“Of this day and the one following,” Allsop says, “I have a few notes, which appear to me of interest. It must be borne constantly in mind, that much of what is preserved has relation to positions enforced by others, which Coleridge held to be untenable on the particular grounds urged, not as being untrue in themselves.”

Had Lord Byron possessed perseverance enough to undergo the drudgery of research, and had his theological studies and attainments been at all like mine, he would have been able to unsettle all the evidences of Christianity, upheld as it is at present by simple confutation. Is it possible to assent to the doctrine of redemption as at present promulgated, that the moral death of an unoffending being should be a consequence of the transgression of humanity[119] and its atonement?

Walter Scott’s novels are chargeable with the same faults as Bertram, et id omne genus, viz., that of ministering to the depraved appetite for excitement, and, though in a far less degree, creating sympathy for the vicious and infamous, solely because the fiend is daring. Not twenty lines of Scott’s poetry will ever reach posterity; it has relation to nothing.

When I wrote a letter upon the scarcity, it was generally said that it was the production of an immense cornfactor, and a letter was addressed to me under that persuasion, beginning “Crafty Monopolist.”

It is very singular that no true poet should have arisen from the lower classes, when it is considered that every peasant who can read knows more of books now than did Æschylus, Sophocles, or Homer; yet if we except Burns, none[120] such have been.

Crashaw seems in his poems to have given the first ebullience of his imagination, unshapen into form, or much of, what we now term, sweetness. In the poem, Hope, by way of question and answer, his superiority to Cowley is self-evident. In that on the name of Jesus equally so; but his lines on St. Theresa are the finest.

Where he does combine richness of thought and diction nothing can excel, as in the lines you so much admire—

These verses were ever present to my mind whilst writing the second part of Christabel; if, indeed, by some subtle process of the mind they did not suggest the first thought of the whole poem.—Poetry, as regards small poets, may be said to be, in a certain sense, conventional in its accidents and in its illustrations; thus Crashaw uses an image:—

As sugar melts in tea away,

which, although proper then, and true now, was in bad taste at that time equally with the present. In Shakspeare, in Chaucer there was nothing of this.

The wonderful faculty which Shakspeare above all other men possessed, or rather the power which possessed him in the highest degree, of anticipating everything, evidently is the result—at least partakes—of meditation, or that mental process which consists in the submitting to the operation of thought every object of feeling, or impulse, or passion observed out of it. I would be willing to live only as long as Shakspeare were the mirror to nature.

What can be finer in any poet than that beautiful passage in Milton—

This is grandeur, but it is grandeur without completeness: but he adds—

Far off their coming shone;

which is the highest sublime. There is total completeness.

So I would say that the Saviour praying on the Mountain, the Desert on one hand, the Sea on the other, the city at an immense distance below, was sublime. But I should say of the Saviour looking towards the City, his countenance full of pity, that he was majestic, and of the situation that it was grand.

When the whole and the parts are seen at once, as mutually producing and explaining each other, as unity in multiety, there results shapeliness—forma formosa. Where the perfection of form is combined with pleasurableness in the sensations, excited by the matters or substances so formed, there results the Beautiful.

Corollary.—Hence colour is eminently subservient to beauty, because it is susceptible of forms, i.e. outline, and yet is a sensation. But a rich mass of scarlet clouds, seen without any attention to the form of the mass or of the parts, may be a delightful but not a beautiful object or colour.

When there is a deficiency of unity in the line forming the whole (as angularity, for instance), and of number in the plurality or the parts, there arises the Formal.

When the parts are numerous, and impressive, and predominate, so as to prevent or greatly lessen the attention to the whole, there results the Grand.

Where the impression of the whole, i.e. the sense of unity predominates, so as to abstract the mind from the parts—the Majestic.

Where the parts by their harmony produce an effect of a whole, but there is no seen form of a whole producing or explaining the parts, i.e. when the parts only are seen and distinguished, but the whole is felt—the Picturesque.

Where neither whole nor parts, but unity, as boundless or endless allness—the Sublime.

It often amuses me to hear men impute all their misfortunes to fate, luck, or destiny, whilst their successes or good fortune they ascribe to their own sagacity, cleverness, or penetration. It never occurs to such minds that light and darkness are one and the same, emanating from, and being part of, the same nature.

The word Nature, from its extreme familiarity, and in some instances, fitness, as well as from the want of a term, or other name for God, has caused very much confusion in the thoughts and language of men. Hence a Nature-God, or God-Nature, not God in Nature; just as others, with as little reason, have constructed a natural and sole religion.

Is it then true, that Reason to man is the ultimate faculty, and that, to convince a reasonable man, it is sufficient to adduce adequate reasons or arguments? How, if this be so, does it happen that we reject as insufficient the reasoning of a friend in our affliction for this or that cause or reason, yet are comforted, soothed, and reassured, by similar or far less sufficient reasons, when urged by a friendly and affectionate woman? It is no answer to say that women were made comforters; that it is the tone, and, in the instance of man’s chief, best comforter, the wife of his youth, the mother of his children, the oneness with himself, which gives value to the consolation; the reasons are the same, whether urged by man, woman, or child. It must be, therefore, that there is something in the will itself, above and beyond, if not higher than, reason. Besides, is Reason or the reasoning always the same, even when free from passion, film, or fever? I speak of the same person. Does he hold the doctrine of temperance in equal reverence when hungry as after he is sated? Does he at forty retain the same reason, only extended and developed, as he possessed at four and twenty? Does he not love the meat in his youth which he cannot endure in his old age? But these are appetites, and therefore no part of him. Is not a man one to-day and another to-morrow? Do not the very ablest and wisest of men attach greater weight at one moment to an argument or a reason than they do at another? Is this a want of sound and stable judgment? If so, what then is this perfect reason? for we have shown what it is not.

It is prettily feigned, that when Plutus is sent from Jupiter, he limps and gets on very slowly at first; but when he comes from Pluto, he runs and is swift of foot. This, rightly taken, is a great sweetener of slow gains. Bacon (alas! the day) seems to have had this in mind when he says, “seek not proud gains, but such as thou mayst get justly, use soberly, distribute cheerfully, and leave contentedly.” He that is covetous makes too much haste; and the wise man saith of him, “he cannot be innocent.”

I have often been pained by observing in others, and was fully conscious in myself, of a sympathy with those of rank and condition in preference to their inferiors, and never discovered the source of this sympathy until one day at Keswick I heard a thatcher’s wife crying her heart out for the death of her little child. It was given me all at once to feel, that I sympathized equally with the poor and the rich in all that related to the best part of humanity—the affections; but that, in what relates to fortune, to mental misery, struggles, and conflicts, we reserve consolation and sympathy for those who can appreciate its force and value.

There are many men, especially at the outset of life, who, in their too eager desire for the end, overlook the difficulties in the way; there is another class, who see nothing else. The first class may sometimes fail; the latter rarely succeed.

Letter 190. To Allsop

Letter 191. To Allsop

Letter 192. To Allsop

I cannot rest until I have answered your last letter. I have contemplated your character, affectionately indeed, but through a clear medium. No film of passion, no glittering mist of outward advantages, has arisen between the sight and the object: I had no other prepossession than the esteem which my knowledge of your sentiments and conduct could not but secure for you. I soon learnt to esteem you; and in esteeming, became attached to you. I began by loving the man on account of his conduct, but I ended in valuing the actions chiefly as so many looks and attitudes of the same person. “Hast thou any thing? Share it with me, and I will pay thee an equivalent. Art thou any thing? O then we will exchange souls.”

We can none of us, not the wisest of us, brood over any source of affliction inwardly, keeping it back, and as it were pressing it in on ourselves; but we must magnify it. We cannot see it clearly, much less distinctly; and as the object enlarges beyond its real proportions, so it becomes vivid; and the feelings that blend with it assume a proportionate undue intensity. So the one acts on the other, and what at first was effect, in its turn becomes a cause; and when at length we have taken heart, and given the whole thing, with all its several parts, the proper distance from our mind’s eye, by confiding it to a true friend, we are ourselves surprised to find what a dwarf the giant shrinks into, as soon as it steps out of the mist into clear sunlight.

I am aware that these are truths of which you do not need to be informed; but they will not be the less impressive on this account in your judgment, knowing, as you must know, that nothing short of my deep and anxious convictions of their importance in all cases of hidden distress, and of their unspeakable importance in yours, could impel me to seek and entreat your entire confidence, to beg you, so fervently as I here am doing, to open out to me the cause of your anxiety, that I may offer you the best advice in my power,—advice that will not be the less dispassionate from its being dictated by zealous friendship, and blended with the truest love.

I fear that in any decision to which you may come in any matter affecting yourself alone, you may, from a culpable delicacy of honour, which, forbidden by wisdom and the universal experience of others, cannot but be in contradiction to the genuine dictates of duty, want fortitude to choose, the lesser evil, at whatever cost to your immediate feelings, and to put that choice into immediate and peremptory act. But I must finish. I trust that the warmth and earnestness of my language are not warranted by the occasion; but they are barely proportionate to the present solicitude of,

Letter 193. To Allsop

I will begin with the beginning of your (to me most affecting) letter. Not exactly obligation, my entirely beloved and relied-on friend! The soiling hand of the world has dyed and sunk into the sense and import of the term too inseparably, for it to convey the kind and degree of what I feel towards you, on the one scale. I love you so truly, that in the first glance, as it were, and welcome of your anxious affection, it delights me for the very act’s sake. I think only of it and you, or rather both are one and the same, and I live in you. Nor does the complacency suffer any abatement, but becomes more intense and lively. As a mother would talk of the soothing attentions, the sacrifices and devotion of a son, eager to supply every want and anticipate every wish, so I talk to myself concerning you; and I am proud of you, and proud to be the object of what cannot but appear lovely to my judgment, and which the hard contrast in so many heart-withering instances forced on me by the experience of my last twenty years, compels me to feel and value with an additional glow. Lastly, it is a source of strength and comfort to know that the labours and aspirations and sympathies of the genuine and invisible Humanity exist in a social world of their own; that its attractions and assimilations are no Platonic fable, no dancing flames or luminous bubbles on the magic cauldron of my wishes; but that there are, even in this unkind life, spiritual parentages and filiations of the soul. Can there be a counterpoise to these? Not a counterpoise—but as weights in the counter-scale there will come the self-reproach, that spite of all inauspicious obstacles, not in my power to remove without loss of self-respect, I have not done all I could and might have done to prevent my present state of dependence. I am now able to hope that I shall be capable of setting apart such a portion of my useable time to my greater work (in assertion of the ideal truths and à priori probability, and à posteriori internal and external evidence of the historic truth of the Christian religion), as to leave a sufficient portion for a not unprofitable series of articles for pecuniary supply. I entertain some hope, too, that my Logic, which I could begin printing immediately if I could find a publisher willing to undertake it on equitable terms, might prove an exception to the general fate of my publications. It is a long lane that has no turning, and while my own heart bears witness to the genial delight you would feel in assisting me, I know that you would have a more satisfactory gladness in my not needing it.

And now a few, a very few, words on the latter portion of your letter. You know, my dearest Friend, how I acted myself, and that my example cannot be urged in confirmation of my judgment. I certainly strive hard to divest my mind of every prejudice, to look at the question sternly through the principle of Right separated from all mere Expedience, nay, from the question of earthly happiness for its own sake. But I cannot answer to myself that the image of any serious obstacle to your peace of heart, that the Thought of your full development of soul being put a stop to, of a secret anxiety blighting your utility by cankering your happiness, I cannot be sure—I cannot be sure that this may not have made me weigh with a trembling and unsteady hand, and less than half the presumption of error, afforded by the shrinking and recoil of your moral sense or even feeling, would render it my duty and my impulse to bring my conclusion anew to the ordeal of my Reason and Conscience. But on your side, my dear Friend! try with me to contemplate the question as a problem in the science of Morals, in the first instance, and to recollect that there are false or intrusive weights possible in the other scale; that our very virtues may become, or be transformed into temptations to, or occasions of, partial judgment; that we may judge partially against ourselves from the very fear, perhaps contempt, of the contrary; that self may be moodily gratified by self-sacrifice, and that the Heart itself, in its perplexity, may acquiesce for a time in the decision as a more safe way; and, lastly, that the question can only be fully answered, when Self and Neighbour, as equi-distant from the conscience or God, are blended in the common term, a Human Being: that we are commanded to love ourselves as our Neighbour in the Law that requires a Christian to love his Neighbour as himself.

But indeed I persuade myself that this dissonance is not real between us, and that it would not have seemed to exist, had I continued the subject into the possible particular cases; e.g., suppose a case in which the misery, and so far the moral incapacitation, of both parties were certainly foreseen as the immediate consequence. A morality of Consequences I, you well know, reprobate; but to exclude the necessary effect of an action is to take away all meaning from the word action—to strike Duty with blindness. I repeat it, that I do not, cannot find it in myself to believe, that on any one case, made out in all its limbs, features, and circumstances, your heart and mine would prompt different verdicts.

But the thought of you personally and individually is at present too strong and stirring to permit me to reason on any points. If the weather is at all plausible, we propose to set off on Saturday. I do most earnestly wish that you could accompany us; a steam-vessel would give us three-fourths of the whole day to tête-à-tête conversation. God bless you,

Cottle saw Coleridge for the last time in 1821. He says “It is a consolation to reflect, that, in the year 1821, being in London, I called to see Mr. Coleridge, at Mr. Gillman’s, when he welcomed me in his former kind and cordial manner. The depressing thought filled my mind, that that would be our final interview in this world, as it was. On my going away, Mr. C. presented me with his Statesman’s Manual, in the title-page of which he wrote—‘Joseph Cottle, from his old and affectionate friend, S. T. Coleridge.’”—(Early Recollections, ii, 177.)

Coleridge, during his Highgate period, was induced by Blackwood to send a few contributions to his magazine (see Lamb’s Letters, ii, 32). He had contributed Fancy in Nubibus in 1819, and he now sent selections from his Literary Correspondence in the shape of letters, which appeared in 1821. Two of these letters are printed by Thomas Ashe (Miscell. Works, 238). The following is one of the letters not published by Ashe:

Letter 194. To William Blackwood

Here have I been sitting, this whole long-lagging, muzzy, mizly morning, struggling without success against the insuperable disgust I feel to the task of explaining the abrupt chasm at the outset of our correspondence, and disposed to let your verdict take its course, rather than suffer over again by detailing the causes of the stoppage; though sure by so doing to acquit my will of all share in the result. Instead of myself, and of you, my dear sir, in relation to myself, I have been thinking, first, of the Edinburgh Magazine; then of magazines generally and comparatively; then of a magazine in the abstract; and lastly, of the immense importance and yet strange neglect of that prime dictate of prudence and common sense—Distinct Means to Distinct Ends. But here I must put in one proviso, not in any relation though to the aphorism itself, which is of universal validity, but relatively to my intended application of it. I must assume—I mean, that the individuals disposed to grant me free access and fair audience for my remarks, have a conscience—such a portion at least, as being eked out with superstition and sense of character, will suffice to prevent them from seeking to realise the ultimate end, (i.e. the maxim of profit) by base or disreputable means. This, therefore, may be left out of the present argument, an extensive sale being the common object of all publishers, of whatever kind the publications may be, morally considered. Nor do the means appropriate to this end differ. Be the work good or evil in its tendency, in both cases alike there is one question to be predetermined, viz. what class or classes of the reading-world the work is intended for? I made the proviso, however, because I would not mislead any man even for an honest cause, and my experience will not allow me to promise an equal immediate circulation from a work addressed to the higher interests and blameless predilections of men, as from one constructed on the plan of flattering the envy and vanity of sciolism, and gratifying the cravings of vulgar curiosity. Such may be, and in some instances, I doubt not, has been, the result. But I dare not answer for it beforehand, even though both works should be equally well suited to their several purposes, which will not be thought a probable case, when it is considered how much less talent, and of how much commoner a kind, is required in the latter.

On the other hand, however, I am persuaded that a sufficient success, and less liable to drawbacks from competition, would not fail to attend a work on the former plan, if the scheme and execution of the contents were as appropriate to the object which the purchasers must be supposed to have in view as the means adopted for its outward attraction, and its general circulation were to the interest of its proprietors.

During a long literary life, I have been no inattentive observer of periodical publications; and I can remember no failure in any work deserving success that might not have been anticipated from some error or deficiency in the means, either in regard to the mode of circulating the work (as, for instance, by the vain attempt to unite the characters of author, editor, and publisher), or to the typographical appearance; or else from its want of suitableness to the class of readers on whom, it should have been foreseen, the remunerating sale must principally depend. It would be misanthropy to suppose that the seekers after truth, information, and innocent amusement, are not sufficiently numerous to support a work in which these attractions are prominent, without the dishonest aid of personality, literary faction, or treacherous invasions of the sacred recesses of private life, without slanders which both reason and duty command us to disbelieve as well as to abhor; for what but falsehood, or that half truth, which is falsehood in its most malignant form, can or ought to be expected from a self-convicted traitor and ingrate?

If these remarks are well founded, we may narrow the problem to the few following terms—it being understood that the work now in question is a monthly publication, not devoted to any one branch of knowledge or literature, but a magazine of whatever may be supposed to interest readers in general, not excluding the discoveries or even the speculations of science, that are generally intelligible or interesting, so that the portion devoted to any one subject or department shall be kept proportionate to the number of readers for whom it may be supposed to have a particular interest. Here, however, we must not forget, that however few the actual dilettanti, or men of the fancy may be, yet, as long as the articles remain generally intelligible (in pugilism, for instance) Variety and Novelty communicate an attraction that interests all. Homo sum, nihil humani a me alienum. If to this we add the exclusion of theological controversy, which is endless, I shall have pretty accurately described the present Edinburgh Magazine, as to its characteristic plan and purposes; which may, I think, be comprised in three terms, as Philosophical. Philological, and Aesthetic Miscellany. The word miscellany, however, must be taken as involving a predicate in itself, in addition to the three preceding epithets, comprehending, namely, all the ephemeral births of intellectual life which add to the gaiety and variety of the work, without interfering with its express and regular objects.

Having thus a sufficiently definite notion of what your Magazine is, and is intended to be, I propose to myself, as a problem to find out, in detail, what the means would be to the most perfect attainment of this end. In other words, what the scheme, and of what nature, and in what order and proportion, the contents should be of a monthly publication; in order for it to verify the title of a Philosophical, Philological, and Aesthetic Miscellany and Magazine. The result of my lucubrations I hope to forward in my next, under the title of The Ideal of a Magazine; and to mark those departments, in the filling up of which, I flatter myself with the prospect of being a fellow labourer. But since I began this scrawl, a friend reminded me of a letter I wrote him many years ago, on the improvement of the mind by the habit of commencing our inquiries with the attempt to construct the most absolute or perfect form of the object desiderated, leaving its practicability, in the first instance, undetermined. An essay, in short, de emendatione intellectûs per ideas—the beneficial influence of which on his mind he spoke of with warmth. The main contents of the letter, the effect of which my friend appreciated so highly, were derived from conversation with a great man now no more. And as I have reason to regard that conversation as an epoch in the history of my own mind, I feel myself encouraged to hope that its publication may not prove useless to some of your numerous readers, to whom Nature has given the stream, and nothing is wanting but to be led into the right channel. There is one other motive to which I must plead conscious, not only in the following, but in all these, my preliminary contributions; viz.—That by the reader’s agreement with the principles and sympathy with the general feelings which they are meant to impress, the interest of my future contributions, and still more, their permanent effect, will be heightened; and most so in those in which, as narrative and imaginative compositions, there is the least show of reflection, on my part, and the least necessity for it,—though I flatter myself not the least opportunity on the part of my readers.

It will be better, too, if I mistake not, both for your purposes and mine, to have it said hereafter that he dragged slow and stiff-kneed up the first hill, but sprang forward as soon as the road was full before him, and got in fresh; than that he set off in grand style—broke up midway, and came in broken-winded. Finis coronat opus.

P.S. I wish I could find a more familiar word than aesthetic for works of taste and criticism. It is, however, in all respects better, and of more reputable origin, than belletristic. To be sure, there is tasty; but that has been long ago emasculated for all unworthy uses by milliners, tailors, and the androgynous correlatives of both, formerly called ’its, and now yclept dandies. As our language, therefore, contains no other useable adjective, to express that coincidence of form, feeling, and intellect, that something, which, confirming the inner and the outward senses, becomes a new sense in itself, to be tried by laws of its own, and acknowledging the laws of the understanding so far only as not to contradict them; that faculty which, when possessed in a high degree, the Greeks termed φῖλοκᾶλία, but when spoken of generally, or in kind only, το αἰσθητικόν; and for which even our substantive, Taste, is a—not inappropriate—but very inadequate metaphor; there is reason to hope, that the term aesthetic, will be brought into common use as soon as distinct thoughts and definite expressions shall once more become the requisite accomplishment of a gentleman. So it was in the energetic days, and in the starry court of our English-hearted Eliza; when trade, the nurse of freedom, was the enlivening counterpoise of agriculture, not its alien and usurping spirit; when commerce had all the enterprise, and more than the romance of war; when the precise yet pregnant terminology of the schools gave bone and muscle to the diction of poetry and eloquence, and received from them in return passion and harmony; but, above all, when from the self-evident truth, that what in kind constitutes the superiority of man to animals, the same in degree must constitute the superiority of men to each other, the practical inference was drawn that every proof of these distinctive faculties, being in a tense and active state, that even the sparks and crackling of mental electricity, in the sportive approaches and collisions of ordinary intercourse, (such as we have in the wit-combats of Benedict and Beatrice, of Mercutio, and in the dialogues assigned to courtiers and gentlemen, by all the dramatic writers of that reign,) are stronger indications of natural superiority, and, therefore, more becoming signs and accompaniments of artificial rank, than apathy, studied mediocrity, and the ostentation of wealth. When I think of the vigour and felicity of style characteristic of the age from Edward VI to the restoration of Charles, and observable in the letters and family memoirs of noble families—take, for instance, the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, written by his widow—I cannot suppress the wish—O that the habits of those days could return, even though they should bring pedantry and Euphuism in their train![121]

Coleridge and the Gillmans had gone to Ramsgate for a holiday while Allsop had gone to Derbyshire. The next letter is from Ramsgate.

Letter 195. To Allsop

Not a day has passed since we left Highgate in which I have not been tracing you in spirit up and down the Glens and Dells of Derbyshire, while my feet only have been in commune with the sandy beach here at Ramsgate. Once when I had stopped and stood stone still for some minutes, Mrs. Gillman’s call snatched me away from a spot opposite to a house, to the second-floor window of which I had been gazing, as if I had feared, yet expected, to see you passing to and fro by it. These, however, were visions to which I had myself given the commencing act—fabrics of which the “I wonder where Allsop is now” had laid the foundation stone. But for the last three days your image, alone or lonely in an unconcerning crowd of human figures, has forced itself on my sleep in dreams of the rememberable kind, accompanied with the feeling of being afraid to go up to you—and now of letting you pass by unnoticed, from want of courage to ask you, what was most on my mind—respecting the one awful to me because so awfully dear to you—(for there is a religion in all deep love, but the love of a Mother is, at your age, the veil of softer light between the Heart and the Heavenly Father!) Mrs. Gillman likewise has been thinking of you both asleep and awake: and so, though I know not how to direct my letter, yet a letter I am resolved to write.

I am sure, my dear Friend! that if aught can be a comfort to you in affliction or an addition to your joy in the hour of Thanksgiving, it will be to know, and to be reminded of your knowledge, that I feel as your own heart in all that concerns you. Next to this I have to tell you, that the Sea Air and the Sea Plunges, and the leisure of mind, with regular devotion of the Daylight to exercise (for I write only after tea), have been auspicious, beyond my best hopes, to my health and spirits. The change in my looks is beyond the present reality, but may be veracious as prophecy, though somewhat exaggerating as history. The same in all essentials holds good of Mrs. Gillman; and I am most pleased that the improvement in her looks and strength has been gradual though rapid. First she got rid, in the course of four or five days, of the Positives of the wrong sort—e.g. the blackness under the eyes and the thinness of the cheeks—and now she is acquiring the Positives of the right kind, her eyes brightening, her face becoming plump, and a delicate, yet cool and steady colour, stealing upon her cheeks. Mr. Gillman too is uncommonly well since his second arrival here. The first week his arm, the absorbents of which had been perilously poisoned by opening a body, was a sad drawback, and prevented his bathing. In short, we are all better than we could have anticipated; and the better we are, the more I long, and we all wish you to be with us. If you can come, though but for a few days, I pray you come to us. In grief or gladness, we shall grieve less, and (I need not say) be more glad, by seeing you, by having you with us. I will not say write, for I would a thousand times rather have you plump in on me, unannounced; but yet write, unless this be possible. We have an excellent house, with beds enough for half a dozen Allsops, if so many there were or could be, the situation the very best in all Ramsgate (Wellington Crescent, East Cliff, Ramsgate); and we, or rather Mrs. Gillman’s voice and manner, procured it shameful cheap for the size and accommodations.

I am called to dinner; so God bless you, and receive all our loves, my very dear friend.

My birth-day, 51; or, as all my collegiates and Mrs. Coleridge swear, 50.

Coleridge was only forty-nine on 21st October 1821, not fifty-one as he supposes. He could never remember his birthday, nor the year in which he was born.

Letter 196. To Allsop

First, let me utter the fervent, God be praised! for the glad tidings respecting your dear Mother, which would have given an abounding interest to a far less interesting letter. May she be long preserved both to enjoy and reward your love and piety! And now I will try to answer the other contents of your letter, as satisfactorily I hope, as I am sure it will be sincerely and affectionately. Conscious how heedfully, how watchfully I cross-examined myself whether or no my anxiety for your earthly happiness and free exercise of head and heart had not warped the attention which it was my purpose to give whole and undivided to the one Question—What is the Right, I can repeat (with as much confidence as the slippery and Protean nature of all self-inquisition and the great à priori likelihood of my reason being tampered with by my affections, will sanction me in expressing) what I have already more than once said, viz., that I hold it incredible, at least improbable to the utmost extent, that you and I should decide differently in any one definite instance. Let a case be stated with all its particulars, personal and circumstantial, with its antecedents and involved (n.b.—not its contingent or apprehended) consequents—and my faith in the voice within, whenever the heart desiringly listens thereto, will not allow me to fear that our verdict should be diverse. If this be true, as true it is, it follows—that we have attached a different import to the same terms in some general proposition;—and that, in attempting to generalise my convictions briefly, and yet comprehensively, I have worded it either incorrectly or obscurely. On the other hand, your communications likewise, my dear friend! were indefinite—“taught light to counterfeit a gloom;” and love left in the dusk of twilight is apt to fear the worst, or rather, to think of worse than it fears, and the momentary transformations of posts and bushes into apparitions and foot-pads must not be interpreted as symptoms of brain fever or depraved vision.

And now, my dearest Allsop! why should it be “a melancholy reflection, that the three most affectionate, gentle, and estimable women in your world are the three from whom you have learnt almost to undervalue their sex?” In other words those who in their reasonings have supposed as possible, not even improbable, that women can be unworthy and insincere in their expressions of attachment to men, the frequency of which it is as impossible, living open-eyed, not to have ascertained, as it is with a heart awake to what a woman ought to be, and those of whom you speak substantially[122] are. Why should this be a melancholy reflection? (Thursday, Nov. 1st. A fatality seems to hang over this letter; I will not, however, defer the continuation for the purpose of explaining its suspension.) Why, dearest friend, a melancholy reflection? Must not those women who have the highest sense of womanhood, who know what their sex may be, and who feel the rightfulness of their own claim to be loved with honour, and honoured with love, have likewise the keenest sense of the contrary? Understand a few foibles as incident to humanity; take as matters of course that need not be mentioned, because we know that in the least imperfect a glance of the womanish will shoot across the womanly, and there are Mirandas and Imogens, a Una, a Desdemona, out of fairy land; rare, no doubt, yet less rare than their counterparts among men in real life. Now can such a woman not be conscious, must she not feel how great the happiness is that a woman is capable of communicating, say rather of being to a man of sense and sensibility, pure of heart, and capable of appreciating, cherishing, and repaying her virtues? Can she feel this, and not shrink from the contemplation of a contrary lot? Can she know this, and not know what a sore evil, fearful in its heart-withering affliction in proportion to the capacity of being blessed, a weak, artful, or worthless woman is—perhaps in her own experience has been? And if she happen to know a young Man, know him as the good, and only the good, know each other—if he were precious to her, as a younger brother to a matron sister—and so that she could not dwell on his principles, dispositions, manners, without the thought—“If I had an only daughter, and she all a mother ever prayed for, one other prayer should I offer—that, freely chosen and choosing, she should enable me to call this man my son!” would you not more than pardon even an excess of anxiety, even an error of judgment, proceeding from a disinterested dread of his taking a step irrevocable, and, if unhappy, miserable beyond all other misery, that of guilt alone excepted? Especially if there were no known particulars to guide her judgment—if that judgment were given avowedly, on the mere unbelieved possibility, on an unsupposed supposition of the worst.

In Mrs. Gillman I have always admired, what indeed I have found more or less an accompaniment of womanly excellence wherever found, a high opinion of her own sex comparatively, and a partiality for female society. I know that her strongest prejudices against individual men have originated in their professed disbelief of such a thing as female friendship, or in some similar brutish forgetfulness that woman is an immortal soul; and as to all parts of the female character, so chiefly and especially to the best, noblest and highest—to the germs and yearnings of immortality in the man. I have much to say on this, and shall now say it with comfort, because I can think of it as a pure Question of Thought. But I will not now keep this letter any longer.