CXLIX. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.
Rickman’s Office, H. of Commons,
February 20, 1804, Monday noon.
Dear Southey,—The affair with Godwin began thus. We were talking of reviews, and bewailing their ill effects. I detailed my plan for a review, to occupy regularly the fourth side of an evening paper, etc., etc., adding that it had been a favourite scheme with me for two years past. Godwin very coolly observed that it was a plan which “no man who had a spark of honest pride” could join with. “No man, not the slave of the grossest egotism, could unite in,” etc. Cool and civil! I asked whether he and most others did not already do what I proposed in prefaces. “Aye! in prefaces; that is quite a different thing.” I then adverted to the extreme rudeness of the speech with regard to myself, and added that it was not only a very rough, but likewise a very mistaken opinion, for I was nearly if not quite sure that it had received the approbation both of you and of Wordsworth. “Yes, sir! just so! of Mr. Southey—just what I said,” and so on mōrĕ Godwiniāno in language so ridiculously and exclusively appropriate to himself, that it would have made you merry. It was even as if he was looking into a sort of moral looking-glass, without knowing what it was, and, seeing his own very, very Godwinship, had by a merry conceit christened it in your name, not without some annexment of me and Wordsworth. I replied by laughing in the first place at the capricious nature of his nicety, that what was gross in folio should become double-refined in octavo foolscap or pickpocket quartos, blind slavish egotism in small pica, manly discriminating self-respect in double primer, modest as maiden’s blushes between boards, or in calf-skin, and only not obscene in naked sheets. And then in a deep and somewhat sarcastic tone, tried to teach him to speak more reverentially of his betters, by stating what and who they were, by whom honoured, by whom depreciated. Well! this gust died away. I was going home to look over his Duncity; he begged me to stay till his return in half an hour. I, meaning to take nothing more the whole evening, took a crust of bread, and Mary Lamb made me a glass of punch of most deceitful strength. Instead of half an hour, Godwin stayed an hour and a half. In came his wife, Mrs. Fenwick,[18] and four young ladies, and just as Godwin returned, supper came in, and it was now useless to go (at supper I was rather a mirth-maker than merry). I was disgusted at heart with the grossness and vulgar insanocecity of this dim-headed prig of a philosophocide, when, after supper, his ill stars impelled him to renew the contest. I begged him not to goad me, for that I feared my feelings would not long remain in my power. He (to my wonder and indignation) persisted (I had not deciphered the cause), and then, as he well said, I did “thunder and lighten at him” with a vengeance for more than an hour and a half. Every effort of self-defence only made him more ridiculous. If I had been Truth in person, I could not have spoken more accurately; but it was Truth in a war-chariot, drawn by the three Furies, and the reins had slipped out of the goddess’s hands!... Yet he did not absolutely give way till that stinging contrast which I drew between him as a man, as a writer, and a benefactor of society, and those of whom he had spoken so irreverently. In short, I suspect that I seldom, at any time and for so great a length of time, so continuously displayed so much power, and do hope and trust that never did I display one half the scorn and ferocity. The next morning, the moment when I awoke, O mercy! I did feel like a very wretch. I got up and immediately wrote and sent off by a porter, a letter, I dare affirm an affecting and eloquent letter to him, and since then have been working for him, for I was heart-smitten with the recollection that I had said all, all in the presence of his wife. But if I had known all I now know, I will not say that I should not have apologised, but most certainly I should not have made such an apology, for he confessed to Lamb that he should not have persisted in irritating me, but that Mrs. Godwin had twitted him for his prostration before me, as if he was afraid to say his life was his own in my presence. He admitted, too, that although he never to the very last suspected that I was tipsy, yet he saw clearly that something unusual ailed me, and that I had not been my natural self the whole evening. What a poor creature! To attack a man who had been so kind to him at the instigation of such a woman![19] And what a woman to instigate him to quarrel with me, who with as much power as any, and more than most of his acquaintances, had been perhaps the only one who had never made a butt of him—who had uniformly spoken respectfully to him. But it is past! And I trust will teach me wisdom in future.
I have undoubtedly suffered a great deal from a cowardice in not daring to repel unassimilating acquaintances who press forward upon my friendship; but I dare aver, that if the circumstances of each particular case were examined, they would prove on the whole honourable to me rather than otherwise. But I have had enough and done enough. Hereafter I shall show a different face, and calmly inform those who press upon me that my health, spirits, and occupation alike make it necessary for me to confine myself to the society of those with whom I have the nearest and highest connection. So help me God! I will hereafter be quite sure that I do really and in the whole of my heart esteem and like a man before I permit him to call me friend.
I am very anxious that you should go on with your “Madoc.” If the thought had happened to suggest itself to you originally and with all these modifications and polypus tendrils with which it would have caught hold of your subject, I am afraid that you would not have made the first voyage as interesting at least as it ought to be, so as to preserve entire the fit proportion of interest. But go on!
I shall call on Longman as soon as I receive an answer from him to a note which I sent....
God bless you and
S. T. Coleridge.
P. S. I have just received Sara’s four lines added to my brother George’s letter, and cannot explain her not having received my letters. If I am not mistaken I have written three or four times: upon an average I have written to Greta Hall once every five days since I left Liverpool—if you will divide the letters, one to each five days. I will write to my brother immediately. I wrote to Sara from Dunmow; to you instantly on my return, and now again. I do not deserve to be scolded at present. I met G. Burnett the day before yesterday in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, so nervous, so helpless with such opium-stupidly-wild eyes.
Oh, it made the place one calls the heart feel as it was going to ache.
CL. TO HIS WIFE.
Mr. J. C. Motley’s, Thomas Street, Portsmouth,
Sunday, April 1, 1804.
My dear Sara,—I am waiting here with great anxiety for the arrival of the Speedwell. The Leviathan, Man of War, our convoy, has orders to sail with the first fair wind, and whatever wind can bring in the Speedwell will carry out the Leviathan, unless she have other orders than those generally known. I have left the Inn, and its crumena-mulga natio, and am only at the expense of a lodging at half a guinea a week, for I have all my meals at Mr. Motley’s, to whom a letter from Stuart introduced me, and who has done most especial honour to the introduction. Indeed he could not well help, for Stuart in his letter called me his very, very particular friend, and that every attention would sink more into his heart than one offered to himself or his brother. Besides, you know it is no new thing for people to take sudden and hot likings to me. How different Sir G. B.! He disliked me at first. When I am in better spirits and less flurried I will transcribe his last letter. It breathed the very soul of calm and manly yet deep affection.
Hartley will receive his and Derwent’s Spillekins with a letter from me by the first waggon that leaves London after Wednesday next.
My dear Sara! the mother, the attentive and excellent mother of my children must needs be always more than the word friend can express when applied to a woman. I pray you, use no word that you use with reluctance. Yet what we have been to each other, our understandings will not permit our hearts to forget! God knows, I weep tears of blood, but so it is! For I greatly esteem and honour you. Heaven knows if I can leave you really comfortable in your circumstances I shall meet Death with a face, which I feel at the moment I say it, it would rather shock than comfort you to imagine.
My health is indifferent. I am rather endurably unwell than tolerably well. I will write Southey to-morrow or next day, though Motley rides and drives me about sightseeing so as to leave me but little time. I am not sure that I shall see the Isle of Wight.
Write to Wordsworth. Inform him that I have received all and everything and will write him very soon, as soon as I can command spirits and time.... Motley can send off all letters to Malta under Government covers. You direct, therefore, at all times merely to me at Mr. J. C. Motley’s, Portsmouth.
My very dear Sara, may God Almighty bless you and your affectionate
S. T. Coleridge.
I mourn for poor Mary.
CLI. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.
Off Oporto and the coast of Portugal,
Monday noon, April 16, 1804.
My dear Southey,—I was thinking long before daylight this morning, that I ought, spite of toss and tumble and cruel rocking, to write a few letters in the course of this and the three following days; at the end of which, if the northwest wind still blows behind, we may hope to be at Gibraltar. I have two or three very unpleasant letters to write, and I was planning whether I should not begin with these, have them off my hands and thoughts, in short, whistle them down into the sea, and then take up the paper, etc., a whole man. When, lo! I heard the Captain above deck talking of Oporto, slipped on my greatcoat and went shoeless up to have a look. And a beautiful scene verily it was and is! The high land of Portugal, and the mountain land behind it, and behind that fair mountains with blue pyramids and cones. By the glass I could distinguish the larger buildings in Oporto, a scrambling city, part of it, seemingly, walls washed by the sea, part of it upon hills. At first view, it looked much like a vast brick kiln in a sandy, clayey country on a hot summer afternoon; seen more distinctly, it gave the nobler idea of a ruined city in a wilderness, its houses and streets lying low in ruins under its ruined walls, and a few temples and palaces standing untouched. But over all the sea between us and the land, short of a stone’s throw on the left of the vessel, there is such a delicious warm olive green, almost yellow, on the water, and now it has taken in the vessel, and its boundary is a gunshot to my right, and one fine vessel exactly on its edge. This, though occasioned by the impurity of the nigh shore and the disemboguing rivers, forms a home scene; it is warm and landlike. The air is balmy and genial, and all that the fresh breeze can do can scarcely keep under its vernal warmth. The country round about Oporto seems darkly wooded; and in the distant gap far behind and below it on the curve of that high ridge forming a gap, I count seventeen conical and pyramidal summits; below that the high hills are saddlebacked. (In picturesque cant I ought to have said BUT below that, etc.) To me the saddleback is a pleasant form which it never would have occurred to me to christen by that name. Tents and marquees with little points and summits made by the tent-poles suggest a more striking likeness. Well! I need not say that the sight of the coast of Portugal made it impossible for me to write to any one before I had written to you—I now seeing for the first time a country you love so dearly. But you, perhaps, are not among my mountains! God Almighty grant that you may not. Yes! you are in London: all is well, and Hartley has a younger sister than tiny Sally. If it be so, call her Edith—Edith by itself—Edith. But somehow or other I would rather it were a boy, then let nothing, I conjure you, no false compliment to another, no false feeling indulged in yourself, deprive your eldest son of his father’s name. Such was ever the manner of our forefathers, and there is a dignity, a self-respect, or an awful, preëminently self-referring event in the custom, that makes it well worthy of our imitation. I would have done [so], but that from my earliest years I have had a feeling of dislike and disgust connected with my own Christian name—such a vile short plumpness, such a dull abortive smartness in the first syllable, and this so harshly contrasted by the obscurity and indefiniteness of the syllabic vowel, and the feebleness of the uncovered liquid with which it ends, the wobble it makes, and struggling between a dis- and a tri-syllable, and the whole name sounding as if you were abeeceeing S. M. U. L. Altogether, it is, perhaps, the worst combination of which vowels and consonants are susceptible. While I am writing we are in 41° 10m. latitude, and are almost three leagues from land; at one time we were scarcely one league from it, and about a quarter of an hour ago, the whole country looked so very like the country from Hutton Moor to Saddleback and the adjoining part of Skiddaw.
I cannot help some anxious feelings respecting you, nor some superstitious twitches within, as if it were wrong at this distance to write so prospectively and with such particularization of that which is contingent, which may be all otherwise. But—God forbid! and, surely, hope is less ominous than fear. We set sail from St. Helier’s, April 9th, Monday morning, having dropped down thither from Spithead on Sunday evening. We lost twenty-six hours of fair wind before our commodore gave the signal—our brig, a most excellent and first-rate sailor, but laden deep with heavy goods (eighty-four large cannon for Trieste in the hold), which makes it rock most cruelly. I can only—
Wed. April 18. I was going to say I can only compare it to a wench kept at home on some gay day to nurse a fretful infant and who, having long rocked it in vain, at length rocks it in spite.... But though the rough weather and the incessant rocking does not disease me, yet the damn’d rocking depresses one inconceivably, like hiccups or itching; it is troublesome and impertinent and forces you away from your thoughts like the presence and gossip of an old aunt, or long-staying visitor, to two lovers. Oh with what envy have I gazed at our commodore, the Leviathan of seventy-four guns, the majestic and beautiful creature sailing right before us, sometimes half a mile, oftener a furlong (for we are always first), with two or at most three topsails that just bisect the naked masts—as much naked mast above as below, upright, motionless as a church with its steeple, as though it moved by its will, as though its speed were spiritual, the being and essence without the body of motion, or as though the distance passed away by it and the objects of its pursuit hurried onward to it! In all other respects I cannot be better off, except perhaps the two passengers; the one a gay, worldly-minded fellow, not deficient in sense or judgment, but inert to everything except gain and eating; the other, a woman once housekeeper in General Fox’s family, a creature with a horrible superfluity of envelope, a monopolist and patentee of flabby flesh, or rather fish. Indeed, she is at once fish, flesh, and fowl, though no chicken. But, ... to see the man eat and this Mrs. Carnosity talk about it! “I must have that little potato” (baked in grease under the meat), “it looks so smilingly at me.” “Do cut me, if you please” (for she is so fat she cannot help herself), “that small bit, just there, sir! a leetle, tiny bit below if you please.” “Well, I have brought plenty of pickles, I always think,” etc. “I have always three or four jars of brandy cherries with me: for with boil’d rice now,” etc., “for I always think,” etc. And true enough, if it can be called thinking, she does always think upon some little damned article of eating that belongs to the housekeeper’s cupboard’s locker. And then her plaintive yawns, such a mixture of moan and petted child’s dry cry, or try at a cry in them. And then she said to me this morning, “How unhappy, I always think, one always is, when there is nothing and nobody as one may say, about one to amuse one. It makes me so nervous.” She eats, drinks, snores, and simply the being stupid, and silly, and vacant the learned body calls nervous. Shame on me for talking about her! The sun is setting so exactly behind my back that a ball from it would strike the stem of the vessel against which my back rests. But sunsets are not so beautiful, I think, at sea as on land. I am sitting at my desk, namely the rudder-case, on the duck coop, the ducks quacking at my legs. The chicken and duck coops run thus and so inclose on three sides the rudder-case. But now immediately that the sun has sunk, the sea runs high, and the vessel begins its old trick of rocking, which it had intermitted the whole day—the second intermission only since our voyage. Oh, how glad I was to see Cape Mondego, and then yesterday the Rock of Lisbon and the fine mountains at its interior extremity, which I conceived to be Cintra! Its outline from the sea is something like this
and just at A. where the fine stony M. begins, with a C. lying on its back, is a village or villages, and before we came abreast of this, we saw far inland, seemingly close by, several breasted peaks, two towers, and, by the glass, three, of a very large building, be it convent or palace. However, I knew you had seen all these places over and over again. The dome-shaped mountain or Cape Esperichel, between Lisbon and Cape St. Vincent, is one of the finest I ever saw; indeed all the mountains have a noble outline. We sail on at a wonderful rate, and considering that we are in convoy, shall have made a most lucky voyage to Gibraltar, if we are not becalmed and taken in the Gut; for we shall be there to-morrow afternoon if the wind hold, and have gone it in ten days. It is unlucky to prophesy good things, but if we have as good fortune in the Mediterranean, instead of nine or eleven weeks, we may reach Malta in a month or five weeks, including the week which we shall most probably stay at Gibraltar. I shall keep the letters open till we arrive there, simply put two strokes under the word “Gibraltar,” and close up the letter, as I may gain thereby a fortnight’s post. You will not expect to hear from me again till we get to Malta. I had hoped to have done something during my voyage; at all events, to have written some letters, etc. But what with the rains, the incessant rocking, and my consequent ill health or stupefaction, I have done little else than read through the Italian Grammar. I took out with me some of the finest wine and the oldest in the kingdom, some marvellous brandy, and rum twenty years old, and excepting a pint of wine, which I had mulled at two different times, and instantly ejected again, I have touched nothing but lemonade from the day we set sail to the present time. So very little does anything grow into a habit with me! This I should say to poor Tobin, who continued advising and advising to the last moment. O God, he is a good fellow, but this rage of advising and discussing character, and (as almost all men of strong habitual health have the trick of doing) of finding out the cause of everybody’s ill health in some one malpractice or other. This, and the self-conceit and presumption necessarily generated by it, added to his own marvellous genius at utterly misunderstanding what he hears, and transposing words often in a manner that would be ludicrous if one did not suspect that his blindness had a share in producing it—all this renders him a sad mischief-maker, and with the best intentions, a manufacturer and propagator of calumnies. I had no notion of the extent of the mischief till I was last in town. I was low, even to sinking, when I was at the Inn. Stuart, best, kindest man to me! was with me, and Lamb, and Sir G. B.’s valet. But Tobin fastened upon me, and advised and reproved, and just before I stepped into the coach, reminded me of a debt of ten pounds which I had borrowed of him for another person, an intimate friend of his, on the condition that I was not to repay him till I could do it out of my own purse, not borrowing of another, and not embarrassing myself—in his very words, “till he wanted it more than I.” I was calling to Stuart in order to pay the sum, but he stopped me with fervour, and, fully convinced that he did it only in the rage of admonition, I was vexed that it had angered me. Therefore say nothing of it, for really he is at bottom a good man.
I dare say nothing of home. I will write to Sara from Malta, the moment of my arrival, if I have not time to write from Gibraltar. One of you write to me by the regular post, “S. T. Coleridge, Esqre. Dr. Stoddart’s, Malta:” the other to me at Mr. J. C. Motley’s, Portsmouth, that I may see whether Motley was right or no, and which comes first.
God bless you all and
S. T. Coleridge.
Remember me kindly to Mr. Jackson, Mrs. Wilson, to the Calverts and Mrs. Wilkinson, to Mary Stamper, etc.
CLII. TO DANIEL STUART.
On board the Speedwell, at anchor in the Bay of Gibraltar,
Saturday night, April 21, 1804.
My dear Stuart,—We dropped anchor half a mile from the landing place of the Rock of Gibraltar on Thursday afternoon between four and five; a most prosperous voyage of eleven days....
Since we anchored I have passed nearly the whole of each day in scrambling about on the back of the rock, among the monkeys. I am a match for them in climbing, but in hops and flying leaps they beat me. You sometimes see thirty or forty together of these our poor relations, and you may be a month on the rock and go to the back every day and not see one. Oh, my dear friend! it is a most interesting place, this! A rock which thins as it rises up, so that you can sit a-straddle on almost any part of its summit, between two and three miles from north to south.
Rude as this line is, it gives you the outline of its appearance, from the sea close to it, tolerably accurately; only, in nature, it gives you very much the idea of a rude statue of a lion couchant, like that in the picture of the Lion and the Gnat, in the common spelling-books, or of some animal with a great dip in the neck. The lion’s head [turns] towards the Spanish, his stiffened tail (4) to the African coast. At (5) a range of Moorish towers and wall begins; and at (6) the town begins, the Moorish wall running straight down by the side of it. Above the town, little gardens and neat small houses are scattered here and there, wherever they can force a bit of gardenable ground; and in these are poplars, with a profusion of geraniums and other flowers unknown to me; and their fences are most commonly that strange vegetable monster, the prickly aloe; its leaves resembling the head of a battledore, or the wooden wings of a church-cherub, and one leaf growing out of another. Under the Lion’s Tail is Europa Point, which is full of gardens and pleasant trees; but the highest head of this mountain is a heap of rocks, with the palm-trees growing in vast quantities in their interstices, with many flowering weeds very often peeping out of the small holes or slits in the body of the rock, just as if they were growing in a bottle. To have left England only eleven days ago, with two flannel waistcoats on, and two others over them; with two flannel drawers under cloth pantaloons, and a thick pair of yarn stockings; to have had no temptation to lay any part of these aside during the whole voyage, and now to find myself in the heat of an English summer, among flowers, and seeking shade, and courting the sea-breezes; all the trees in rich foliage, and the corn knee-high, and so exquisitely green! and to find myself forced to retain only one flannel waistcoat, and roam about in a pair of silk stockings and nankeen pantaloons, is a delightful transition. How I shall bear the intensity of a Maltese or even a Sicilian summer I cannot guess; but if I get over it, I am confident, from what I have experienced the last four days, that their late autumn and winter will almost re-create me. I could fill a fresh sheet with the description of the singular faces, dresses, manners, etc., etc., of the Spaniards, Moors, Jews (who have here a peculiar dress resembling a college dress), Greeks, Italians, English, etc., that meet in the hot crowded streets of the town, or walk under the aspen poplars that form an Exchange in the very centre. But words would do nothing. I am sure that any young man who has a turn for character-painting might pass a year on the Rock with infinite advantage. A dozen plates by Hogarth from this town! We are told that we shall not sail to-morrow evening. The Leviathan leaves us and goes to join the fleet, and the Maidstone Frigate is to convoy us to Malta. When you write, send one letter to me at Mr. J. C. Motley’s, Portsmouth, and another by the post to me at Dr. Stoddart’s,[20] Malta, that I may see which comes first. God grant that my present health may continue, and then my after-letters will be better worth the postage. But even this scrawl will not be unwelcome to you, since it tells you that I am safe, improving in my health, and ever, ever, my dear Stuart, with true affection, and willing gratitude, your sincere friend,
S. T. Coleridge.
In the diary of his voyage on the Speedwell Coleridge records at greater length and in a more impassioned strain his first impressions of Gibraltar. “Saturday, April 21st, went again on shore, walked up to the furthermost signal-house, the summit of that third and last segment of the mountain ridge which looks over the blue sea to Africa. The mountains around me did not anywhere arrange themselves strikingly, and few of their shapes were striking. One great pyramidal summit far above the rest, on the coast of Spain, and an uncouth form, an old Giant’s Head and shoulders, looking in upon us from Africa far inland, were the most impressive; but the sea was so blue, calm, sunny, so majestic a lake where it is enshored by mountains, and, where it is not [enshored], having its indefiniteness the more felt from those huge mountain boundaries, which yet by their greatness prepared the mind for the sublimity of unbounded ocean—altogether it reposed in the brightness and quietness of the noon—majestic, for it was great with an inseparable character of unity, and, thus, the more touching to me who had looked from far loftier mountains over a far more manifold landscape, the fields and habitations of Englishmen, children of one family, one religion, and that my own, the same language and manners—by every hill, by every river some sweet name familiar to my ears, or, if first heard, remembered as soon as heard! But here, on this side of me, Spaniards, a degraded race that dishonour Christianity; on the other, Moors of many nations, wretches that dishonour human nature! If any one were near me and could tell me, ‘that mountain yonder is called so and so, and at its foot runs such and such a river,’ oh, with how blank an ear should I listen to sounds which probably my tongue could not repeat, and which I should be sure to forget, and take no pleasure in remembering! And the Rock itself, on which I stand (nearly the same in length as our Carrock, but not so high, nor one tenth as wide), what a complex Thing! At its feet mighty ramparts establishing themselves in the sea with their huge artillery, hollow trunks of iron where Death and Thunder sleep; the gardens in deep moats between lofty and massive walls; a town of all nations and all languages—close below me, on my left, fields and gardens and neat small mansions—poplars, cypresses, and willow-leaved aspens, with fences of prickly aloe—strange plant that does not seem to be alive, but to have been so, a thing fantastically carved in wood, and coloured—some hieroglyphic or temple ornament of undiscovered meaning. On my right and immediately with and around me white stone above stone, an irregular heap of marble rocks, with flowers growing out of the holes and fissures, and palmettoes everywhere ... beyond these an old Moorish tower, and then galleries and halls cut out by human labour out of the dense hard rock, with enormous cannon the apertures for which no eye could distinguish, from the sea or the land below them, from the nesting-holes of seafowl. On the north side, aside these, one absolutely perpendicular precipice, the absolute length of the Rock, at its highest a precipice of 1,450 feet—the whole eastern side an unmanageable mass of stones and weeds, save one place where a perpendicular precipice of stone slants suddenly off in a swelling slope of sand like the Screes on Wastwater. The other side of this rock 5,000 men in arms, and no less than 10,000 inhabitants—in this [side] sixty or seventy apes! What a multitude, an almost discordant complexity of associations! The Pillars of Hercules, Calpe, and Abyla, the realms of Masinissa, Jugurtha, and Syphax: Spain, Gibraltar: the Dey of Algiers, dusky Moor and black African, and others. Quiet it is to the eye, and to the heart, which in it will entrance itself in the present vision, and know nothing, feel nothing, but the abiding things of Nature, great, calm, majestic, and one! From the road I climbed up among the rocks, crushing the tansy, the strong smell of which the open air reconciled to me. I reached the ‘striding edge,’ where, as I sate, I fell into the above musing.”
CLIII. TO HIS WIFE.
[Malta,] June, 1804.
[My dear Sara,]—[I wrote] to Southey from Gibraltar, directing you to open the letter in case Southey should be in town. You received it, I trust, and learnt from it that I had been pretty well, and that we had had a famous quick passage. At Gibraltar we stayed five days, and so lost our fair wind, and [during our] after-voyage to Malta [there] was [a] storm, that carried away our main yard, etc., long dead calms, every rope of the whole ship reflected in the bright, soft blue sea, and light winds, often varying every quarter of an hour, and more often against us than for us. We were the best sailing vessel in the whole convoy; but every day we had to lie by and wait for the laggards. This is very disheartening; likewise the frequent danger in light winds or calms, or in foggy weather of running foul of each other is another heavy inconvenience of convoy, and, in case of a deep calm in a narrow sea, as in the Gut of Gibraltar and in the Archipelago, etc., where calms are most common, a privateering or piratical row-boat might board you and make slaves of you under the very nose of the man-of-war, which would lie a lifeless hulk on the smooth water. For these row-boats, mounting from one to four or five guns, would instantly sink a man-of-war’s boat, and one of them, last war, had very nearly made a British frigate strike. I mention these facts because it is a common notion that going under convoy you are “as snug as a bug in a rug.” If I had gone without convoy on board the Speedwell, we should have reached Malta in twenty days from the day I left Portsmouth, but, however, we were congratulated on having had a very good passage for the time of the year, having been only forty days including our stay at Gibraltar; and if there be inconvenience in a convoy, I have reason to know and to be grateful for its advantages. The whole of the voyage from Gibraltar to Malta, excepting the four or five last days, I was wretchedly unwell.... The harbour at Valetta is narrow as the neck of a bottle in the entrance; but instantly opens out into a lake with tongues of land, capes, one little island, etc., etc., where the whole navy of England might lie as in a dock in the worst of weather. All around its banks, in the form of an amphitheatre, rise the magnificent houses of Valetta, and its two over-the-water towns, Burmola and Flavia (which are to Valetta what the Borough is to London). The houses are all lofty and built of fine white freestone, something like Bath, only still whiter and newer looking, yet the windows, from the prodigious thickness of the walls, being all out of sight, the whole appeared to me as Carthage to Æneas, a proud city, well nigh but not quite finished. I walked up a long street of good breadth, all a flight of stairs (no place for beast or carriage, each broad stair composed of a cement-sand of terra pozzolana, hard and smooth as the hardest pavement of smooth rock by the seaside and very like it). I soon found out Dr. Stoddart’s house, which seemed a large pile of building. He was not at home, but I stayed for him, and in about two hours he came, and received me with an explosion of surprise and welcome—more fun than affection in the manner, but just as I wished it.... Yesterday and to-day I have been pretty well. In a hot climate, now that the glass is high as 80 in the shade, the healthiest persons are liable to fever on the least disagreement of food with the first passages, and my general health is, I would fain believe, better on the whole.... I will try the most scrupulous regimen of diet and exercise; and I rejoice to find that the heat, great as it is, does not at all annoy me. In about a fortnight I shall probably take a trip into Sicily, and spend the next two or three months in some cooler and less dreary place, and return in September. For eight months in the year the climate of Malta is delightful, but a drearier place eye never saw. No stream in the whole island, only one place of springs, which are conveyed by aqueducts and supply the island with about one third of its water; the other two thirds they depend for upon the rain. And the reservoirs under the houses, walls, etc., to preserve the rain are stupendous! The tops of all the houses are flat, and covered with that smooth, hard composition, and on these and everywhere where rain can fall are channels and pipes to conduct it to the reservoirs. Malta is about twenty miles by twelve—a mere rock of freestone. In digging out this they find large quantities of vegetable soil. They separate it, and with the stones they build their houses and garden and field walls, all of an enormous thickness. The fields are seldom so much as half an acre one above another in that form, so that everything grows as in huge garden pots. The whole island looks like one monstrous fortification. Nothing green meets your eye—one dreary, grey-white,—and all the country towns from the retirement and invisibility of the windows look like towns burnt out and desolate. Yet the fertility is marvellous. You almost see things grow, and the population is, I suppose, unexampled. The town of Valetta itself contains about one hundred and ten streets, all at right angles to each other, each having from twelve to fifty houses; but many of them very steep—a few staired all across, and almost all, in some part or other, if not the whole, having the footway on each side so staired. The houses lofty, all looking new. The good houses are built with a court in the centre, and the rooms large and lofty, from sixteen to twenty feet high, and walls enormously thick, all necessary for coolness. The fortifications of Valetta are endless. When I first walked about them, I was struck all of a heap with their strangeness, and when I came to understand a little of their purpose, I was overwhelmed with wonder. Such vast masses—bulky mountain-breasted heights; gardens with pomegranate trees—the prickly pears in the fosses, and the caper (the most beautiful of flowers) growing profusely in the interstices of the high walls and on the battlements. The Maltese are a dark, light-limbed people. Of the women five tenths are ugly; of the remainder, four fifths would be ordinary but that they look so quaint, and one tenth, perhaps, may be called quaint-pretty. The prettiest resemble pretty Jewesses in England. They are the noisiest race[21] under heaven, and Valetta the noisiest place. The sudden shot-up, explosive bellows-cries you ever heard in London would give you the faintest idea of it. Even when you pass by a fruit stall the fellow will put his hand like a speaking trumpet to his mouth and shoot such a thunderbolt of sound full at you. Then the endless jangling of those cursed bells, etc. Sir Alexander Ball and General Valette (the civil and military commanders) have been marvellously attentive—Sir A. B. even friendly and confidential to me.
Poor Mrs. Stoddart was brought to bed of a little girl on the 24th of May, and it died on Tuesday, June 5th. On the night of its birth, poor little lamb! I had such a lively vision of my little Sara, that it brought on a sort of hysterical fit on me. O merciful God! how I tremble at the thought of letters from England. I should be most miserable without them, and yet I shall receive them as a sentence of death! So terribly has fear got the upper hand in my habitual feelings, from my long destitution of hope and joy.
Hartley, Derwent, my sweet children! a father’s blessing on you! With tears and clasped hands I bless you. Oh, I must write no more of this. I have been haunted by the thought that I have lost a box of books containing Shakespeare (Stockdale’s), the four or five first volumes of the “British Poets,” Young’s “Syllabus” (a red paper book), Condillac’s “Logic,” “Thornton on Public Credit,” etc. Be sure you inform me whether or no I did take these books from Keswick. I will write to Southey by the next opportunity. You recollect that I went away without knowing the result of Edith’s confinement; not a day in which I do not think of it.
My love to dear Southey, and remember me to Mr. Jackson, and Mrs. Wilson with the kindest words, and to Mary Stamper. My kind remembrances to Mr. and Mrs. Wilkinson, and to the Calverts. How is your sister Mary in her spirits? My wishes and prayers attend her. I am anxious to hear about poor George and shall write about him to Portsmouth in the course of a week, for by that time a convoy will be going to England as we expect. I hope that in the course of three weeks or a month I may be able to give a more promising account of my health. As it is, I have reason to be satisfied. The effect of years cannot be done away in a few weeks. I am tranquil and resigned, and, even if I should not bring back health, I shall at least bring back experience, and suffer with patience and in silence. Again and again God bless you, my dear Sara! Let me know everything of your health, etc., etc. Oh, the letters are on the sea for me, and what tidings may they not bring to me!
S. T. Coleridge.
Single sheet. Per Germania a Londra. An. 1804.
CLIV. TO DANIEL STUART.
Syracuse,[22] October 22, 1804.
My dear Stuart,—I have written you a long letter this morning by way of Messina, and from other causes am so done up and brain weary that I must put you to the expense of this as almost a blank, except that you will be pleased to observe my attention to business in having written two letters of advice, as well as transmitted first and second of exchange for £50 which I have drawn upon you, payable to order of Dr. Stoddart at usance. I shall want no more for my return. I shall stay a month at Messina, and in that time visit Naples. Supposing the letter of this morning to miss, I ought to repeat to you that I leave the publication of the Pacquet,[23] which is waiting for convoy at Malta for you, to your own opinion. If the information appear new or valuable to you, and the letters themselves entertaining, etc., publish them; only do not sell the copyright of more than the right of two editions to the bookseller. He will not give more, or much more for the copyright of the whole.
May God bless you! I am, and shall be as long as I exist, your truly grateful and affectionate friend,
S. T. Coleridge.
CLV. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.
Sat. morning, 4 o’clock. Treasury, Malta.
February 2, 1805.
Dear Southey,—A Privateer is to leave this Port to-day at noon for Gibraltar, and, it chancing that an officer of rank takes his passage in her, Sir A. Ball trusts his dispatches with due precaution to this unusual mode of conveyance, and I must enclose a letter to you in the government parcel. I pray that the lead attached to it will not be ominous of its tardy voyage, much less of its making a diving tour whither the spirit of Shakespeare went, under the name of the Dreaming Clarence.[24] Certain it is that I awoke about some half hour ago from so vivid a dream that the work of sleep had completely destroyed all sleepiness. I got up, went to my office-room, rekindled the wood-fire for the purpose of writing to you, having been so employed from morn till eve in writing public letters, some as long as memorials, from the hour that this opportunity was first announced to me, that for once in my life, at least, I can with strict truth affirm that I have had no time to write to you, if by time be understood the moments of life in which our powers are alive. I am well—at least, till within the last fortnight I was perfectly so, till the news of the sale of my blessed house played “the foe intestine” with me. But of that hereafter.
My dear Southey![25] the longer I live, and the more I see, know, and think, the more deeply do I seem to know and feel your goodness; and why, at this distance, may I not allow myself to utter forth my whole thought by adding your greatness? “Thy kingdom come” will have been a petition already granted, when in the minds and hearts of all men both words mean the same; or (to shake off a state of feeling deeper than may be serviceable to me) when gulielmosartorially speaking (i. e. William “Taylorice”) the latter word shall have become an incurable synonym, a lumberly duplicate, thrown into the kennel of the Lethe-lapping Chronos Anubioeides,[26] as a carriony, bare-ribbed tautology. Oh me! it will not do! You, my children, the Wordsworths, are at Keswick and Grasmere, and I am at Malta, and it is a silly hypocrisy to pretend to joke when I am heavy at heart. By the accident of the sale of a dead Colonel’s effects, who arrived in this healing climate too late to be healed, I procured the perusal of the second volume of the “Annual Review.” I was suddenly and strangely affected by the marked attention which you had paid to my few hints, by the insertion of my joke on Booker; but more, far more than all, by the affection for me which peeped forth in that “William Brown of Ottery.” I knew you stopped before and after you had written the words. But I am to speak of your reviews in general. I am confident, for I have carefully reperused almost the whole volume, and what I knew or detected to be yours I have read over and over again, with as much care and as little warping of partiality as if it had been a manuscript of my own going to the press—I can say confidently that in my best judgment they are models of good sense and correct style; of high and honest feeling intermingled with a sort of wit which (I now translate as truly, though not as verbally, as I can, the sense of an observation which a literary Venetian, who resides here as the editor of a political journal, made to me after having read your reviews of Clarke’s “Maritime Discoveries”) unites that happy turn of words, which is the essence of French wit, with those comic picture-making combinations of fancy that characterises the old wit of old England. If I can find time to copy off what in the hurry of the moment I wrote on loose papers that cannot be made up into a letter without subjecting you to an expense wholly disproportionate to their value, I shall prove to you that I have been watchful in marking what appeared to me false, or better-not, or better-otherwise, parts, no less than what I felt to be excellent. It is enough to say at present, that seldom in my course of reading have I been more deeply impressed than by the sense of the diffused good they were likely to effect. At the same time I could not help feeling to how many false and pernicious principles, both in taste and in politics, they were likely, by their excellence, to give a non-natural circulation. W. Taylor grows worse and worse. As to his political dogmata concerning Egypt, etc., God forgive him! He knows not what he does! But as to his spawn about Milton and Tasso—nay, Heaven forbid it should be spawn, it is pure toad-spit, not as toad-spit is, but as it is vulgarly believed to be. (See, too, his Article in the “Critical Review.”) Now for your feelings respecting “Madoc.” I regard them as all nerve and stomach-work, you having too recently quitted the business. Genius, too, has its intoxication, which, however divine, leaves its headaches and its nauseas. Of the very best of the few bad, good, and indifferent things, I have had the same sensations. Concerning the immediate chryso-poetic powers of “Madoc” I can only fear somewhat and hope somewhat. Midas and Apollo are as little cronies as Marsyas and Apollo. But of its great and lasting effects on your fame, if I doubted, I should then doubt all things in which I had hitherto had firm faith. Neither am I without cheerful belief respecting its ultimate effects on your worldly fortune. O dear Southey! when I see this booby with his ten pound a day as Mr. Commissary X., and that thorough-rogue two doors off him with his fifteen pound a day as Mr. General Paymaster Y. Z., it stirs up a little bile from the liver and gives my poor stomach a pinch, when I hear you talk of having to look forward to an £100 or £150. But cheerily! what do we complain of? would we be either of these men? Oh, had I domestic happiness, and an assurance only of the health I now possess continuing to me in England, what a blessed creature should I be, though I found it necessary to feed me and mine on roast potatoes for two days in each week in order to make ends meet, and to awake my beloved with a kiss on the first of every January. “Well, my best darling! we owe nobody a farthing! and I have you, my children, two or three friends, and a thousand books!” I have written very lately to Mrs. Coleridge. If my letter reaches her, as I have quoted in it a part of yours of Oct. 19th, she will wonder that I took no notice of the house and the Bellygerent. From Mrs. C. I have received no letter by the last convoy. In truth I am and have reason to be ashamed to own to what a diseased excess my sensibility has worsened into. I was so agitated by the receipt of letters, that I did not bring myself to open them for two or three days, half-dreaming that from there being no letter from Mrs. C. some one of the children had died, or that she herself had been ill, or—for so help me God! most ill-starred as our marriage has been, there is perhaps nothing that would so frightfully affect me as any change respecting her health or life; and, when I had read about a third of your letter, I walked up and down and then out, and much business intervening, I wrote to her before I had read the remainder, or my other letters. I grieve exceedingly at the event, and my having foreseen it does not diminish the shock. My dear study! and that house in which such persons have been! where my Hartley has made his first love-commune with Nature, to belong to White. Oh, how could Mr. Jackson have the heart to do it! As to the climate, I am fully convinced that to an invalid all parts of England are so much alike, that no disadvantages on that score can overbalance any marked advantages from other causes. Mr. J. well knows that but for my absolute confidence in him I should have taken the house for a long lease—but, poor man! I am rather to soothe than to reproach him. When will he ever again have loving friends and housemates like to us? And dear good Mrs. Wilson! Surely Mrs. Coleridge must have written to me, though no letter has arrived. Now for myself. I am most anxiously expecting the arrival of Mr. Chapman from Smyrna, who is (by the last ministry if that should hold valid) appointed successor to Mr. Macaulay, as Public Secretary of Malta, the second in rank to the Governor. Mr. M., an old man of eighty, died on the 18th of last month, calm as a sleeping baby, in a tremendous thunder-and-lightning storm. In the interim, I am and some fifty times a day subscribe myself, Segretario Pubblico dell’ Isole di Malta, Gozo, e delle loro dipendenze. I live in a perfect palace and have all my meals with the Governor; but my profits will be much less than if I had employed my time and efforts in my own literary pursuits. However, I gain new insights and if (as I doubt not I shall) I return having expended nothing, having paid all my prior debts as well as interim expense (of the which debts I consider the £100 borrowed by me from Sotheby on the firm of W. Wordsworth, the heaviest), with health, and some additional knowledge both in things and languages, I surely shall not have lost a year. My intention is, assuredly, to leave this place at the farthest in the latter end of this month, whether by the convoy, or over-land by Trieste, Vienna, Berlin, Embden, and Denmark, but I must be guided by circumstances. At all events, it will be well if a letter should be left for me at the “Courier” office in London, by the first of May, informing me of all which it is necessary for me to know. But of one thing I am most anxious, namely, that my assurance money should be paid. I pray you, look to that. You will have heard long before this letter reaches you that the French fleet have escaped from Toulon. I have no heart for politics, else I could tell you how for the last nine months I have been working in memorials concerning Egypt, Sicily, and the coast of Africa. Could France ever possess these, she would be, in a far grander sense than the Roman, an Empire of the World. And what would remain to England? England; and that which our miserable diplomatists affect now to despise, now to consider as a misfortune, our language and institutions in America. France is blest by nature, for in possessing Africa she would have a magnificent outlet for her population as near her own coasts as Ireland to ours; an America that must forever be an integral part of the mother-country. Egypt is eager for France—only eager, far more eager for G. Britain. The universal cry there (I have seen translations of twenty, at least, mercantile letters in the Court of Admiralty here (in which I have made a speech with a wig and gown, a true Jack of all Trades), all stating that the vox populi) is English, English, if we can! but Hats at all events! (Hats means Europeans in contradistinction to Turbans.) God bless you, Southey! I wish earnestly to kiss your child. And all whom you love, I love, as far as I can, for your sake.
For England. Per Inghilterra.
Robert Southey, Esqre, Greta Hall, Keswick, Cumberland.
CLVI. TO DANIEL STUART.
Favoured by Captain Maxwell of the Artillery.—N. B., an amiable mild man, who is prepared to give you any information.
Malta, April 20, 1805.
Dear Stuart,—The above is a duplicate, or rather a sex or septem-plicate of an order sent off within three weeks after my draft on you had been given by me; and very anxious I have been, knowing that all or almost all of my letters have failed. It seems like a judgment on me. Formerly, when I had the sure means of conveying letters, I neglected my duty through indolence or procrastination. For the last year, when, having all my heart, all my hope in England, I found no other gratification than that of writing to Wordsworth and his family, his wife, sister, and wife’s sister; to Southey, to you, to T. Wedgwood, Sir. G. Beaumont, etc. Indeed, I have been supererogatory in some instances—but an evil destiny has dogged them—one large and (forgive my vanity!) rather important set of letters to you on Sicily and Egypt were destroyed at Gibraltar among the papers of a most excellent man, Major Adye, to whom I had entrusted them on his departure from Sicily, and who died of the Plague FOUR DAYS after his arrival at Gibraltar. But still was I afflicted (shame on me! even to violent weeping) when all my many, many letters were thrown overboard from the Arrow, the Acheron, and a merchant vessel, to all which I had entrusted them; the last through my own over care. For I delivered them to the captain with great pomp of seriousness, in my official character as Public Secretary of the Islands.[27] He took them, and considering them as public papers, on being close chased and expecting to be boarded, threw them overboard; and he, however, escaped, steering for Africa, and returned to Malta. But regrets are idle things.
In my letter, which will accompany this, I have detailed my health and all that relates to me. In case, however, that letter should not arrive, I will simply say, that till within the last two months or ten weeks my health had improved to the utmost of my hopes, though not without some intrusions of sickness; but latterly the loss of my letters to England, the almost entire non-arrival of letters from England, not a single one from Mrs. Coleridge or Southey or you; and only one from the Wordsworths, and that dated September, 1804! my consequent heart-saddening anxieties, and still, still more, the depths which Captain John Wordsworth’s death[28] sunk into my heart, and which I heard abruptly, and in the very painfullest way possible in a public company—all these joined to my disappointment in my expectation of returning to England by this convoy, and the quantity and variety of my public occupations from eight o’clock in the morning to five in the afternoon, having besides the most anxious duty of writing public letters and memorials which belongs to my talents rather than to my pro-tempore office; these and some other causes that I cannot mention relative to my affairs in England have produced a sad change indeed on my health; but, however, I hope all will be well.... It is my present intention to return home over-land by Naples, Ancona, Trieste, etc., on or about the second of next month.
The gentleman who will deliver this to you is Captain Maxwell of the Royal Artillery, a well-informed and very amiable countryman of yours. He will give you any information you wish concerning Malta. An intelligent friend of his, an officer of sense and science, has entrusted to him an essay on Lampedusa,[29] which I have advised him to publish in a newspaper, leaving it to the Editor to divide it. It may, perhaps, need a little softening, but it is an accurate and well-reasoned memorial. He only wishes to give it publicity, and to have not only his name concealed, but every circumstance that could lead to a suspicion. If after reading it you approve of it, you would greatly oblige him by giving it a place in the “Courier.” He is a sensible, independent man. For all else to my other letter.—I am, dear Stuart, with faithful recollections, your much obliged and truly grateful friend and servant,
S. T. Coleridge.
April 20, 1805.
CLVII. TO HIS WIFE.
Malta, July 21, 1805.
Dear Sara,—The Niger is ordered off for Gibraltar at a moment’s warning, and the Hall is crowded with officers and merchants whose oaths I am to take, and accompts to sign. I will not, however, suffer it to go without a line, and including a draft for £110—another opportunity will offer in a week or ten days, and I will enclose a duplicate in a letter at large. Now for the most important articles. My health had greatly improved; but latterly it has been very, very bad, in great measure owing to dejection of spirits, my letters having failed, the greater part of those to me, and almost all mine homeward.... My letters and the duplicates of them, written with so much care and minuteness to Sir George Beaumont—those to Wedgwood, to the Wordsworths, to Southey, Major Adye’s sudden death, and then the loss of the two frigates, the capture of a merchant’s privateer, all have seemed to spite. No one not absent on a dreary island, so many leagues of sea from England, can conceive the effect of these accidents on the spirit and inmost soul. So help me Heaven! they have nearly broken my heart. And, added to this, I have been hoping and expecting to get away for England for five months past, and Mr. Chapman not arriving, Sir Alexander’s importunities have always overpowered me, though my gloom has increased at each disappointment. I am determined, however, to go in less than a month. My office, as Public Secretary, the next civil dignitary to the Governor, is a very, very busy one, and not to involve myself in the responsibility of the Treasurer I have but half the salary. I oftentimes subscribe my name 150 times a day, S. T. Coleridge, Pub. Sec. to H. M. Civ. Commissr, or (if in Italian) Seg. Pub. del Commiss’ Regio, and administer half as many oaths—besides which I have the public memorials to write, and, worse than all, constant matters of arbitration. Sir A. Ball is indeed exceedingly kind to me. The officers will be impatient. I would I could write a more cheerful account of my health; all I can say is that I am better than I have been, and that I was very much better before so many circumstances of dejection happened. I should overset myself completely, if I ventured to mention a single name. How deeply I love, O God! it is agony at morning and evening.
S. T. Coleridge.
P. S. On being abruptly told by Lady Ball of John Wordsworth’s fate, I attempted to stagger out of the room (the great saloon of the Palace with fifty people present), and before I could reach the door fell down on the ground in a convulsive hysteric fit. I was confined to my room for a fortnight after; and now I am afraid to open a letter, and I never dare ask a question of any new-comer. The night before last I was much affected by the sudden entrance of poor Reynell (our inmate at Stowey);[30] more of him in my next. May God Almighty bless you and—
(Signed with seal, ΕΣΤΗΣΕ.)
For England.
Mrs. Coleridge, Keswick, Cumberland.
Postmark, Sept. 8, 1805.
CLVIII. TO WASHINGTON ALLSTON.
Direct to me at Mr. Degens, Leghorn. God bless you!
Tuesday, June 17, 1806.[31]
My dear Allston,—No want of affection has occasioned my silence. Day after day I expected Mr. Wallis. Benvenuti received me with almost insulting coldness, not even asking me to sit down; neither could I, by any enquiry, find that he ever returned my call, and even in answer to a very polite note enquiring for letters, sent a verbal message, that there was one, and that I might call for it. However, within the last seven or eight days he has called and made his amende honourable; he says he forgot the name of my inn, and called at two or three in vain. Whoo! I did not tell him that within five days I sent him a note in which the inn was mentioned, and that he sent me a message in consequence, and yet never called for ten days afterwards. However, yester-evening the truth came out. He had been bored by letters of recommendation, and till he received a letter from Mr. —— looked upon me as a bore—which, however, he might and ought to have got rid of in a more gentlemanly manner. Nothing more was necessary than the day after my arrival to have sent his card by his servant. But I forgive him from my heart. It should, however, be a lesson to Mr. Wallis, to whom, and for whom, he gives letters of recommendation.
I have been dangerously ill for the last fortnight, and unwell enough, Heaven knows, previously; about ten days ago, on rising from my bed, I had a manifest stroke of palsy along my right side and right arm. My head felt like another man’s head, so dead was it, that I seemed to know it only by my left hand, and a strange sense of numbness....
Enough of it, continual vexations and preyings upon the spirit—I gave life to my children,[32] and they have repeatedly given it to me; for, by the Maker of all things, but for them I would try my chance. But they pluck out the wing-feathers from the mind. I have not entirely recovered the sense of my side or hand, but have recovered the use. I am harassed by local and partial fevers. This day, at noon, we set off for Leghorn;[33] all passage through the Italian States and Germany is little other than impossible for an Englishman, and Heaven knows whether Leghorn may not be blockaded. However, we go thither, and shall go to England in an American ship. Inform Mr. Wallis of this, and urge him to make his way—assure him of my anxious thoughts and fervent wishes respecting him and of my love for T——, and his family. Tell Mr. Migliorus [?] that I should have written him long ago but for my ill health; and will not fail to do it on my arrival at Pisa—from thence, too, I will write a letter to you, for this I do not consider as a letter. Nothing can surpass Mr. Russell’s[34] kindness and tender-heartedness to me, and his understanding is far superior to what it appears on first acquaintance. I will write likewise to Mr. Wallis and conjure him not to leave Amelia. I have heard in Leghorn a sad, sad character of one of those whom you called acquaintance, but who call you their dear friend.
My dear Allston, somewhat from increasing age, but more from calamity and intense fra[ternal affections], my heart is not open to more than kind, good wishes in general. To you, and to you alone, since I left England, I have felt more, and had I not known the Wordsworths, should have esteemed and loved you first and most; and, as it is, next to them I love and honour you. Heaven knows, a part of such a wreck as my head and heart is scarcely worth your acceptance.
S. T. Coleridge.
CLIX. TO DANIEL STUART.
Bell Inn, Friday Street,
Monday morning, August 18, 1806.
My dear Sir,—I arrived here from Stangate Creek last night, a little after ten, and have found myself so unusually better ever since I leaped on land yester-afternoon, that I am glad that neither my strength nor spirits enabled me to write to you on my arrival in Quarantine on the eleventh. Both the captain and my fellow-passengers were seriously alarmed for my life; and indeed such have been my unremitting sufferings from pain, sleeplessness, loathing of food, and spirits wholly despondent, that no motive on earth short of an awful duty would ever prevail on me to take any sea-voyage likely to be longer than three or four days. I had rather starve in a hovel, and, if life through disease become worthless, will choose a Roman death. It is true I was very low before I embarked.... To have been working so hard for eighteen months in a business I detested; to have been flattered, and to have flattered myself that I should, on striking the balance, have paid all my debts and maintained both myself and family during my exile out of my savings and earnings, including my travels through Germany, through which I had to the very last hoped to have passed, and found myself!—but enough! I cannot charge my conscience with a single extravagance, nor even my judgment with any other imprudences than that of suffering one good and great man to overpersuade me from month to month to a delay which was gnawing away my very vitals, and in being duped in disobedience to my first feelings and previous ideas by another diplomatic Minister.... A gentleman offered to take me without expense to Rome, which I accepted with the full intention of staying only a fortnight, and then returning to Naples to pass the winter.... I left everything but a good suit of clothes and my shirts, etc., all my letters of credit, manuscripts, etc. I had not been ten days in Rome before the French torrent rolled down on Naples. All return was impossible, and all transmission of papers not only insecure, but being English and many of them political, highly dangerous both to the sender and sendee.... But this is only a fragment of a chapter of contents, and I am too much agitated to write the details, but will call on you as soon as my two or three remaining [guineas] shall have put a decent hat upon my head and shoes upon my feet. I am literally afraid, even to cowardice, to ask for any person or of any person. Including the Quarantine we had fifty-five days of shipboard, working up against head-winds, rotting and sweating in calms, or running under hard gales with the dead lights secured. From the captain and my fellow-passenger I received every possible tenderness, only when I was very ill they laid their wise heads together, and the latter in a letter to his father begged him to inform my family that I had arrived, and he trusted that they would soon see me in better health and spirits than when I had quitted them; a letter which must have alarmed if they saw into it, and wounded if they did not. I was not informed of it till this morning. God bless you, my dear sir! I have yet cheerful hopes that Heaven will not suffer me to die degraded by any other debts than those which it ever has been, and ever will be, my joy and pride still to pay and still to owe; those of a truly grateful heart, and to you among the first of those to whom they are due.
S. T. Coleridge.