will venture to affirm that there were never so many lines which so uninterruptedly combined natural and beautiful words with strict philosophic truths, “i.e.”, scientifically philosophic. Of the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh stanzas, I am doubtful which is the most beautiful. Do not imagine that I cling to a fond love of future identity, but the thought which you have expressed in the last stanzas might be more grandly, and therefore more consolingly exemplified. I had forgot to say that sameness and identity are words too etymologically the same to be placed so close to each other.
As to myself, I am doing little worthy the relation. I write for Stuart in the “Morning Post”, and I am compelled by the god Pecunia, which was one name of the supreme Jupiter, to give a volume of letters from Germany, which will be a decent “lounge” book, and not an atom more. The “Christabel” was running up to 1,300 lines, and was so much admired by Wordsworth, that he thought it indelicate to print two volumes with his name, in which so much of another man’s was included; and which was of more consequence, the poem was in direct opposition to the very purpose for which the lyrical ballads were published, viz., an experiment to see how far those passions which alone give any value to extraordinary incidents were capable of interesting in and for themselves in the incidents of common life. We mean to publish the “Christabel”, therefore, with a long blank-verse poem of Wordsworth’s, entitled “The Pedlar”.[3] I assure you I think very differently of “Christabel”. I would rather have written “Ruth”, and “Nature’s Lady”,[4] than a million such poems. But why do I calumniate my own spirit by saying I would rather? God knows it is as delightful to me that they “are” written. I “know” that at present, and I “hope” that it “will” be so; my mind has “disciplined” itself into a willing exertion of its powers, without any reference to their comparative value.
I cannot speak favourably of W.’s health, but indeed he has not done common justice to Dr. Beddoes’s kind prescriptions. I saw his countenance darken, and all his hopes vanish, when he saw the “prescriptions”–his “scepticism” concerning medicines! nay, it is not enough “scepticism”! Yet, now that peas and beans are over, I have hopes that he will in good earnest make a fair and full trial. I rejoice with sincere joy at Beddoes’s recovery.
Wordsworth is fearful you have been much teazed by the printers on his account, but you can sympathise with him. The works which I gird myself up to attack as soon as money concerns will permit me, are the “Life of Lessing”, and the “Essay on Poetry”. The latter is still more at my heart than the former: its title would be an essay on the elements of poetry–it would in reality be a “disguised” system of morals and politics.
When you write, and do write soon, tell me how I can get your essay on the nitrous oxide. If you desired Johnson to have one sent to Lackington’s, to be placed in Mr. Crosthwaite’s monthly parcel for Keswick, I should receive it. Are your galvanic discoveries important? What do they lead to? All this is “ultra crepidation”, but would to heaven I had as much knowledge as I have sympathy! My wife and children are well; the baby was dying some weeks ago, so the good people would have it baptized; his name is Derwent Coleridge, so called from the river, for fronting our house the Greta runs into the Derwent. Had it been a girl, the name should have been Greta. By the by, Greta, or rather Grieta, is exactly the Cocytus of the Greeks; the word, literally rendered in modern English, is, “The loud Lamenter;” to griet, in the Cambrian dialect, signifying to roar aloud for grief or pain, and it does “roar” with a vengeance!
I will say nothing about Spring–a thirsty man tries to think of anything but the stream when he knows it to be ten miles off!
God bless you! Your most affectionate
S. T. COLERIDGE.[5]
Another letter to Godwin at this time indicates that Coleridge was still expecting to be able to finish “Christabel”, which as a completed poem, Coleridge, as we have already seen, calculated would run up to 1,300 lines.
[Footnote 1: No doubt the leaving of the Pneumatic for the Royal Institution.]
[Footnote 2: That entitled, “Written after Recovery from a Dangerous Illness.” It is to be found in the “Memoirs of his Life”, vol. i, p. 390. Coleridge’s critical remarks apply to it as it was first written; the words objected to are not to be found in it in its corrected printed state.]
[Footnote 1: A name changed to “The Excursion”.]
[Footnote 2: “Three years she grew in sun and shower.”]
[Footnote 5: Letter CXI is our 96.]
LETTER 97. TO GODWIN
Monday, Oct. 13, 1800.
Dear Godwin,
I have been myself too frequently a grievous delinquent in the article of letter-writing to feel any inclination to reproach my friends when, peradventure, they have been long silent. But, this out of the question, I did not expect a speedier answer; for I had anticipated the circumstances which you assign as the causes of your delay.
An attempt to finish a poem of mine for insertion in the second volume of the “Lyrical Ballads”, has thrown me so fearfully back in my bread and beef occupations, that I shall scarcely be able to justify myself in putting you to the expense of the few lines which I may be able to scrawl in the present paper–but some parts in your letter interested me deeply, and I wished to tell you so. First, then, you know Kemble, and I do not. But my conjectural judgments concerning his character lead me to persuade an absolute passive obedience to his opinion, and this, too, because I would leave to every man his own trade. “Your” trade has been, in the present instance, “first” to furnish a wise pleasure to your fellow-beings in general, and, “secondly”, to give Mr. Kemble and his associates the power of delighting that part of your fellow-beings assembled in a theatre. As to what relates to the first point, I should be sorry indeed if greater men than Mr. Kemble could induce you to alter a “but” to a “yet” contrary to your own convictions. Above all things, an author ought to be sincere to the public; and, when William Godwin stands in the title-page, it implies that W. G. approves that which follows. Besides, the mind and finer feelings are blunted by such obsequiousness. But in the theatre it is Godwin and Co. “ex professo”. I should regard it in almost the same light as if I had written a song for Haydn to compose and Mara to sing; I know, indeed, what is poetry, but I do not know so well as he and she what will suit his notes or her voice. That actors and managers are often wrong is true, but still their trade is “their” trade, and the presumption is in favour of their being right. For the press, I should wish you to be solicitously nice; because you are to exhibit before a larger and more respectable multitude than a theatre presents to you, and in a new part, that of a poet employing his philosophical knowledge practically. If it be possible, come, therefore, and let us discuss every page and every line.
Now for something which, I would fain believe, is still more important, namely, the propriety of your future philosophical speculations. Your second objection, derived from the present “ebb” of opinion, will be best answered by the fact that Mackintosh and his followers have the “flow”. This is greatly in your favour, for mankind are at present gross reasoners. They reason in a perpetual antithesis; Mackintosh is an oracle, and Godwin therefore a fool. Now it is morally impossible that Mackintosh and the sophists of his school can retain this opinion. You may well exclaim with Job, “O that my adversary would write a book!” When he publishes, it will be all over with him, and then the minds of men will incline strongly to those who would point out in intellectual perceptions a source of moral progressiveness. Every man in his heart is in favour of your general principles. A party of dough-baked democrats of fortune were weary of being dissevered from their fellow rich men. They want to say something in defence of turning round. Mackintosh puts that something into their mouths, and for awhile they will admire and be-praise him. In a little while these men will have fallen back into the ranks from which they had stepped out, and life is too melancholy a thing for men in general for the doctrine of unprogressiveness to remain popular. Men cannot long retain their faith in the Heaven “above” the blue sky, but a Heaven they will have, and he who reasons best on the side of the universal wish will be the most popular philosopher. As to your first objection, that you are a logician, let me say that your habits are analytic, but that you have not read enough of travels, voyages, and biography–especially men’s lives of themselves–and you have too soon submitted your notions to other men’s censures in conversation. A man should nurse his opinions in privacy and self-fondness for a long time, and seek for sympathy and love, not for detection or censure. Dismiss, my dear fellow, your theory of Collision of Ideas, and take up that of Mutual Propulsion. I wish to write more, and state to you a lucrative job, which would, I think, be eminently serviceable to your own mind, and which you would have every opportunity of doing here. I now express a serious wish that you would come and look out for a house. Did Stuart remit you L10. on my account?
S. T. COLERIDGE.
I would gladly write any verses, but to a prologue or epilogue I am absolutely incompetent.
Coleridge was a tremendous walker and hill climber. The following letter narrates a curious adventure in a storm among the mountains.
LETTER 98. TO DAVY
October 18, 1800.
My dear Davy,
Our mountains northward end in the mountain Carrock–one huge, steep, enormous bulk of stones, desolately variegated with the heath plant; at its foot runs the river Calder, and a narrow vale between it and the mountain Bowscale, so narrow, that in its greatest width it is not more than a furlong. But that narrow vale is “so” green, “so” beautiful, there are moods in which a man might weep to look at it, On this mountain Carrock, at the summit of which are the remains of a vast Druid circle of stones, I was wandering, when a thick cloud came on, and wrapped me in such darkness, that I could not see ten yards before me, and with the cloud a storm of wind and hail, the like of which I had never before seen and felt. At the very summit is a cone of stones, built by the shepherds, and called the Carrock Man. Such cones are on the tops of almost all our mountains, and they are all called “men”. At the bottom of the Carrock Man I seated myself for shelter, but the wind became so fearful and tyrannous, that I was apprehensive some of the stones might topple down upon me, so I groped my way farther down and came to three rocks, placed on this wise 1/3\2*** each one supported by the other like a child’s house of cards, and in the hollow and screen which they made, I sate for a long while sheltered, as if I had been in my own study in which I am now writing: there I sate with a total feeling worshipping the power and “eternal link” of energy. The darkness vanished as by enchantment; far off, far, far off to the south, the mountains of Glaramara and Great Gable and their family appeared distinct, in deepest, sablest “blue”. I rose, and behind me was a rainbow bright as the brightest. I descended by the side of a torrent, and passed, or rather crawled (for I was forced to descend on all fours), by many a naked waterfall, till fatigued and hungry (and with a finger almost broken, and which remains swelled to the size of two fingers), I reached the narrow vale, and the single house nestled in ash and sycamores. I entered to claim the universal hospitality of this country; but instead of the life and comfort usual in these lonely houses, I saw dirt, and every appearance of misery–a pale woman sitting by a peat fire. I asked her for bread and milk, and she sent a small child to fetch it, but did not rise herself. I ate very heartily of the black, sour bread, and drank a bowl of milk, and asked her to permit me to pay her. “Nay,” says she, “we are not so scant as that–you are right welcome; but do you know any help for the rheumatics, for I have been so long ailing that I am almost fain to die?” So I advised her to eat a great deal of mustard, having seen in an advertisement something about essence of mustard curing the most obstinate cases of rheumatism. But do write me, and tell me some cure for the rheumatism; it is in her shoulders, and the small of her back chiefly. I wish much to go off with some bottles of stuff to the poor creature. I should walk the ten miles as ten yards. With love and honour,
My dear Davy, yours,
S. T. COLERIDGE. [1]
[Footnote 1: Letter CXII is our 98.]
The next letter relates how Coleridge wrote the Second Part of “Christabel”, which had been composed before 4th October (Dorothy Wordsworth’s “Journals”, i, 51).
LETTER 99. TO JOSIAH WEDGWOOD
Keswick, Nov. 1, 1800.
My dear Sir,
I would fain believe that the experiment which your brother has made in the West Indies is not wholly a discouraging one. If a warm climate did nothing but only prevented him from getting worse, it surely evidenced some power; and perhaps a climate equally favourable in a country of more various interest, Italy, or the South of France, may tempt your brother to make a longer trial. If (disciplining myself into silent cheerfulness) I could be of any comfort to him by being his companion and attendant, for two or three months, on the supposition that he should wish to travel, and was at a loss for a companion more fit, I would go with him with a willing affection. You will easily see, my dear friend, that I say this only to increase the range of your brother’s choice–for even in choosing there is some pleasure.
There happen frequently little odd coincidences in time, that recall momentary faith in the notion of sympathies acting in absence. I heard of your brother’s return, for the first time, on Monday last, the day on which your letter is dated, from Stoddart. Had it rained on my naked skin I could not have felt more strangely. The 300 or 400 miles that are between us seemed converted into a moral distance; and I knew that the whole of this silence I was myself accountable for; for I ended my last letter by promising to follow it with a second and longer one, before you could answer the first. But immediately on my arrival in this country I undertook to finish a poem which I had begun, entitled “Christabel”, for a second volume of the “Lyrical Ballads”. I tried to perform my promise, but the deep unutterable disgust which I had suffered in the translation of the accursed “Wallenstein”, seemed to have stricken me with barrenness; for I tried and tried, and nothing would come of it. I desisted with a deeper dejection than I am willing to remember. The wind from the Skiddaw and Borrowdale was often as loud as wind need be, and many a walk in the clouds in the mountains did I take; but all would not do, till one day I dined out at the house of a neighbouring clergyman, and some how or other drank so much wine, that I found some effort and dexterity requisite to balance myself on the hither edge of sobriety. The next day my verse-making faculties returned to me, and I proceeded successfully, till my poem grew so long, and in Wordsworth’s opinion so impressive, that he rejected it from his volume, as disproportionate both in size and merit, and as discordant in its character. In the mean time I had gotten myself entangled in the old sorites of the old sophist,–procrastination. I had suffered my necessary businesses to accumulate so terribly, that I neglected to write to any one, till the pain I suffered from not writing made me waste as many hours in dreaming about it as would have sufficed for the letter writing of half a life. But there is something beside time requisite for the writing of a letter–at least with me. My situation here is indeed a delightful situation; but I feel what I have lost–feel it deeply–it recurs more often and more painfully than I had anticipated, indeed so much so, that I scarcely ever feel myself impelled, that is to say, pleasurably impelled to write to Poole. I used to feel myself more at home in his great windy parlour than in my own cottage. We were well suited to each other–my animal spirits corrected his inclination to melancholy; and there was something both in his understanding and in his affections, so healthy and manly, that my mind freshened in his company, and my ideas and habits of thinking acquired day after day more of substance and reality. Indeed, indeed, my dear, sir, with tears in my eyes, and with all my heart and soul, I wish it were as easy for us all to meet as it was when you lived at Upcott. Yet when I revise the step I have taken, I know not how I could have acted otherwise than I did act. Everything I promised myself in this country has answered far beyond my expectation. The room in which I write commands six distinct landscapes–the two lakes, the vale, the river and mountains, and mists, and clouds and sunshine, make endless combinations, as if heaven and earth were for ever talking to each other. Often when in a deep study, I have walked to the window and remained there looking without seeing; all at once the lake of Keswick and the fantastic mountains of Borrowdale, at the head of it, have entered into my mind, with a suddenness as if I had been snatched out of Cheapside and placed for the first time, in the spot where I stood–and that is a delightful feeling–these fits and trances of novelty received from a long known object. The river Greta flows behind our house, roaring like an untamed son of the hills, then winds round and glides away in the front, so that we live in a peninsula. But besides this etherial eye-feeding we have very substantial conveniences. We are close to the town, where we have respectable and neighbourly acquaintance, and a most sensible and truly excellent medical man. Our garden is part of a large nursery garden, which is the same to us and as private as if the whole had been our own, and thus too we have delightful walks without passing our garden gates. My landlord who lives in the sister house, for the two houses are built so as to look like one great one, is a modest and kind man, of a singular character. By the severest economy he raised himself from a carrier into the possession of a comfortable independence. He was always very fond of reading, and has collected nearly 500 volumes, of our most esteemed modern writers, such as Gibbon, Hume, Johnson, etc. etc. His habits of economy and simplicity, remain with him, and yet so very disinterested a man I scarcely ever knew. Lately, when I wished to settle with him about the rent of our house, he appeared much affected, told me that my living near him, and the having so much of Hartley’s company were great comforts to him and his housekeeper, that he had no children to provide for, and did not mean to marry; and in short, that he did not want any rent at all from me. This of course I laughed him out of; but he absolutely refused to receive any rent for the first half-year, under the pretext that the house was not completely furnished. Hartley quite lives at the house, and it is as you may suppose, no small joy to my wife to have a good affectionate motherly woman divided from her only by a wall. Eighteen miles from our house lives Sir Guilfred Lawson, who has a princely library, chiefly of natural history–a kind and generous, but weak and ostentatious sort of man, who has been abundantly civil to me. Among other raree shows, he keeps a wild beast or two, with some eagles, etc. The master of the beasts at the Exeter ‘Change, sent him down a large bear,–with it a long letter of directions, concerning the food, etc. of the animal, and many solicitations respecting other agreeable quadrupeds which he was desirous to send to the baronet, at a moderate price, and concluding in this manner: “and remain your honour’s most devoted humble servant, J.P. Permit me, sir Guilfred, to send you a buffalo and a rhinoceros.” As neat a postscript as I ever heard–the tradesmanlike coolness with which these pretty little animals occurred to him just at the finishing of his letter! You will in three weeks see the letters on the ‘Rise and Condition of the German Boors’. I found it convenient to make up a volume out of my journey, etc. in North Germany–and the letters (your name of course erased) are in the printer’s hands. I was so weary of transcribing and composing, that when I found those more carefully written than the rest, I even sent them off as they were.
* * * * *
My littlest one is a very stout boy indeed. He is christened by the name of “Derwent,”–a sort of sneaking affection you see for the poetical and novellish, which I disguised to myself under the show, that my brothers had so many children Johns, Jameses, Georges, etc. etc., that a handsome Christian-like name was not to be had except by encroaching on the names of my little nephews. If you are at Gunville at Christmas, I hold out hopes to myself that I shall be able to pass a week with you there. I mentioned to you at Upcott a kind of comedy that I had committed to writing in part. This is in the wind.
Wordsworth’s second vol. of the ‘Lyrical Ballads’ will, I hope, and almost believe, afford you as unmingled pleasure as is in the nature of a collection of very various poems to afford to one individual mind. Sheridan has sent to him too–requests him to write a tragedy for Drury Lane. But W. will not be diverted by anything from the prosecution of his great work.
Southey’s ‘Thalaba’, in twelve books, is going to the press.
Remember me with great affection to your brother, and present my kindest respects to Mrs. Wedgwood. Your late governess wanted one thing, which where there is health is I think indispensable in the moral character of a young person–a light and cheerful heart. She interested me a good deal. She appears to me to have been injured by going out of the common way without any of that imagination, which if it be a Jack o’ Lanthorn to lead us out of our way, is however, at the same time a torch to light us whither we are going. A whole essay might be written on the danger of thinking without images. God bless you, my dear sir, and him who is with grateful and affectionate esteem,
Yours ever,
S. T. COLERIDGE
Josiah Wedgwood.
Coleridge was still in money difficulties, and the following letter is chiefly about his indebtedness to the Wedgwoods.
LETTER 100. TO JOSIAH WEDGWOOD
November 12, 1800.
My dear sir,
I received your kind letter, with the L20. My eyes are in such a state of inflammation that I might as well write blindfold, they are so blood-red. I have had leeches twice, and have now a blister behind my right ear. How I caught the cold, in the first instance, I can scarcely guess; but I improved it to its present glorious state, by taking long walks all the mornings, spite of the wind, and writing late at night, while my eyes were weak.
I have made some rather curious observations on the rising up of spectra in the eye, in its inflamed state, and their influence on ideas, etc., but I cannot see to make myself intelligible to you. Present my kindest remembrance to Mrs. W. and your brother. Pray did you ever pay any particular attention to the first time of your little ones smiling and laughing? Both I and Mrs. C. have carefully watched our little one, and noticed down all the circumstances, under which he smiled, and under which he laughed, for the first six times, nor have we remitted our attention; but I have not been able to derive the least confirmation of Hartley’s or Darwin’s Theory. You say most truly, my dear sir, that a pursuit is necessary. Pursuit, for even praiseworthy employment, merely for good, or general good, is not sufficient for happiness, nor fit for man.
I have not at present made out how I stand in pecuniary ways, but I believe that I have anticipated on the next year to the amount of Thirty or Forty pounds, probably more. God bless you, my dear sir, and your sincerely
Affectionate friend,
S. T. COLERIDGE.
Josiah Wedgwood, Esq.
The publication of the “Wallenstein” had brought on Coleridge the odium of being an advocate of the German Theatre, at this time identified with the melo-dramatic sentimentalism of Kotzbue and his school. English opinion did not then discriminate between a Schiller and a Kotzebue. The following curious disclaimer appeared in the “Monthly Review” on 18th November 1800.
LETTER 101. TO THE EDITOR OF THE “MONTHLY REVIEW”.
Greta Hall, Keswick,
Nov. 18, 1800.
In the review of my translation of Schiller’s “Wallenstein” (“Rev”. for October), I am numbered among the partisans of the German theatre. As I am confident there is no passage in my preface or notes from which such an opinion can be legitimately formed, and as the truth would not have been exceeded if the direct contrary had been affirmed, I claim it of your justice that in your Answers to Correspondents you would remove this misrepresentation. The mere circumstance of translating a manuscript play is not even evidence that I admired that one play, much less that I am a general admirer of the plays in that language.
I remain, etc.,
S. T. COLERIDGE.
During the latter half of 1800 Dorothy Wordsworth’s “Journal” contains many entries showing that Coleridge and the Wordsworths were in frequent communication with each other. Coleridge thought nothing of traversing the dozen miles between Keswick and Dove Cottage by the highway, or over the hill passes. Wordsworth and Dorothy, too, went often to Keswick, and occasionally stayed with the Coleridges (“Grasmere Journals”, i, 43-60).
Amid these literary and poetic meetings between the poets and their families, other correspondents were not forgotten by Coleridge. The following two letters to Davy indicate that the poets were taking some interest in science.
LETTER 102. TO DAVY
Greta Hall, Tuesday night, December 2, 1800.
My dear Davy,
By an accident I did not receive your letter till this evening. I would that you had added to the account of your indisposition the probable causes of it. It has left me anxious whether or no you have not exposed yourself to unwholesome influences in your chemical pursuits. There are “few” beings both of hope and performance, but few who combine the “are” and the “will be.” For God’s sake, therefore, my dear fellow, do not rip open the bird that lays the golden eggs. I have not received your book. I read yesterday a sort of medical review about it. I suppose Longman will send it to me when he sends down the “Lyrical Ballads” to Wordsworth. I am solicitous to read the latter part. Did there appear to you any remote analogy between the case I translated from the German Magazine and the effects produced by your gas? Did Carlisle[1] ever communicate to you, or has he in any way published his facts concerning “pain”, which he mentioned when we were with him? It is a subject which “exceedingly interests” me. I want to read something by somebody expressly on “pain”, if only to give an “arrangement” to my own thoughts, though if it were well treated, I have little doubt it would revolutionize them. For the last month I have been trembling on through sands and swamps of evil and bodily grievance. My eyes have been inflamed to a degree that rendered reading and writing scarcely possible; and strange as it seems, the act of metre composition, as I lay in bed, perceptibly affected them, and my voluntary ideas were every minute passing, more or less transformed into vivid spectra. I had leeches repeatedly applied to my temples, and a blister behind my ear–and my eyes are now my own, but in the place where the blister was, six small but excruciating boils have appeared, and harass me almost beyond endurance. In the meantime my darling Hartley has been taken with a stomach illness, which has ended in the yellow jaundice; and this greatly alarms me. So much for the doleful! Amid all these changes, and humiliations, and fears, the sense of the Eternal abides in me, and preserves unsubdued my cheerful faith, that all I endure is full of blessings!
At times, indeed, I would fain be somewhat of a more tangible utility than I am; but so I suppose it is with all of us–one while cheerful, stirring, feeling in resistance nothing but a joy and a stimulus; another while drowsy, self-distrusting, prone to rest, loathing our own self-promises, withering our own hopes–our hopes, the vitality and cohesion of our being!
I purpose to have ‘Christabel’ published by itself–this I publish with confidence–but my travels in Germany come from me now with mortal pangs. Nothing but the most pressing necessity could have induced me–and even now I hesitate and tremble. Be so good as to have all that is printed of ‘Christabel’ sent to me per post.
Wordsworth has nearly finished the concluding poem. It is of a mild, unimposing character, but full of beauties to those short-necked men who have their hearts sufficiently near their heads–the relative distance of which (according to citizen Tourder, the French translator of Spallanzani) determines the sagacity or stupidity of all bipeds and quadrupeds.
There is a deep blue cloud over the heavens; the lake, and the vale, and the mountains, are all in darkness; only the ‘summits’ of all the mountains in long ridges, covered with snow, are bright to a dazzling excess. A glorious scene! Hartley was in my arms the other evening, looking at the sky; he saw the moon glide into a large cloud. Shortly after, at another part of the cloud, several stars sailed in. Says he, “Pretty creatures! they are going in to see after their mother moon.”
Remember me kindly to King. Write as often as you can; but above all things, my loved and honoured dear fellow, do not give up the idea of letting me and Skiddaw see you.
God love you!
S. T. COLERIDGE.
Tobin writes me that Thompson [2] has made some lucrative discovery. Do you know aught about it? Have you seen T. Wedgwood since his return? [3]
[Footnote 1: Afterwards Sir Antony, a distinguished surgeon.]
[Footnote 2: The late Mr. James Thompson, of Clitheroe.]
[Footnote 3: Letter CXIII is our 102; CXIV follows 102]
LETTER 103. TO DAVY
February 3, 1801.
My dear Davy–
I can scarcely reconcile it to my conscience to make you pay postage for another letter. O, what a fine unveiling of modern politics it would be if there were published a minute detail of all the sums received by Government from the Post establishment, and of all the outlets in which the sums so received flowed out again; and, on the other hand, all the domestic affections that had been stifled, all the intellectual progress that would have been, but is not, on account of the heavy tax, etc., etc. The letters of a nation ought to be paid for as an article of national expense. Well! but I did not take up this paper to flourish away in splenetic politics. A gentleman resident here, his name Calvert, an idle, good-hearted, and ingenious man, has a great desire to commence fellow-student with me and Wordsworth in chemistry. He is an intimate friend of Wordsworth’s, and he has proposed to W. to take a house which he (Calvert) has nearly built, called Windy Brow, in a delicious situation, scarce half a mile from Greta Hall, the residence of S. T. Coleridge, Esq., and so for him (Calvert) to live with them, ‘i.e.’, Wordsworth and his sister. In this case he means to build a little laboratory, etc. Wordsworth has not quite decided, but is strongly inclined to adopt the scheme, because he and his sister have before lived with Calvert on the same footing, and are much attached to him: because my health is so precarious and so much injured by wet, and his health, too, is like little potatoes, no great things, and therefore Grasmere (“thirteen” miles from Keswick) is too great a distance for us to enjoy each other’s society, without inconvenience, as much as it would be profitable for us both: and likewise because he feels it more necessary for him to have some intellectual pursuit less closely connected with deep passion than poetry, and is of course desirous, too, not to be so wholly ignorant of knowledge so exceedingly important. However, whether Wordsworth come or no, Calvert and I have determined to begin and go on. Calvert is a man of sense and some originality, and is besides what is well called a handy man. He is a good practical mechanic, etc., and is desirous to lay out any sum of money that is necessary. You know how long, how ardently I have wished to initiate myself in Chemical science, both for its own sake, and in no small degree likewise, my beloved friend, that I may be able to sympathize with all that you do and think. Sympathize blindly with it all I do even “now”, God knows! from the very middle of my heart’s heart, but I would fain sympathize with you in the light of knowledge. This opportunity is exceedingly precious to me, as on my own account I could not afford the least additional expense, having been already, by long and successive illnesses, thrown behindhand, so much, that for the next four or five months, I fear, let me work as hard as I can, I shall not be able to do what my heart within me “burns” to do, that is, to “concenter” my free mind to the affinities of the feelings with words and ideas under the title of “Concerning Poetry, and the nature of the Pleasures derived from it”. I have faith that I do understand the subject, and I am sure that if I write what I ought to do on it, the work would supersede all the books of metaphysics, and all the books of morals too. To whom shall a young man utter “his pride”, if not to a young man whom he loves?
I beg you, therefore, my dear Davy, to write to me a long letter when you are at leisure, informing me:–Firstly, What books it will be well for me and Calvert to purchase. Secondly, Directions for a convenient little laboratory. Thirdly, To what amount apparatus would run in expense, and whether or no you would be so good as to superintend its making at Bristol. Fourthly, Give me your advice how to “begin”. And, fifthly, and lastly, and mostly, do send a “drop” of hope to my parched tongue, that you will, if you can, come and visit me in the spring. Indeed, indeed, you ought to see this country, this beautiful country, and then the joy you would send into me!
The shape of this paper will convince you with what eagerness I began this letter; I really did not see that it was not a sheet.
I have been ‘thinking’ vigorously during my illness, so that I cannot say that my long, long wakeful nights have been all lost to me. The subject of my meditations has been the relations of thoughts to things–in the language of Hume, of ideas to impressions. I may be truly described in the words of Descartes: I have been “res cogitans, id est, dubitans, affirmans, negans, pauca intelligens, multa ignorans, volens, nolens, imaginans etiam, et sentiens.” I please myself with believing that you will receive no small pleasure from the result of these broodings, although I expect in you (in some points) a determined opponent, but I say of my mind in this respect: “Manet imperterritus ille hostem magnanimum opperiens, et mole sua stat.” Every poor fellow has his proud hour sometimes, and this I suppose is mine.
I am better in every respect than I was, but am still ‘very feeble’. The weather has been woefully against me for the last fortnight, having rained here almost incessantly. I take quantities of bark, but the effect is (to express myself with the dignity of science) “x” = 0000000, and I shall not gather strength, or that little suffusion of bloom which belongs to my healthy state, till I can walk out.
God bless you, my dear Davy! and
Your ever affectionate friend,
S. T. COLERIDGE.
P.S.–An electrical machine, and a number of little nicknacks connected with it, Mr. Calvert has.–“Write”.[1]
[Footnote l: Letter CXV is our 103.]
Josiah Wade, the early Bristol friend of Coleridge, who probably was one of the three friends who assisted him with funds to start ‘The Watchman’, was now intending to travel in Germany. He applied to Coleridge for advice regarding the mode of travelling, and Coleridge tendered his counsel in the following characteristic epistle.
LETTER 104. To JOSIAH WADE
March 6, 1801.
My very dear friend,
I have even now received your letter. My habits of thinking and feeling, have not hitherto inclined me to personify commerce in any such shape, so as to tempt me to turn pagan, and offer vows to the goddess of our isle. But when I read that sentence in your letter, “The time will come I trust, when I shall be able to pitch my tent in your neighbourhood,” I was most potently commanded [1] to a breach of the second commandment, and on my knees, to entreat the said goddess to touch your bank notes and guineas with her magical multiplying wand. I could offer such a prayer for you, with a better conscience than for most men, because I know that you have never lost that healthy common sense, which regards money only as the means of independence, and that you would sooner than most men cry out, enough! enough! To see one’s children secured against want, is doubtless a delightful thing; but to wish to see them begin the world as rich men, is unwise to ourselves, for it permits no close of our labours, and is pernicious to them; for it leaves no motive to their exertions, none of those sympathies with the industrious and the poor, which form at once the true relish and proper antidote of wealth.
* * * Is not March rather a perilous month for the voyage from Yarmouth to Hamburg? Danger there is very little, in the packets, but I know what inconvenience rough weather brings with it; not from my own feelings, for I am never sea-sick, but always in exceeding high spirits on board ship, but from what I see in others. But you are an old sailor. At Hamburg I have not a shadow of acquaintance. My letters of introduction produced for me, with one exception, viz., Klopstock, the brother of the poet, no real service, but merely distant and ostentatious civility. And Klopstock will by this time have forgotten my name, which indeed he never properly knew, for I could speak only English and Latin, and he only French and German. At Ratzeburg, 35 English miles N.E. from Hamburg, on the road to Lubec, I resided four months; and I should hope, was not unbeloved by more than one family, but this is out of your route. At Gottingen I stayed near five months, but here I knew only students, who will have left the place by this time, and the high learned professors, only one of whom could speak English; and they are so wholly engaged in their academical occupations, that they would be of no service to you. Other acquaintance in Germany I have none, and connexion I never had any. For though I was much entreated by some of the Literati to correspond with them, yet my natural laziness, with the little value I attach to literary men, as literary men, and with my aversion from those letters which are to be made up of studied sense, and unfelt compliments, combined to prevent me from availing myself of the offer. Herein, and in similar instances, with English authors of repute, I have ill consulted the growth of my reputation and fame. But I have cheerful and confident hopes of myself. If I can hereafter do good to my fellow-creatures as a poet, and as a metaphysician, they will know it; and any other fame than this, I consider as a serious evil, that would only take me from out the number and sympathy of ordinary men, to make a coxcomb of me.
As to the inns or hotels at Hamburg, I should recommend you to some German inn. Wordsworth and I were at the “Der Wilde Man,” and dirty as it was, I could not find any inn in Germany very much cleaner, except at Lubec. But if you go to an English inn, for heaven’s sake, avoid the “Shakspeare,” at Altona, and the “King of England,” at Hamburg. They are houses of plunder rather than entertainment. “The Duke of York” hotel, kept by Seaman, has a better reputation, and thither I would advise you to repair; and I advise you to pay your bill every morning at breakfast time: it is the only way to escape imposition. What the Hamburg merchants may be I know not, but the tradesmen are knaves. Scoundrels, with yellow-white phizzes, that bring disgrace on the complexion of a bad tallow candle. Now as to carriage, I know scarcely what to advise; only make up your mind to the very worst vehicles, with the very worst horses, drawn by the very worst postillions, over the very worst roads, and halting two hours at each time they change horses, at the very worst inns; and you have a fair, unexaggerated picture of travelling in North Germany. The cheapest way is the best; go by the common post wagons, or stage coaches. What are called extraordinaries, or post-chaises, are little wicker carts, uncovered, with moveable benches or forms in them, execrable in every respect. And if you buy a vehicle at Hamburg, you can get none decent under thirty or forty guineas, and very probably it will break to pieces on the infernal roads. The canal boats are delightful, but the porters everywhere in the United Provinces, are an impudent, abominable, and dishonest race. You must carry as little luggage as you well can with you, in the canal boats, and when you land, get recommended to an inn beforehand, and bargain with the porters first of all, and never lose sight of them, or you may never see your portmanteau or baggage again.
My Sarah desires her love to you and yours. God bless your dear little ones! Make haste and get rich, dear friend! and bring up the little creatures to be playfellows and school-fellows with my little ones!
Again and again, sea serve you, wind speed you, all things turn out good to you! God bless you,
S. T. COLERIDGE. [2]
John Stoddart, a friend of Coleridge, visited him while at Keswick in the month of October, 1800, and saw the Wordsworths at Grasmere (Dorothy Wordsworth’s ‘Journal’, i, 55)–It was then that Stoddart obtained a copy of ‘Christabel’, and read it shortly afterwards [3] to Sir Walter Scott, then busy with his ‘Border Minstrelsy’. The beauty of ‘Christabel’ touched Sir Walter’s romantic imagination, and echoes of the poem are discernible in the ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel’ and the ‘Bridal of Tryermain’.
But Coleridge, in spite of many attempts, could not complete the piece, and had to give up the endeavour. In a letter to Godwin of 25th March 1801, Coleridge thus laments what was practically the end of his career as a poet:
[Footnote 1: “Tempted,” E.R., ii, 18.]
[Footnote 2: Letters CXVI-CXVII follow 104.]
[Footnote 3: In 1802.]
LETTER 105. To GODWIN.
Wednesday, March 25, 1801.
Dear Godwin,
I fear your tragedy [1] will find me in a very unfit state of mind to sit in judgment on it. I have been during the last three months undergoing a process of intellectual exsiccation. During my long illness I had compelled into hours of delight many a sleepless painful hour of darkness by chasing down metaphysical game, and since then I have continued the hunt, till I found myself, unaware, at the root of pure mathematics, and up that tall smooth tree, whose few poor branches are all at the very summit, am I climbing by pure adhesive strength of arms and thighs, still slipping down, still renewing my ascent. You would not know me! All sounds of similitude keep at such a distance from each other in my mind, that I have forgotten how to make a rhyme. I look at the mountains (that visible God Almighty that looks in at all my windows)–I look at the mountains only for the curves of their outlines; the stars, as I behold them, form themselves into triangles; and my hands are scarred with scratches from a cat, whose back I was rubbing in the dark in order to see whether the sparks from it were refrangible by a prism. The Poet is dead in me; my imagination (or rather the Somewhat that had been imaginative) lies like a cold snuff on the circular rim of a brass candlestick, without even a stink of tallow to remind you that it was once clothed and mitred with flame. That is past by. I was once a volume of gold leaf, rising and riding on every breath of Fancy, but I have beaten myself back into weight and density, and now I sink in quicksilver and remain squat and square on the earth amid the hurricane that makes oaks and straws join in one dance, fifty yards high in the element.
However I will do what I can. Taste and feeling have I none, but what I have, give I unto thee. But I repeat that I am unfit to decide on any but works of severe logic.
I write now to beg that, if you have not sent your tragedy, you may remember to send ‘Antonio’ with it, which I have not yet seen, and likewise my Campbell’s ‘Pleasures of Hope’, which Wordsworth wishes to see.
Have you seen the second volume of the ‘Lyrical Ballads’, and the preface prefixed to the first? I should judge of a man’s heart and intellect precisely according to the degree and intensity of the admiration with which he read these poems. Perhaps, instead of heart I should have said Taste; but, when I think of ‘The Brothers’, of ‘Ruth’, and of ‘Michael’, I recur to the expression and am enforced to say heart. If I die, and the booksellers will give you anything for ray life, be sure to say, “Wordsworth descended on him like the [Greek: Gnothi seauton] from heaven; by showing to him what true poetry was, he made him know that he himself was no Poet.”
In your next letter you will, perhaps, give me some hints respecting your prose plans.
God bless you, and
S. T. COLERIDGE.
Greta Hall, Keswick.
P.S.–What is a fair price–what might an author of reputation fairly ask from a bookseller, for one edition, of a thousand copies, of a five-shilling book?
[I congratulate you on the settlement of Davy in London. I hope that his enchanting manners will not draw too many idlers about him, to harass and vex his mornings.]
[Footnote: 1 This tragedy was entitled Abbas.]
PART II
THE PERMANENT
I will write for “The Permanent”, or not at all.” (Letter to Sir G. Beaumont, “Coleorton Memorials”, ii, 162.) “Woe is me! that at 46 I am under the necessity of appearing as a lecturer, and obliged to regard every hour given to “The Permanent”, whether as poet or philosopher, an hour stolen from others as well as from my own maintenance.” (Letter to Mudford, Brandl’s “Life of Coleridge”, p. 359.)
* * * * *
The conventional view of Coleridge that opium killed the poet in him does not commend itself to the scientific consciousness. Opium has the tendency to stimulate rather than to deaden the poetic imagination, as the history of De Quincey can testify; and one of Coleridge’s most imaginative pieces, “Kubla Khan”, is said to have been occasioned by an overdose of the drug.
The poet in Coleridge was extinguished by a very different thing than opium. Coleridge’s poetic faculty was suspended by the loss of hope and also by the growth of his intellect, by the development of his reasoning and philosophic powers, and by the multiplication of the interests which appealed to him, and the many problems which presented themselves for his solution. He was, constitutionally, the most comprehensive mind of a new age, and just because he was its greatest thinker he was perplexed and attracted by the majority of the problems which arose around him, and which he himself helped to raise. Poetry, the poetry of the Romantic Movement, in which he far excelled all his contemporaries, was no longer capable of grappling with the philosophic, theological, political and social questions now on the horizon or which Coleridge felt would soon, by the development of international affinities, be on the horizon of the English mind. Hence Coleridge’s thirst for the new lore of the German philosophy, which seemed to him to supply a want in the Intellectualism of his native country.
In spite of this, Coleridge knew that in being deserted by the poetic spirit, he was leaving a high artistic realm for one of lesser glory; and hence his letter to Godwin of 25th March 1801, and, later on, his dirge over himself in “Dejection”.
Coleridge, in choosing to follow Wordsworth to the Lake District in preference to remaining at Nether Stowey with Poole, had experienced some contrition, for Poole, after all, was a more profound appreciator of his many-sidedness and the Cervantean vein of his character than Wordsworth, who appreciated Coleridge only from that side of him which resembled himself.
Tom Poole regretted, like others, that Coleridge had no permanent calling, or could not fix upon an undertaking worthy of his powers. Poole looked upon Coleridge’s devotion to journalism while he was engaged upon the “Morning Post” as a “turning aside of his powers from higher ends” (“T. Poole and his Friends”, ii, 2), and wished him to give himself up to something more “permanently” useful to society (“T. Poole and his Friends”, ii, 3). The correspondence of Coleridge and Poole from 1800 onwards, often turns upon the subject (“T. Poole and his Friends”, ii, 66, 68, 122, 177, 187, 205, 226, 247); and Coleridge admitted a “distracting manifoldness” in his objects and attainments (“T. Poole and his Friends”, ii, 122). “You,” said Coleridge, “are nobly employed–most worthy of you. “You” are made to endear yourself to mankind as an immediate benefactor: I must throw my bread on the waters” (“T. Poole and his Friends”, ii, 122).
While engaged in these argumentations with his best friend, Coleridge was striving to think out in his deep philosophic and musing mind many problems of the time; and there arose in his imagination the Idea of the Permanent. He was henceforth no longer the Poet of Romanticism, whose significance he had exhausted, but the philosopher of the Permanent, which presented itself as a splendid possibility in all departments of human knowledge and activity. In his prose works and letters we find a continual reference to what Coleridge now calls “The Permanent”–the permanent principles of Morals, Philosophy, and Religion, and of the permanent principles of criticism as applied to Poetry and the Fine Arts. Everything is now adjusted by Coleridge to this idea. Art, morals, religion, and politics are tried by its standard, to find if they are founded in the permanent principles of human nature.
It is in the light of this Idea, the ideal of Coleridge’s later life, that we must judge Coleridge and weigh him. To continue to see in opium the sole or even the principal cause of his failure, is to misjudge him altogether. To compare him with others of different powers who accomplished more in one direction in the matter of literary output, with Sir Walter Scott or Byron, for instance, is misleading. It is the man of profound genius, who in his own time, is feeling on all sides into the Future, who is least likely to give forth “finished productions,” as they are called, in which the subjects of which they treat are often exhausted, and please the ear of the Present. Coleridge is such a man of genius; nearly all his works are fragmentary, unfinished, suggestive rather than “complete,” just because they verge upon that Transcendentalism which he was the first to make audible to English ears in his day. Ill health, and opium in conjunction with ill health, contributed no doubt to enfeeble his utterance; but to assert that opium was the cause or the main cause of Coleridge’s inability to do what he wanted himself to do, or what his friends and contemporaries expected him to do, is a gross perversion of the facts of the case. Coleridge’s inability arose from his multiplicity of motive, his visionary faculty of seeing in the light of a new principle a host of problems rise up on all sides, all claiming recognition and solution. “That is the disease of my mind–it is comprehensive in its conceptions, and wastes itself in the contemplations of the many things which it might do.” (Letter to Poole, 4th January 1799, “Letters”, p. 270). A greater than Coleridge had felt this tendency before him, and created as its embodiment “Hamlet”; and Coleridge has been called the Hamlet of literature.
CHAPTER X
ILL HEALTH; SOUTHEY COMES TO KESWICK
On 13th April 1801 Coleridge wrote to Southey the following letter, and Southey replied in cordial terms, from which it will be gathered a reconciliation had been made since the Lloyd and Lamb quarrel. [1]
[Footnote 1: See “Letters”, vol. i, 304.]
LETTER 106. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY, ESQ.
Greta Hall, Keswick; April 13. 1801.
My dear Southey,
I received your kind letter on the evening before last, and I trust that this will arrive at Bristol just in time to rejoice with them that rejoice. Alas! you will have found the dear old place sadly “minus”ed by the removal of Davy. It is one of the evils of long silence, that when one recommences the correspondence, one has so much to say that one can say nothing. I have enough, with what I have seen, and with what I have done, and with what I have suffered, and with what I have heard, exclusive of all that I hope and all that I intend–I have enough to pass away a great deal of time with, were you on a desert isle, and I your “Friday”. But at present I purpose to speak only of myself relatively to Keswick and to you.
Our house stands on a low hill, the whole front of which is one field and an enormous garden, nine-tenths of which is a nursery garden. Behind the house is an orchard, and a small wood on a steep slope, at the foot of which flows the river Greta, which winds round and catches the evening lights in the front of the house. In front we have a giant’s camp–an encamped army of tent-like mountains, which by an inverted arch gives a view of another vale. On our right the lovely vale and the wedge-shaped lake of Bassenthwaite; and on our left Derwentwater and Lodore full in view, and the fantastic mountains of Borrodale. Behind us the massy Skiddaw, smooth, green, high, with two chasms and a tentlike ridge in the larger. A fairer scene you have not seen in all your wanderings. Without going from our own grounds we have all that can please a human being. As to books, my landlord, who dwells next door,[1] has a very respectable library, which he has put with mine; histories, encyclopaedias, and all the modern gentry. But then I can have, when I choose, free access to the princely library of Sir Guilfred Lawson, which contains the noblest collection of travels and natural history of, perhaps, any private library in England; besides this, there is the Cathedral library of Carlisle, from whence I can have any books sent to me that I wish; in short, I may truly say that I command all the libraries in the county. …
Our neighbour is a truly good and affectionate man, a father to my children, and a friend to me. He was offered fifty guineas for the house in which we are to live, but he preferred me for a tenant at twenty-five; and yet the whole of his income does not exceed, I believe, L200 a year. A more truly disinterested man I never met with; severely frugal, yet almost carelessly generous; and yet he got all his money as a common carrier[2], by hard labour, and by pennies. He is one instance among many in this country of the salutary effect of the love of knowledge–he was from a boy a lover of learning. The house is full twice as large as we want; it hath more rooms in it than Allfoxden; you might have a bed-room, parlour, study, etc., etc., and there would always be rooms to spare for your or my visitors. In short, for situation and convenience,–and when I mention the name of Wordsworth, for society of men of intellect,–I know no place in which you and Edith would find yourselves so well suited.
S. T. C.
[Footnote 1: Greta Hall was at this time divided into two houses, which were afterwards thrown together.]
[Footnote 2: This person, whose name was Jackson, was the “master” in Wordsworth’s poem of ‘The Waggoner’, the circumstances of which are accurately correct.]
The remainder of this letter, as well as another of later date, was filled with a most gloomy account of his own health, to which Southey refers in the commencement of his reply.
SOUTHEY TO COLERIDGE
Bristol, July 11, 1801.
Yesterday I arrived, and found your letters; they did depress me, but I have since reasoned or dreamt myself into more cheerful anticipations. I have persuaded myself that your complaint is gouty; that good living is necessary, and a good climate. I also move to the south; at least so it appears: and if my present prospects ripen, we may yet live under one roof. …
You may have seen a translation of “Persius”, by Drummond, an M.P. This man is going ambassador, first to Palermo and then to Constantinople: if a married man can go as his secretary, it is probable that I shall accompany him. I daily expect to know. It is a scheme of Wynn’s to settle me in the south, and I am returned to look about me. My salary will be small–a very trifle; but after a few years I look on to something better, and have fixed my mind on a consulship. Now, if we go, you must join us as soon as we are housed, and it will be marvellous if we regret England. I shall have so little to do, that my time may be considered as wholly my own: our joint amusements will easily supply us with all expenses. So no more of the Azores; for we will see the Great Turk, and visit Greece, and walk up the Pyramids, and ride camels in Arabia. I have dreamt of nothing else these five weeks. As yet every thing is so uncertain, for I have received no letter since we landed, that nothing can be said of our intermediate movements. If we are not embarked too soon, we will set off as early as possible for Cumberland, unless you should think, as we do, that Mahomet had better come to the mountain; that change of all externals may benefit you; and that bad as Bristol weather is, it is yet infinitely preferable to northern cold and damp. Meet we must, and will.
You know your old Poems are a third time in the press; why not set forth a second volume? * * * Your “Christabel”, your “Three Graces”,[1] which I remember as the very consummation of poetry. I must spur you to something, to the assertion of your supremacy; if you have not enough to muster, I will aid you in any way–manufacture skeletons that you may clothe with flesh, blood, and beauty; write my best, or what shall be bad enough to be popular;–we will even make plays “a-la-mode” Robespierre. * * * Drop all task-work, it is ever unprofitable; the same time, and one twentieth part of the labour, would produce treble emolument. For “Thalaba” I received L115; it was just twelve months’ “intermitting” work, and the after-editions are my own. …
I feel here as a stranger; somewhat of Leonard’s feeling. God bless Wordsworth for that poem![2] What tie have I to England? My London friends? There, indeed, I have friends. But if you and yours were with me, eating dates in a garden at Constantinople, you might assert that we were in the best of all possible places; and I should answer, Amen: and if our wives rebelled, we would send for the chief of the black eunuchs, and sell them to the Seraglio. Then should Moses [3] learn Arabic, and we would know whether there was anything in the language or not. We would drink Cyprus wine and Mocha coffee, and smoke more tranquilly than ever we did in the Ship in Small Street.
Time and absence make strange work with our affections; but mine are ever returning to rest upon you. I have other and dear friends, but none with whom the whole of my being is intimate–with whom every thought and feeling can amalgamate. Oh! I have yet such dreams! Is it quite clear that you and I were not meant for some better star, and dropped, by mistake, into this world of pounds, shillings, and pence? …
God bless you!
ROBERT SOUTHEY.
[Footnote 1: “The Three Graves”.]
[Footnote 2: “The Brothers” is the title of this poem.]
[Footnote 3: Hartley Coleridge.]
SOUTHEY TO COLERIDGE
July 25.
In about ten days we shall be ready to set forward for Keswick; where, if it were not for the rains, and the fogs, and the frosts, I should, probably, be content to winter; but the climate deters me. It is uncertain when I may be sent abroad, or where, except that the south of Europe is my choice. The appointment hardly doubtful, and the probable destination Palermo or Naples. We will talk of the future, and dream of it, on the lake side. * * * I may calculate upon the next six months at my own disposal; so we will climb Skiddaw this year, and scale Etna the next; and Sicilian air will keep us alive till Davy has found out the immortalising elixir, or till we are very well satisfied to do without it, and be immortalised after the manner of our fathers. My pocket-book contains more plans than will ever be filled up; but whatever becomes of those plans, this, at least, is feasible. * * * Poor H—-, he has literally killed himself by the law: which, I believe, kills more than any disease that takes its place in the bills of mortality. Blackstone is a needful book, and my Coke is a borrowed one; but I have one law book whereof to make an auto-da-fe; and burnt he shall be: but whether to perform that ceremony, with fitting libations, at home, or fling him down the crater of Etna directly to the Devil, is worth considering at leisure.
I must work at Keswick; the more willingly, because with the hope, hereafter, the necessity will cease. My Portuguese materials must lie dead, and this embarrasses me. It is impossible to publish any thing about that country now, because I must one day return there,–to their libraries and archives; otherwise I have excellent stuff for a little volume; and could soon set forth a first vol. of my History, either civil or literary. In these labours I have incurred a heavy and serious expense. I shall write to Hamilton, and review again, if he chooses to employ me. * * * It was Cottle who told me that your Poems were reprint”ing” in a “third” edition: this cannot allude to the “Lyrical Ballads”, because of the number and the participle present. * * * I am bitterly angry to see one new poem [1] smuggled into the world in the “Lyrical Ballads”, where the 750 purchasers of the first can never get at it. At Falmouth I bought Thomas Dermody’s “Poems”, for old acquaintance sake; alas! the boy wrote better than the man! * * * Pye’s “Alfred” (to distinguish him from Alfred the pious [2]) I have not yet inspected; nor the wilful murder of Bonaparte, by Anna Matilda; nor the high treason committed by Sir James Bland Burgess, Baronet, against our lion-hearted Richard. Davy is fallen stark mad with a play, called the “Conspiracy of Gowrie”, which is by Rough; an imitation of “Gebir”, with some poetry; but miserably and hopelessly deficient in all else: every character reasoning, and metaphorising, and metaphysicking the reader most nauseously. By the by, there is a great analogy between hock, laver, pork pie, and the “Lyrical Ballads”,–all have a “flavour”, not beloved by those who require a taste, and utterly unpleasant to dram-drinkers, whose diseased palates can only feel pepper and brandy. I know not whether Wordsworth will forgive the stimulant tale of “Thalaba”,–’tis a turtle soup, highly seasoned, but with a flavour of its own predominant. His are sparagrass (it ought to be spelt so) and artichokes, good with plain butter, and wholesome.
I look on “Madoc” with hopeful displeasure; probably it must be corrected, and published now; this coming into the world at seven months is a bad way; with a Doctor Slop of a printer’s devil standing ready for the forced birth, and frightening one into an abortion. * * * Is there an emigrant at Keswick, who may make me talk and write French? And I must sit at my almost forgotten Italian, and read German with you; and we must read Tasso together.
God bless you!
Yours,
R. S.
[Footnote 1: Coleridge’s poem of “Love”.]
[Footnote 2: This alludes to Mr. Cottle’s “Alfred”.]
The next two letters to Davy indicate that Coleridge’s health was now of the worst, and that he was thinking seriously of emigrating for some time.
LETTER 107. TO DAVY
Monday, May 4, 1801.
My dear Davy,
I heard from Tobin the day before yesterday–nay, it was Friday. From him I learn that you are giving lectures on galvanism. Would to God I were one of your auditors! My motive muscles tingled and contracted at the news, as if you had bared them, and were ‘zincifying’ their life-mocking fibres.
When you have leisure and impulse–perfect leisure and a complete impulse–write to me, but only then. For though there does not exist a man on earth who yields me greater pleasure by writing to me, yet I have neither pain nor disquietude from your silence. I have a deep faith in the guardianship of Nature over you–of the Great Being whom you are manifesting. Heaven bless you, my dear Davy!
I have been rendered uneasy by an account of the Lisbon packet’s non-arrival, lest Southey should have been on board it. Have you heard from him lately?
It would seem affectation to write to you and say nothing of my health; but in truth I am weary of giving useless pain. Yesterday I should have been incapable of writing you this scrawl, and to-morrow I may be as bad. “‘Sinking, sinking, sinking!’ I feel that I am ‘sinking’.” My medical attendant says that it is irregular gout, with nephritic symptoms. ‘Gout’, in a young man of twenty-nine!! Swollen knees, and knotty fingers, a loathing stomach, and a dizzy head. Trust me, friend, I am at times an object of moral disgust to my own mind! But that this long illness has impoverished me, I should immediately go to St. Miguels, one of the Azores–the baths and the delicious climate might restore me–and if it were possible, I would afterwards send over for my wife and children, and settle there for a few years; it is exceedingly cheap. On this supposition Wordsworth and his sister have with generous friendship offered to settle there with me–and happily our dear Southey would come too. But of this I pray you, my dear fellow, do not say a syllable to any human being, for the scheme, from the present state of my circumstances, is rather the thing of a “wish” than of a “hope”.
If you write to me, pray in a couple of sentences tell me whether Herschell’s thermometric “spectrum” (in the “Philos. Trans.”) will lead to any revolution in the chemical philosophy. As far as “words” go, I have become a formidable chemist–having got by heart a prodigious quantity of terms, etc., to which I attach “some” ideas, very scanty in number, I assure you, and right meagre in their individual persons. That which must discourage me in it is, that I find all “power” of vital attributes to depend on modes of “arrangement”, and that chemistry throws not even a distant rushlight glimmer upon this subject. The “reasoning”, likewise, is always unsatisfactory to me. I am perpetually saying, probably there are many agents hitherto undiscovered. This cannot be reasoning: we must have a deep conviction that all the “terms” have been exhausted. This is saying no more than that (with Dr. Beddoes’s leave) chemistry can never possess the same kind of certainty with the mathematics–in truth, it is saying nothing. I grow, however, exceedingly interested in the subject.
God love you, my dear friend! From Tobin’s account, I fear that I must give up a very sweet vision–that of seeing you this summer. The summer after, my ghost perhaps may be a gas.
Yours affectionately,
S. T. COLERIDGE. [1]
[Footnote 1: Letter CXVIII follows No. 107.]
LETTER 108. TO DAVY
Greta Hall, Keswick, May 20, 1801.
My dear Davy,
Though we of the north must forego you, yet I shall rejoice when I receive a letter from you from Cornwall. I must believe that you have made some important discoveries in galvanism, and connected the facts with other more interesting ones, or I should be puzzled to conceive how that subject could furnish matter for more than one lecture. If I recollect aright, you have identified it with electricity, and that indeed is a wide field. I shall dismiss my ‘British Critic’ and take in ‘Nicholson’s Journal’, and then I shall know something about you. I am sometimes apprehensive that my passion for science is scarcely true and genuine–it is but ‘Davyism’! that is, I fear that I am more delighted at ‘your’ having discovered facts than at the facts having been discovered.
My health is better. I am indeed eager to believe that I am really beginning to recover, though I have had so many short recoveries followed by severe relapses, that I am at times almost afraid to hope. But cheerful thoughts come with genial sensations; and hope is itself no mean medicine.
I am anxious respecting Robert Southey. Why is he not in England? Remember me kindly to Tobin. As soon as I have anything to communicate I will write to him. But, alas! sickness turns large districts of time into dreary uniformity of sandy desolation. Alas, for Egypt–and Menou! However, I trust the ‘English’ will keep it, if they take it, and something will be gained to the cause of human nature.
Heaven bless you!
S. T. COLERIDGE.
The next letter to Godwin renews his complaints about health.
LETTER 109. To GODWIN
Greta Hall, Keswick.
Dear Godwin,
I have had, during the last three weeks, such numerous interruptions of my “uninterrupted rural retirement,” such a succession of visitors, both indigenous and exotic, that verily I wanted both the time and composure necessary to answer your letter of the first of June–at present I am writing to you from my bed. For, in consequence of a very sudden change in the weather from intense heat to a raw and scathing chillness, my bodily health has suffered a relapse as severe as it was unexpected….
I have not yet received either “Antonio”, or your pamphlet, in answer to Dr. Parr and the Scotch gentleman [1] (who is to be professor of morals to the young nabobs at Calcutta, with an establishment of L3,000 a year!). Stuart was so kind as to send me Fenwick’s review of it in a paper called the “Albion”, and Mr. Longman has informed me that, by your orders, the pamphlet itself has been left for me at his house. The extracts which I saw pleased me much, with the exception of the introduction, which is incorrectly and clumsily worded. But, indeed, I have often observed that, whatever you write, the first page is always the worst in the book. I wish that instead of six days you had employed six months, and instead of a half-crown pamphlet, had given us a good half-guinea octavo. But you may yet do this. It strikes me, that both in this work, and in the second edition of the “Political Justice”, your retractations have been more injudicious than the assertions or dogmas retracted. But this is no fit subject for a mere letter. If I had time, which I have not, I would write two or three sheets for your sole inspection, entitled “History of the Errors and Blunders of the Literary Life of William Godwin”. To the world it would appear a paradox to say that you are at all too persuadable, but you yourself know it to be the truth.
I shall send back your manuscript on Friday, with my criticisms. You say in your last, “How I wish you were here!” When I see how little I have written of what I could have talked, I feel with you that a letter is but “a mockery” to a full and ardent mind. In truth I feel this so forcibly that, if I could be certain that I should remain in this country, I should press you to come down, and finish the whole in my house. But, if I can by any means raise the moneys, I shall go in the first vessel that leaves Liverpool for the Azores (St. Michael’s, to wit), and these sail at the end of July. Unless I can escape one English winter and spring I have not any rational prospect of recovery. You “cannot help regarding uninterrupted rural retirement as a principal cause” of my ill health. My ill health commenced at Liverpool, in the shape of blood-shot eyes and swollen eyelids, while I was in the daily habit of visiting the Liverpool literati–these, on my settling at Keswick, were followed by large boils in my neck and shoulders; these, by a violent rheumatic fever; this, by a distressing and tedious hydrocele; and, since then, by irregular gout, which promises at this moment to ripen into a legitimate fit. What uninterrupted rural retirement can have had to do in the production of these outward and visible evils, I cannot guess; what share it has had in consoling me under them, I know with a tranquil mind and feel with a grateful heart. O that you had now before your eyes the delicious picture of lake, and river, and bridge, and cottage, and spacious field with its pathway, and woody hill with its spring verdure, and mountain with the snow yet lingering in fantastic patches upon it, even the same which I had from my sick bed, even without raising my head from the pillow! O God! all but dear and lovely things seemed to be known to my imagination only as words; even the forms which struck terror into me in my fever-dreams were still forms of beauty. Before my last seizure I bent down to pick something from the ground, and when I raised my head, I said to Miss Wordsworth, “I am sure, Rotha, that I am going to be ill;” for as I bent my head there came a distinct, vivid spectrum upon my eyes; it was one little picture–a rock, with birches and ferns on it, a cottage backed by it, and a small stream. Were I a painter I would give an outward existence to this, but it will always live in my memory.
By-the-bye, our rural retirement has been honoured by the company of Mr. Sharp, and the poet Rogers; the latter, though not a man of very vigorous intellect, won a good deal both on myself and Wordsworth, for what he said evidently came from his own feelings, and was the result of his own observation.
My love to your dear little one. I begin to feel my knee preparing to make ready for the reception of the Lady Arthritis. God bless you and
S. T. COLERIDGE.
Tuesday Evening, June 23, 1801. [2]
[Footnote 1: Mackintosh]
[Footnote 2: Letters CXIX-CXXII follow No. 109.]
Coleridge, for want of funds, was unable for the present to carry out his project of going abroad, and the next letter to Davy tells us that he had resolved to go to London instead, and write for the daily papers again.
LETTER 110. To DAVY
Greta Hall, Keswick, Cumberland, October 31, 1801.
My dear Davy,
I do not know by what fatality it has happened, but so it is; that I have thought more often of you, and I may say, “yearned” after your society more for the last three months than I ever before did, and yet I have not written to you. But you know that I honour you, and that I love whom I honour. Love and esteem with me have no dividual being; and wherever this is not the case, I suspect there must be some lurking moral superstition which nature gets the better of; and that the real meaning of the phrase “I love him though I cannot esteem him,” is–I esteem him, but not according to my system of esteem. But you, my dear fellow, ‘all’ men love and esteem–which is the only suspicious part of your character–at least according to the 5th chapter of St. Matthew.–God bless you.
And now for the business of this letter. ‘If I can’, I leave this place so as to be in London on Wednesday, the 11th of next month; in London I shall stay a fortnight; but as I am in feeble health, and have a perfect ‘phobia’ of inns and coffee-houses, I should rejoice if you or Southey should be able to offer me a bed-room for the fortnight aforesaid. From London I move southward. Now for the italicized words ‘if I can’. The cryptical and implicit import of which is–I have a damned thorn in my leg, which the surgeon has not been yet able to extract–and but that I have metaphysicized most successfully on ‘Pain’, in consequence of the accident, by the Great Scatterer of Thoughts, I should have been half mad. But as it is I have borne it ‘like a woman’, which, I believe, to be two or three degrees at least beyond a ‘stoic’. A suppuration is going on, and I endure in hope.
I have redirected some of Southey’s letters to you, taking it for granted that you will see him immediately on his arrival in town; he left us yesterday afternoon. Let me hear from you, if it be only to say what I know already, that you will be glad to see me. O, dear friend, thou one of the two human beings of whom I dare hope with a hope, that elevates my own heart. O bless you!
S.T. COLERIDGE. [1]
[Footnote 1: Letters CXXIII-CXXXI follow No. 110.]
Sir Humphry Davy’s description of Coleridge at this date is well known, and we must quote it; “Coleridge has left London for Keswick. During his stay in town I saw him seldomer than usual; when I did see him, it was generally in the midst of large companies, where he is the image of power and activity. His eloquence is unimpaired: perhaps it is softer and stronger. His will is less than ever commensurate with his ability. Brilliant images of greatness float upon his mind, like images of the morning clouds on the waters. Their forms are changed by the motions of the waves, they are agitated by every breeze, and modified by every sunbeam. He talked in the course of an hour of beginning three works; he recited the poem of ‘Christabel’ unfinished, and as I had before heard it. What talent does he not waste in forming visions, sublime, but unconnected with the real world! I have looked to his efforts, as to the efforts of a creating being; but as yet he has not laid the foundation for the new world of intellectual forms” (‘Fragmentary Remains’, p. 74).
Southey had now returned from Portugal, and was also in London (‘Southey’s Letters’, i, 183). It was not till September, 1803, that Southey came to Keswick (‘Southey’s Letters’, i, 229-31). During the interval Coleridge had written various things for the ‘Morning Post’, the most outstanding contributions being the two powerful letters to Fox of 4th and 9th November 1802, written on the occasion of that statesman going to Paris and paying court to Napoleon. The next eight letters to Thomas Wedgwood give the best impression of Coleridge between October 1802 and February 1803.
Letter 111 To Thomas Wedgwood
Keswick, Oct. 20, 1802.
My dear sir,
This is my birthday, my thirtieth. It will not appear wonderful to you, when I tell you, that before the arrival of your letter, I had been thinking with a great weight of different feelings, concerning you, and your dear brother, for I have good reason to believe, that I should not now have been alive, if in addition to other miseries, I had had immediate poverty pressing upon me. I will never again remain silent so long. It has not been altogether indolence, or my habit of procrastination which have [1] kept me from writing, but an eager wish,–I may truly say, a thirst of spirit, to have something honourable to tell you of myself.
At present I must be content to tell you something cheerful. My health is very much better. I am stronger in every respect, and am not injured by study, or the act of sitting at my writing desk; but my eyes suffer if at any time I have been intemperate in the use of candle-light. This account supposes another, namely, that my mind is calm, and more at ease. My dear sir, when I was last with you at Stowey, my heart was often full, and I could scarcely keep from communicating to you the tale of my distresses, but could I add to your depression, when you were low? or how interrupt, or cast a shade on your good spirits, that were so rare, and so precious to you? …
I found no comfort but in the driest speculations;–in the ‘Ode to Dejection’, which you were pleased with. These lines, in the original, followed the line “My shaping spirit of imagination,”–
For not to think of what I needs must feel, But to be still and patient, all I can, And haply by abstruse research to steal From my own nature all the natural man; This was my sole resource, my only plan And that which suits a part infests the whole, And now is almost grown the temper [2] of my soul.
I give you these lines for the spirit, and not for the poetry. …
But better days are arrived, and are still to come, I have had Visitations of Hope–that I may yet be something of which those who love me may be proud.
I cannot write that without recalling dear Poole. I have heard twice, and written twice, and I fear by a strange fatality, one of the letters will have missed him. Leslie [3] was here some time ago. I was very much pleased with him. And now I will tell you what I am doing. I dedicate three days in the week to the ‘Morning Post’, and shall hereafter write, for the far greater part, such things as will be of as permanent interest as any thing I can hope to write; and you will shortly see a little essay of mine, justifying the writing in a newspaper.
My comparison of the French with the Roman Empire was very favourably received. The poetry which I have sent is merely the emptying out of my desk. The epigrams are wretched indeed, but they answered Stuart’s purpose, better than better things. I ought not to have given any signature to them whatsoever. I never dreamt of acknowledging either them, or the ‘Ode to the Rain’. As to feeble expressions, and unpolished lines–there is the rub! Indeed, my dear sir, I do value your opinion very highly. I think your judgment on the sentiment, the imagery, the flow of a poem, decisive; at least, if it differed from my own, and if after frequent consideration mine remained different, it would leave me at least perplexed. For you are a perfect electrometer in these things–but in point of poetic diction, I am not so well satisfied that you do not require a certain aloofness from the language of real life, which I think deadly to poetry.
Very soon however I shall present you from the press with my opinions full on the subject of style, both in prose and verse; and I am confident of one thing, that I shall convince you that I have thought much and patiently on the subject, and that I understand the whole strength of my antagonist’s cause. For I am now busy on the subject, and shall in a very few weeks go to press with a volume on the prose writings of Hall, Milton, and Taylor; and shall immediately follow it up with an essay on the writings of Dr. Johnson and Gibbon, and in these two volumes I flatter myself I shall present a fair history of English Prose. If my life and health remain, and I do but write half as much, and as regularly as I have done during the last six weeks, this will be finished by January next; and I shall then put together my memorandum-book on the subject of Poetry. In both I have endeavoured sedulously to state the facts and the differences clearly and accurately; and my reasons for the preference of one style to another are secondary to this.
Of this be assured, that I will never give any thing to the world in ‘propria persona’ in my own name which I have not tormented with the file. I sometimes suspect that my foul copy would often appear to general readers more polished than my fair copy. Many of the feeble and colloquial expressions have been industriously substituted for others which struck me as artificial, and not standing the test; as being neither the language of passion, nor distinct conceptions. Dear sir, indulge me with looking still further on in my literary life.
I have, since my twentieth year, meditated an heroic poem on the ‘Siege of Jerusalem’, by Titus. This is the pride and the stronghold of my hope, but I never think of it except in my best moods. The work to which I dedicate the ensuing years of my life, is one which highly pleased Leslie, in prospective, and my paper will not let me prattle to you about it. I have written what you more wished me to write, all about myself.
Our climate (in the north) is inclement, and our houses not as compact as they might be, but it is a stirring climate, and the worse the weather, the more unceasingly entertaining are my study windows, and the month that is to come is the glory of the year with us. A very warm bed-room I can promise you, and one at the same time which commands the finest lake and mountain view. If Leslie could not go abroad with you, and I could in any way mould my manners and habits to suit you, I should of all things like to be your companion. Good nature, an affectionate disposition, and so thorough a sympathy with the nature of your complaint, that I should feel no pain, not the most momentary, at being told by you what your feelings require at the time in which they required it; this I should bring with me. But I need not say that you may say to me,–“You don’t suit me,” without inflicting the least mortification. Of course this letter is for your brother, as for you; but I shall write to him soon. God bless you,
S. T. COLERIDGE.
Thomas Wedgwood, Esq.
[Footnote 1: ‘Sic.’]
[Footnote 2: Cottle prints “temple,” an error.]
[Footnote 3: The eminent Edinburg Professor. For three years the private tutor of Mr. T. Wedgwood (Cottle). [For further information regarding John, aftwards Sir John, Leslie (1766-1832) see ‘Tom Wedgwood’ by Lichfield.]]
LETTER 112. TO THOMAS WEDGWOOD
Keswick, November 3, 1802.
Dear Wedgwood,
It is now two hours since I received your letter; and after the necessary consultation, Mrs. Coleridge herself is fully of opinion that to lose time is merely to lose spirits. Accordingly I have resolved not to look the children in the face, (the parting from whom is the downright bitter in the thing) but to go to London by to-morrow’s mail. Of course I shall be in London, God permitting, on Saturday morning. I shall rest that day, and the next, and proceed to Bristol by the Monday night’s mail. At Bristol I will go to “Cote-House”[1] At all events, barring serious illness, serious fractures, and the et cetera of serious unforeseens, I shall be at Bristol, Tuesday noon, November 9.
You are aware that my whole knowledge of French does not extend beyond the power of limping slowly, not without a dictionary crutch, through an easy French book: and that as to pronunciation, all my organs of speech, from the bottom of the Larynx to the edge of my lips, are utterly and naturally anti-Gallican. If only I shall have been any comfort, any alleviation to you I shall feel myself at ease–and whether you go abroad or no, while I remain with you, it will greatly contribute to my comfort, if I know you will have no hesitation, nor pain, in telling me what you wish me to do, or not to do.
I regard it among the blessings of my life, that I have never lived among men whom I regarded as my artificial superiors: that all the respect I have at any time paid, has been wholly to supposed goodness, or talent. The consequence has been that I have no alarms of pride; no “cheval de frise” of independence. I have always lived among equals. It never occurs to me, even for a moment, that I am otherwise. If I have quarrelled with men, it has been as brothers or as school-fellows quarrel. How little any man can give me, or take from me, save in matters of kindness and esteem, is not so much a thought or conviction with me, or even a distinct feeling, as it is my very nature. Much as I dislike all formal declarations of this kind, I have deemed it well to say this. I have as strong feelings of gratitude as any man. Shame upon me if in the sickness and the sorrow which I have had, and which have been kept unaggravated and supportable by your kindness, and your brother’s (Mr. Josiah Wedgwood) shame upon me if I did not feel a kindness, not unmixed with reverence towards you both. But yet I never should have had my present impulses to be with you, and this confidence, that I may become an occasional comfort to you, if, independently of all gratitude, I did not thoroughly esteem you; and if I did not appear to myself to understand the nature of your sufferings; and within the last year, in some slight degree to have felt myself, something of the same.
Forgive me, my dear sir, if I have said too much. It is better to write it than to say it, and I am anxious in the event of our travelling together that you should yourself be at ease with me, even as you would with a younger brother, to whom, from his childhood you had been in the habit of saying, “Do this Col.” or “don’t do that.” All good be with you.
S. T. COLERIDGE.
Thomas Wedgwood, Esq.[2]
[Footnote: 1 Westbury, near Bristol, the then residence of Mr. John Wedgwood.]
[Footnote 2: Letters CXXXII-CXXXIV follow 112.]
LETTER 113. To THOMAS WEDGWOOD
Keswick, January 9, 1803.
My dear Wedgwood,
I send you two letters, one from your dear sister, the second from Sharp, by which you will see at what short notice I must be off, if I go to the “Canaries”, If your last plan continue in full force, I have not even the phantom of a wish thitherward struggling, but if aught have happened to you, in the things without, or in the world within, to induce you to change the place, or the plan, relatively to me, I think I could raise the money. But I would a thousand-fold rather go with you whithersoever you go. I shall be anxious to hear how you have gone on since I left you. You should decide in favour of a better climate somewhere or other. The best scheme I can think of, is to go to some part of Italy or Sicily, which we both liked. I would look out for two houses. Wordsworth and his family would take the one, and I the other, and then you might have a home either with me, or if you thought of Mr. and Mrs. Luff, under this modification, one of your own; and in either case you would have neighbours, and so return to England when the home sickness pressed heavy upon you, and back to Italy when it was abated, and the climate of England began to poison your comforts. So you would have abroad in a genial climate, certain comforts of society among simple and enlightened men and women; and I should be an alleviation of the pang which you will necessarily feel, as often as you quit your own family.
I know no better plan: for travelling in search of objects is at best a dreary business, and whatever excitement it might have had, you must have exhausted it. God bless you, my dear friend. I write with dim eyes, for indeed, indeed, my heart is very full of affectionate sorrowful thoughts toward you.
I write with difficulty, with all the fingers but one of my right hand very much swollen. Before I was half up the “Kirkstone” mountain, the storm had wetted me through and through, and before I reached the top it was so wild and outrageous, that it would have been unmanly to have suffered the poor woman (guide) to continue pushing on, up against such a torrent of wind and rain: so I dismounted and sent her home with the storm in her back. I am no novice in mountain mischiefs, but such a storm as this was, I never witnessed, combining the intensity of the cold, with the violence of the wind and rain. The rain drops were pelted or slung against my face by the gusts, just like splinters of flint, and I felt as if every drop cut my flesh. My hands were all shrivelled up like a washer-woman’s, and so benumbed that I was obliged to carry my stick under my arm. O, it was a wild business! Such hurry skurry of clouds, such volleys of sound! In spite of the wet and the cold, I should have had some pleasure in it, but for two vexations; first, an almost intolerable pain came into my right eye, a smarting and burning pain; and secondly, in consequence of riding with such cold water under my seat, extremely uneasy and burthensome feelings attacked my groin, so that, what with the pain from the one, and the alarm from the other, I had “no enjoyment at all”!
Just at the brow of the hill I met a man dismounted, who could not sit on horse-back. He seemed quite scared by the uproar, and said to me, with much feeling, “O sir, it is a perilous buffeting, but it is worse for you than for me, for I have it at my back.” However I got safely over, and immediately all was calm and breathless, as if it was some mighty fountain put on the summit of Kirkstone, that shot forth its volcano of air, and precipitated huge streams of invisible lava down the road to Patterdale.
I went on to Grasmere. [1] I was not at all unwell, when I arrived there, though wet of course to the skin. My right eye had nothing the matter with it, either to the sight of others, or to my own feelings, but I had a bad night, with distressful dreams, chiefly about my eye; and waking often in the dark I thought it was the effect of mere recollection, but it appeared in the morning that my right eye was blood-shot, and the lid swollen. That morning however I walked home, and before I reached Keswick, my eye was quite well, but “I felt unwell all over”. Yesterday I continued unusually unwell all over me till eight o’clock in the evening. I took no “laudanum or opium”, but at eight o’clock, unable to bear the stomach uneasiness and achings of my limbs, I took two large tea-spoons full of Ether in a wine glass of camphorated gum-water, and a third teaspoon full at ten o’clock, and I received complete relief; my body calmed; my sleep placid; but when I awoke in the morning, my right hand, with three of the fingers, was swollen and inflamed. The swelling in the hand is gone down, and of two of the fingers somewhat abated, but the middle finger is still twice its natural size, so that I write with difficulty. This has been a very rough attack, but though I am much weakened by it, and look sickly and haggard, yet I am not out of heart. Such a ’bout’; such a “periless buffetting,” was enough to have hurt the health of a strong man. Few constitutions can bear to be long wet through in intense cold. I fear it will tire you to death to read this prolix scrawled story.
Affectionately dear Friend, Yours ever,
S. T. COLERIDGE.[2]
[Footnote 1: The then residence of Mr. Wordsworth. [Cottle.]]
[Footnote 2: Letter CXXXV is our No. 110.]
LETTER 114. TO THOMAS WEDGWOOD
Friday night, Jan. 14, 1803
Dear Friend,
I was glad at heart to receive your letter, and still more gladdened by the reading of it. The exceeding kindness which it breathed was literally medicinal to me, and I firmly believe, cured me of a nervous rheumatic affection, the acid and the oil, very completely at Patterdale; but by the time it came to Keswick, the oil was all atop.
You ask me, “Why, in the name of goodness, I did not return when I saw the state of the weather?” The true reason is simple, though it may be somewhat strange. The thought never once entered my head. The cause of this I suppose to be, that (I do not remember it at least) I never once in my whole life turned back in fear of the weather. Prudence is a plant, of which I no doubt possess some valuable specimens, but they are always in my hothouse, never out of the glasses, and least of all things would endure the climate of the mountains. In simple earnestness, I never find myself alone, within the embracement of rocks and hills, a traveller up an alpine road, but my spirit careers, drives, and eddies, like a leaf in autumn; a wild activity of thoughts, imaginations, feelings, and impulses of motion rises up from within me; a sort of bottom wind, that blows to no point of the compass, comes from I know not whence, but agitates the whole of me; my whole being is filled with waves that roll and stumble, one this way, and one that way, like things that have no common master. I think that my soul must have pre-existed in the body of a chamois chaser. The simple image of the old object has been obliterated, but the feelings, and impulsive habits, and incipient actions, are in me, and the old scenery awakens them.
The further I ascend from animated nature, from men, and cattle, and the common birds of the woods and fields, the greater becomes in me the intensity of the feeling of life. Life seems to me then an universal spirit, that neither has, nor can have an opposite. “God is everywhere,” I have exclaimed, and works everywhere, and where is there room for death? In these moments it has been my creed, that death exists only because ideas exist; that life is limitless sensation; that death is a child of the organic senses, chiefly of the sight; that feelings die by flowing into the mould of the intellect becoming ideas, and that ideas passing forth into action, reinstate themselves again in the world of life. And I do believe that truth lies in these loose generalizations. I do not think it possible that any bodily pains could eat out the love of joy, that is so substantially part of me, towards hills, and rocks, and steep waters; and I have had some trial.
On Monday night I had an attack in my stomach and right side, which in pain, and the length of its continuance appeared to me by far the severest I ever had. About one o’clock the pain passed out of my stomach, like lightning from a cloud, into the extremities of my right foot. My toe swelled and throbbed, and I was in a state of delicious ease, which the pain in my toe did not seem at all to interfere with. On Tuesday I was uncommonly well all the morning, and ate an excellent dinner; but playing too long and too rompingly with Hartley and Derwent, I was very unwell that evening. On Wednesday I was well, and after dinner wrapped myself up warm, and walked with Sarah Hutchinson, to Lodore. I never beheld anything more impressive than the wild outline of the black masses of mountain over Lodore, and so on to the gorge of Borrowdale. Even through the bare twigs of a grove of birch trees, through which the road passes; and on emerging from the grove a red planet, so very red that I never saw a star so red, being clear and bright at the same time. It seemed to have sky behind it. It started, as it were from the heavens, like an eye-ball of fire. I wished aloud at that moment that you had been with me.
The walk appears to have done me good, but I had a wretched night; shocking pains in my head, occiput, and teeth, and found in the morning that I had two blood-shot eyes. But almost immediately after the receipt and perusal of your letter the pains left me, and I am bettered to this hour; and am now indeed as well as usual saving that my left eye is very much blood-shot. It is a sort of duty with me, to be particular respecting facts that relate to my health. I have retained a good sound appetite through the whole of it, without any craving after exhilarants or narcotics, and I have got well as in a moment. Rapid recovery is constitutional with me; but the former circumstances, I can with certainty refer to the system of diet, abstinence from vegetables, wine, spirits, and beer, which I have adopted by your advice.
I have no dread or anxiety respecting any fatigue which either of us is likely to undergo, even in continental travelling. Many a healthy man would have been laid up with such a bout of thorough wet, and intense cold at the same time, as I had at Kirkstone. Would to God that also for your sake I were a stronger man, but I have strong wishes to be with you. I love your society, and receiving much comfort from you, and believing likewise that I receive much improvement, I find a delight very great, my dear friend! indeed it is, when I have reason to imagine that I am in return an alleviation to your destinies, and a comfort to you. I have no fears and am ready to leave home at a two days’ warning. For myself I should say two hours, but bustle and hurry might disorder Mrs. Coleridge. She and the three children are quite well.[1]
I grieve that there is a lowering in politics. The ‘Moniteur’ contains almost daily some bitter abuse of our minister and parliament, and in London there is great anxiety and omening. I have dreaded war from the time that the disastrous fortunes of the expedition to Saint Domingo, under Le Clerc, was known in France. Write me one or two lines, as few as you like.
I remain, my dear Wedgwood, with most affectionate esteem, and grateful attachment,
Your sincere friend,
S. T. COLERIDGE.
Thomas Wedgwood, Esq.
[Footnote 1: Sara had been born 23rd December 1802.]
LETTER 115. TO THOMAS WEDGWOOD
Nether Stowey, Feb. 10, 1803.
Dear Wedgwood,
Last night Poole and I fully expected a few lines from you. When the newspaper came in, without your letter, we felt as if a dull neighbour had been ushered in after a knock at the door which had made us rise up and start forward to welcome some long absent friend. Indeed in Poole’s case, this simile is less over-swollen than in mine, for in contempt of my convictions and assurance to the contrary, Poole, passing off the Brummagem coin of his wishes for sterling reasons, had persuaded himself fully that he should see you in ‘propria persona’. The truth is, we had no right to expect a letter from you, and I should have attributed your not writing to your having nothing to write, to your bodily dislike of writing, or, though with reluctance, to low spirits, but that I have been haunted with the fear that your sister is worse, and that you are at Cote-House, in the mournful office of comforter to your brother. God keep us from idle dreams. Life has enough of real pains.
I wrote to Captain Wordsworth to get me some Bang. The captain in an affectionate letter answers me: “The Bang if possible shall be sent. If any country ship arrives I shall certainly get it. We have not got anything of the kind in our China ships.” If you would rather wait till it can be brought by Captain Wordsworth himself from China, give me a line that I may write and tell him. We shall hope for a letter from you to-night. I need not say, dear Wedgwood, how anxious I am to hear the particulars of your health and spirits.
Poole’s account of his conversations, etc., in France, are very interesting and instructive. If your inclination lead you hither you would be very comfortable here. But I am ready at an hour’s warning; ready in heart and mind, as well as in body and moveables.
I am, dear Wedgwood, most truly yours,
S. T. COLERIDGE.
Thomas Wedgwood, Esq.