XC. TO THE SAME.

December 2, 1798.

Sunday Evening.—God, the Infinite, be praised that my babes are alive. His mercy will forgive me that late and all too slowly I raised up my heart in thanksgiving. At first and for a time I wept as passionately as if they had been dead; and for the whole day the weight was heavy upon me, relieved only by fits of weeping. I had long expected, I had passionately expected, a letter; I received it, and my frame trembled. I saw your hand, and all feelings of mind and body crowded together. Had the news been cheerful and only “We are as you left us,” I must have wept to have delivered myself of the stress and tumult of my animal sensibility. But when I read the danger and the agony—My dear Sara! my love! my wife!—God bless you and preserve us. I am well; but a stye, or something of that kind, has come upon and enormously swelled my eyelids, so that it is painful and improper for me to read or write. In a few days it will now disappear, and I will write at length (now it forces me to cease). To-morrow I will write a line or two on the other side of the page to Mr. Roskilly.

I received your letter Friday, November 31. I cannot well account for the slowness. Oh, my babies! Absence makes it painful to be a father.

My life, believe and know that I pant to be home and with you.

S. T. Coleridge.

December 3.—My eyes are painful, but there is no doubt but they will be well in two or three days. I have taken physic, eat very little flesh, and drink only water, but it grieves me that I cannot read. I need not have troubled my poor eyes with a superfluous love to my dear Poole.

XCI. TO THE REV. MR. ROSKILLY.[191]

Ratzeburg, Germany, December 3, 1798.

My dear Sir,—There is an honest heart out of Great Britain that enters into your good fortune with a sincere and lively joy. May you enjoy life and health—all else you have,—a good wife, a good conscience, a good temper, sweet children, and competence! The first glass of wine I drink shall be a bumper—not to you, no! but to the Bishop of Gloucester! God bless him!

Sincerely your friend,
S. T. Coleridge.

XCII. TO THOMAS POOLE.

January 4, 1799—Morning, 11 o’clock.

My friend, my dear friend! Two hours have past since I received your letter. It was so frightfully long since I received one!! My body is weak and faint with the beating of my heart. But everything affects me more than it ought to do in a foreign country. I cried myself blind about Berkeley, when I ought to have been on my knees in the joy of thanksgiving. The waywardness of the pacquets is wonderful. On December the seventh Chester received a letter from his sister dated November 27. Yours is dated November 22, and I received it only this morning. I am quite well, calm and industrious. I now read German as English,—that is, without any mental translation as I read. I likewise understand all that is said to me, and a good deal of what they say to each other. On very trivial and on metaphysical subjects I can talk tolerably—so, so!—but in that conversation, which is between both, I bungle most ridiculously. I owe it to my industry that I can read old German, and even the old low German, better than most of even the educated natives. It has greatly enlarged my knowledge of the English language. It is a great bar to the amelioration of Germany, that through at least half of it, and that half composed almost wholly of Protestant States, from whence alone amelioration can proceed, the agriculturists and a great part of the artizans talk a language as different from the language of the higher classes (in which all books are written) as the Latin is from the Greek. The differences are greater than the affinities, and the affinities are darkened by the differences of pronunciation and spelling. I have written twice to Mr. Josiah Wedgwood,[192] and in a few days will follow a most voluminous letter, or rather series of letters, which will comprise a history of the bauers or peasants collected, not so much from books as from oral communications from the Amtmann here—(an Amtmann is a sort of perpetual Lord Mayor, uniting in himself Judge and Justice of Peace over the bauers of a certain district). I have enjoyed great advantages in this place, but I have paid dear for them. Including all expenses, I have not lived at less than two pounds a week. Wordsworth (from whom I receive long and affectionate letters) has enjoyed scarcely one advantage, but his expenses have been considerably less than they were in England. Here I shall stay till the last week in January, when I shall proceed to Göttingen, where, all expenses included, I can live for 15 shillings a week. For these last two months I have drunk nothing but water, and I eat but little animal food. At Göttingen I shall hire lodging for two months, buy my own cold beef at an eating-house, and dine in my chamber, which I can have at a dollar a week. And here at Göttingen I must endeavour to unite the advantages of advancing in German and doing something to repay myself. My dear Poole! I am afraid that, supposing I return in the first week of May, my whole expenses[193] from Stowey to Stowey, including books and clothes, will not have been less than 90 pounds! and if I buy ten pounds’ worth more of books it will have been a hundred. I despair not but with intense application and regular use of time, to which I have now almost accustomed myself, that by three months’ residence at Göttingen I shall have on paper at least all the materials if not the whole structure of a work that will repay me. The work I have planned, and I have imperiously excluded all waverings about other works. That is the disease of my mind—it is comprehensive in its conceptions, and wastes itself in the contemplations of the many things which it might do. I am aware of the disease, and for the next three months (if I cannot cure it) I will at least suspend its operation. This book is a life of Lessing, and interweaved with it a true state of German literature in its rise and present state. I have already written a little life from three different biographies, divided it into years, and at Göttingen I will read his works regularly according to the years in which they were written, and the controversies, religious and literary, which they occasioned. But of this say nothing to any one. The journey to Germany has certainly done me good. My habits are less irregular and my mind more in my own power. But I have much still to do! I did, indeed, receive great joy from Roskilly’s good fortune, and in a little note to my dear Sara I joined a note of congratulation to Roskilly. O Poole! you are a noble heart as ever God made! Poor ——! he is passing through a fiery discipline, and I would fain believe that it will end in his peace and utility. Wordsworth is divided in his mind,—unquietly divided between the neighbourhood of Stowey and the North of England. He cannot think of settling at a distance from me, and I have told him that I cannot leave the vicinity of Stowey. His chief objection to Stowey is the want of books. The Bristol Library is a hum, and will do us little service; and he thinks that he can procure a house near Sir Gilford Lawson’s by the Lakes, and have free access to his immense library. I think it better once in a year to walk to Cambridge, in the summer vacation—perhaps I may be able to get rooms for nothing, and there for a couple of months read like a Turk on a given plan, and return home with a mass of materials which, with dear, independent Poetry, will fully employ the remaining year. But this is idle prating about a future. But indeed, it is time to be looking out for a house for me—it is not possible I can be either comfortable or useful in so small a house as that in Lime Street. If Woodlands can be gotten at a reasonable price, I would have it. I will now finish my long-neglected journal.

Sara, I suppose, is at Bristol—on Monday I shall write to her. The frost here has been uncommonly severe. For two days it was 20 degrees under the freezing point. Wordsworth has left Goslar, and is on his road into higher Saxony to cruise for a pleasanter place; he has made but little progress in the language. I am interrupted, and if I do not conclude shall lose the post. Give my kind love to your dear mother. Oh, that I could but find her comfortable on my return. To Ward remember me affectionately—likewise remember to James Cole; and my grateful remembrances to Mrs. Cole for her kindness during my wife’s domestic troubles. To Harriet, Sophia, and Lavinia Poole—to the Chesters—to Mary and Ellen Cruickshank—in short, to all to whom it will give pleasure remember me affectionately.

My dear, dear Poole, God bless us!

S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. The Amtmann, who is almost an Englishman and an idolizer of our nation, desires to be kindly remembered to you. He told me yesterday that he had dreamt of you the night before.

XCIII. TO HIS WIFE.

Ratzeburg, Monday, January 14, 1799.

My dearest Love,—Since the wind changed, and it became possible for me to have letters, I lost all my tranquillity. Last evening I was absent in company, and when I returned to solitude, restless in every fibre, a novel which I attempted to read seemed to interest me so extravagantly that I threw it down, and when it was out of my hands I knew nothing of what I had been reading. This morning I awoke long before light, feverish and unquiet. I was certain in my mind that I should have a letter from you, but before it arrived my restlessness and the irregular pulsation of my heart had quite wearied me down, and I held the letter in my hand like as if I was stupid, without attempting to open it. “Why don’t you read the letter?” said Chester, and I read it. Ah, little Berkeley—I have misgivings, but my duty is rather to comfort you, my dear, dear Sara! I am so exhausted that I could sleep. I am well, but my spirits have left me. I am completely homesick, I must walk half an hour, for my mind is too scattered to continue writing. I entreat and entreat you, Sara! take care of yourself. If you are well, I think I could frame my thoughts so that I should not sink under other losses. You do right in writing me the truth. Poole is kind, but you do right, my dear! In a sense of reality there is always comfort. The workings of one’s imagination ever go beyond the worst that nature afflicts us with; they have the terror of a superstitious circumstance. I express myself unintelligibly. Enough that you write me always the whole truth. Direct your next letter thus: An den Herrn Coleridge, à la Poste Restante, Göttingen, Germany. If God permit I shall be there before this day three weeks, and I hope on May-day to be once more at Stowey. My motives for going to Göttingen I have written to Poole. I hear as often from Wordsworth as letters can go backward and forward in a country where fifty miles in a day and night is expeditious travelling! He seems to have employed more time in writing English than in studying German. No wonder! for he might as well have been in England as at Goslar, in the situation which he chose and with his unseeking manners. He has now left it, and is on his journey to Nordhausen. His taking his sister with him was a wrong step; it is next but impossible for any but married women, or in the suit of married women, to be introduced to any company in Germany. Sister here is considered as only a name for mistress. Still, however, male acquaintance he might have had, and had I been at Goslar I would have had them; but W., God love him! seems to have lost his spirits and almost his inclination for it. In the mean time his expenses have been almost less than they [would have been] in England; mine have been very great, but I do not despair of returning to England with somewhat to pay the whole. O God! I do languish to be at home.

I will endeavour to give you some idea of Ratzeburg, but I am a wretched describer. First you must imagine a lake, running from south to north about nine miles in length, and of very various breadths—the broadest part may be, perhaps, two or three miles, the narrowest scarce more than half a mile. About a mile from the southernmost point of the lake, that is, from the beginning of the lake, is the island-town of Ratzeburg.

● is Ratzeburg; is our house on the hill; from the bottom of the hill there lies on the lake a slip of land, scarcely two stone-throws wide, at the end of which is a little bridge with a superb military gate, and this bridge joins Ratzeburg to the slip of land—you pass through Ratzeburg up a little hill, and down the hill, and this brings you to another bridge, narrow, but of an immense length, which communicates with the other shore.

The water to the south of Ratzeburg is called the little lake and the other the large lake, though they are but one piece of water. This little lake is very beautiful, the shores just often enough green and bare to give the proper effect to the magnificent groves which mostly fringe them. The views vary almost every ten steps, such and so beautiful are the turnings and windings of the shore—they unite beauty and magnitude, and can be but expressed by feminine grandeur! At the north of the great lake, and peering over, you see the seven church-towers of Lubec, which is twelve or fourteen miles from Ratzeburg. Yet you see them as distinctly as if they were not three miles from you. The worse thing is that Ratzeburg is built entirely of bricks and tiles, and is therefore all red—a clump of brick-dust red—it gives you a strong idea of perfect neatness, but it is not beautiful.[194] In the beginning or middle of October, I forget which, we went to Lubec in a boat. For about two miles the shores of the lake are exquisitely beautiful, the woods now running into the water, now retiring in all angles. After this the left shore retreats,—the lake acquires its utmost breadth, and ceases to be beautiful. At the end of the lake is the river, about as large as the river at Bristol, but winding in infinite serpentines through a dead flat, with willows and reeds, till you reach Lubec, an old fantastic town. We visited the churches at Lubec—they were crowded with gaudy gilded figures, and a profusion of pictures, among which were always the portraits of the popular pastors who had served the church. The pastors here wear white ruffs exactly like the pictures of Queen Elizabeth. There were in the Lubec churches a very large attendance, but almost all women. The genteeler people dressed precisely as the English; but behind every lady sat her maid,—the caps with gold and silver combs. Altogether, a Lubec church is an amusing sight. In the evening I wished myself a painter, just to draw a German Party at cards. One man’s long pipe rested on the table, by the fish-dish; another who was shuffling, and of course had both hands employed, held his pipe in his teeth, and it hung down between his thighs even to his ankles, and the distortion which the attitude and effort occasioned made him a most ludicrous phiz.... [If it] had been possible I would have loitered a week in those churches, and found incessant amusement. Every picture, every legend cut out in gilded wood-work, was a history of the manners and feelings of the ages in which such works were admired and executed.

As the sun both rises and sets over the little lake by us, both rising and setting present most lovely spectacles.[195] In October Ratzeburg used at sunset to appear completely beautiful. A deep red light spread over all, in complete harmony with the red town, the brown-red woods, and the yellow-red reeds on the skirts of the lake and on the slip of land. A few boats, paddled by single persons, used generally to be floating up and down in the rich light. But when first the ice fell on the lake, and the whole lake was frozen one large piece of thick transparent glass—O my God! what sublime scenery I have beheld. Of a morning I have seen the little lake covered with mist; when the sun peeped over the hills the mist broke in the middle, and at last stood as the waters of the Red Sea are said to have done when the Israelites passed; and between these two walls of mist the sunlight burst upon the ice in a straight road of golden fire, all across the lake, intolerably bright, and the walls of mist partaking of the light in a multitude of colours. About a month ago the vehemence of the wind had shattered the ice; part of it, quite shattered, was driven to shore and had frozen anew; this was of a deep blue, and represented an agitated sea—the water that ran up between the great islands of ice shone of a yellow-green (it was at sunset), and all the scattered islands of smooth ice were blood, intensely bright blood; on some of the largest islands the fishermen were pulling out their immense nets through the holes made in the ice for this purpose, and the fishermen, the net-poles, and the huge nets made a part of the glory! O my God! how I wished you to be with me! In skating there are three pleasing circumstances—firstly, the infinitely subtle particles of ice which the skate cuts up, and which creep and run before the skater like a low mist, and in sunrise or sunset become coloured; second, the shadow of the skater in the water seen through the transparent ice; and thirdly, the melancholy undulating sound from the skate, not without variety; and, when very many are skating together, the sounds give an impulse to the icy trees, and the woods all round the lake tinkle. It is a pleasant amusement to sit in an ice stool (as they are called) and be driven along by two skaters, faster than most horses can gallop. As to the customs here, they are nearly the same as in England, except that [the men] never sit after dinner [and only] drink at dinner, which often lasts three or four hours, and in noble families is divided into three gangs, that is, walks. When you have sat about an hour, you rise up, each lady takes a gentleman’s arm, and you walk about for a quarter of an hour—in the mean time another course is put upon the table; and, this in great dinners, is repeated three times. A man here seldom sees his wife till dinner,—they take their coffee in separate rooms, and never eat at breakfast; only as soon as they are up they take their coffee, and about eleven o’clock eat a bit of bread and butter with the coffee. The men at least take a pipe. Indeed, a pipe at breakfast is a great addition to the comfort of life. I shall [smoke at] no other time in England. Here I smoke four times a day—1 at breakfast, 1 half an hour before dinner, 1 in the afternoon at tea, and 1 just before bed-time—but I shall give it all up, unless, as before observed, you should happen to like the smoke of a pipe at breakfast. Once when I first came here I smoked a pipe immediately after dinner; the pastor expressed his surprise: I expressed mine that he could smoke before breakfast. “O Herr Gott!” (that is, Lord God) quoth he, “it is delightful; it invigorates the frame and it clears out the mouth so.” A common amusement at the German Universities is for a number of young men to smoke out a candle! that is, to fill a room with tobacco smoke till the candle goes out. Pipes are quite the rage—a pipe of a particular kind, that has been smoked for a year or so, will sell here for twenty guineas—the same pipe when new costs four or five. They are called Meerschaum.

God bless you, my dear Love! I will soon write again.

S. T. Coleridge.

Postscript. Perhaps you are in Bristol. However, I had better direct it to Stowey. My love to Martha and your mother and your other sisters. Once more, my dearest Love, God love and preserve us through this long absence! O my dear Babies! my Babies!

XCIV. TO THE SAME.

Bei dem Radermacher Gohring, in der Bergstrasse, Göttingen,
March 12, 1799. Sunday Night.

My dearest Love,—It has been a frightfully long time since we have heard from each other. I have not written, simply because my letters could have gone no further than Cuxhaven, and would have stayed there to the [no] small hazard of their being lost. Even now the mouth of the Elbe is so much choked with ice that the English Pacquets cannot set off. Why need I say how anxious this long interval of silence has made me! I have thought and thought of you, and pictured you and the little ones so often and so often that my imagination is tired down, flat and powerless, and I languish after home for hours together in vacancy, my feelings almost wholly unqualified by thoughts. I have at times experienced such an extinction of light in my mind—I have been so forsaken by all the forms and colourings of existence, as if the organs of life had been dried up; as if only simply Being remained, blind and stagnant. After I have recovered from this strange state and reflected upon it, I have thought of a man who should lose his companion in a desart of sand, where his weary Halloos drop down in the air without an echo. I am deeply convinced that if I were to remain a few years among objects for whom I had no affection I should wholly lose the powers of intellect. Love is the vital air of my genius, and I have not seen one human being in Germany whom I can conceive it possible for me to love, no, not one; in my mind they are an unlovely race, these Germans.

We left Ratzeburg, Feb. 6, in the Stage Coach. This was not the coldest night of the century, because the night following was two degrees colder—the oldest man living remembers not such a night as Thursday, Feb. 7. This whole winter I have heard incessant complaints of the unusual cold, but I have felt very little of it. But that night! My God! Now I know what the pain of cold is, and what the danger. The pious care of the German Governments that none of their loving subjects should be suffocated is admirable! On Friday morning when the light dawned, the Coach looked like a shapeless idol of suspicion with an hundred eyes, for there were at least so many holes in it. And as to rapidity! We left Ratzeburg at 7 o’clock Wednesday evening, and arrived at Lüneburg—i. e., 35 English miles—at 3 o’clock on Thursday afternoon. This is a fair specimen! In England I used to laugh at the “flying waggons;” but, compared with a German Post Coach, the metaphor is perfectly justifiable, and for the future I shall never meet a flying waggon without thinking respectfully of its speed. The whole country from Ratzeburg almost to Einbeck—i. e., 155 English miles—is a flat, objectless, hungry heath, bearing no marks of cultivation, except close by the towns, and the only remarks which suggested themselves to me were that it was cold—very cold—shocking cold—never felt it so cold in my life! Hanover is 115 miles from Ratzeburg. We arrived there Saturday evening.

The Herr von Döring, a nobleman who resides at Ratzeburg, gave me letters to his brother-in-law at Hanover, and by the manner in which he received me I found that they were not ordinary letters of recommendation. He pressed me exceedingly to stay a week in Hanover, but I refused, and left it on Monday noon. In the mean time, however, he had introduced me to all the great people and presented me “as an English gentleman of first-rate character and talents” to Baron Steinburg, the Minister of State, and to Von Brandes, the Secretary of State and Governor of Göttingen University. The first was amazingly perpendicular, but civil and polite, and gave me letters to Heyne, the head Librarian, and, in truth, the real Governor of Göttingen. Brandes likewise gave me letters to Heyne and Blumenbach, who are his brothers-in-law. Baron Steinburg offered to present me to the Prince (Adolphus), who is now in Hanover; but I deferred the honour till my return. I shall make Poole laugh when I return with the visiting-card which the Baron left at my inn.

The two things worth seeing in Hanover are (1) the conduit representing Mount Parnassus, with statues of Apollo, the Muses, and a great many others; flying horses, rhinoceroses, and elephants, etc.; and (2) a bust of Leibnitz—the first for its excessive absurdity, ugliness, and indecency—(absolutely I could write the most humorous octavo volume containing the description of it with a commentary)—the second—i. e. the bust of Leibnitz—impressed on my soul a sensation which has ennobled it. It is the face of a god! and Leibnitz was almost more than a man in the wonderful capaciousness of his judgment and imagination! Well, we left Hanover on Monday noon, after having paid a most extravagant bill. We lived with Spartan frugality, and paid with Persian pomp! But I was an Englishman, and visited by half a dozen noblemen and the Minister of State. The landlord could not dream of affronting me by anything like a reasonable charge! On the road we stopped with the postillion always, and our expenses were nothing. Chester and I made a very hearty dinner of cold beef, etc., and both together paid only fourpence, and for coffee and biscuits only threepence each. In short, a man may travel cheap in Germany, but he must avoid great towns and not be visited by Ministers of State.

In a village some four miles from Einbeck we stopped about 4 o’clock in the morning. It was pitch dark, and the postillion led us into a room where there was not a ray of light—we could not see our hand—but it felt extremely warm. At length and suddenly the lamp came, and we saw ourselves in a room thirteen strides in length, strew’d with straw, and lying by the side of each other on the straw twelve Jews. I assure you it was curious. Their dogs lay at their feet. There was one very beautiful boy among them, fast asleep, with the softest conceivable opening of the mouth, with the white beard of his grandfather upon his cheek—a fair, rosy cheek.

This day I called with my letters on the Professor Heyne, a little, hopping, over-civil sort of a thing, who talks very fast and with fragments of coughing between every ten words. However, he behaved very courteously to me. The next day I took out my matricula, and commenced student of the University of Göttingen. Heyne has honoured me so far that he has given me the right, which properly only professors have, of sending to the Library for an indefinite number of books in my own name.

On Saturday evening I went to the concert. Here the other Englishmen introduced themselves. After the concert Hamilton, a Cambridge man, took me as his guest to the Saturday Club, where what is called the first class of students meet and sup once a week. Here were all the nobility and three Englishmen. Such an evening I never passed before—roaring, kissing, embracing, fighting, smashing bottles and glasses against the wall, singing—in short, such a scene of uproar I never witnessed before, no, not even at Cambridge. I drank nothing, but all except two of the Englishmen were drunk, and the party broke up a little after one o’clock in the morning. I thought of what I had been at Cambridge and of what I was, of the wild bacchanalian sympathy with which I had formerly joined similar parties, and of my total inability now to do aught but meditate, and the feeling of the deep alteration in my moral being gave the scene a melancholy interest to me.

We are quite well. Chester will write soon to his family; in the mean time he sends duty, love, and remembrance to all to whom they are due. I have drunk no wine or fermented liquor for more than three months, in consequence of which I am apt to be wakeful; but then I never feel any oppression after dinner, and my spirits are much more equable, blessings which I esteem inestimable! My dear Hartley—my Berkeley—how intensely do I long for you! My Sara, O my dear Sara! To Poole, God bless him! to dear Mrs. Poole and Ward, kindest love, and to all love and remembrance.

S. T. Coleridge.

XCV. TO THOMAS POOLE.

April 6, 1799.

My dearest Poole,—Your two letters, dated January 24 and March 15,[196] followed close on each other. I was still enjoying “the livelier impulse and the dance of thought” which the first had given me when I received the second. At the time, in which I read Sara’s lively account of the miseries which herself and the infant had undergone, all was over and well—there was nothing to think of—only a mass of pain was brought suddenly and closely within the sphere of my perception, and I was made to suffer it over again. For this bodily frame is an imitative thing, and touched by the imagination gives the hour which is past as faithfully as a repeating watch. But Death—the death of an infant—of one’s own infant! I read your letter in calmness, and walked out into the open fields, oppressed, not by my feelings, but by the riddles which the thought so easily proposes, and solves—never! A parent—in the strict and exclusive sense a parent!—to me it is a fable wholly without meaning except in the moral which it suggests—a fable of which the moral is God. Be it so—my dear, dear friend! Oh let it be so! La Nature (says Pascal) “La Nature confond les Pyrrhoniens, et la Raison confond les Dogmatistes. Nous avons une impuissance à prouver invincible à tout le Dogmatisme. Nous avons une idée de la verité invincible à tout le Pyrrhonisme.” I find it wise and human to believe, even on slight evidence, opinions, the contrary of which cannot be proved, and which promote our happiness without hampering our intellect. My baby has not lived in vain—this life has been to him what it is to all of us—education and development! Fling yourself forward into your immortality only a few thousand years, and how small will not the difference between one year old and sixty years appear! Consciousness!—it is no otherwise necessary to our conceptions of future continuance than as connecting the present link of our being with the one immediately preceding it; and that degree of consciousness, that small portion of memory, it would not only be arrogant, but in the highest degree absurd, to deny even to a much younger infant. ’Tis a strange assertion that the essence of identity lies in recollective consciousness. ’Twere scarcely less ridiculous to affirm that the eight miles from Stowey to Bridgwater consist in the eight milestones. Death in a doting old age falls upon my feelings ever as a more hopeless phenomenon than death in infancy; but nothing is hopeless. What if the vital force which I sent from my arm into the stone as I flung it in the air and skimmed it upon the water—what if even that did not perish! It was life!—it was a particle of being!—it was power! and how could it perish? Life, Power, Being! Organization may and probably is their effect—their cause it cannot be! I have indulged very curious fancies concerning that force, that swarm of motive powers which I sent out of my body into that stone, and which, one by one, left the untractable or already possessed mass, and—but the German Ocean lies between us. It is all too far to send you such fancies as these! Grief, indeed,—

But I cannot truly say that I grieve—I am perplexed—I am sad—and a little thing—a very trifle—would make me weep—but for the death of the baby I have not wept! Oh this strange, strange, strange scene-shifter Death!—that giddies one with insecurity and so unsubstantiates the living things that one has grasped and handled! Some months ago Wordsworth transmitted me a most sublime epitaph. Whether it had any reality I cannot say. Most probably, in some gloomier moment he had fancied the moment in which his sister might die.

XCVI. TO HIS WIFE.

Göttingen, in der Wondestrasse, April 8, 1799.

It is one of the discomforts of my absence, my dearest Love! that we feel the same calamities at different times—I would fain write words of consolation to you; yet I know that I shall only fan into new activity the pang which was growing dead and dull in your heart. Dear little Being! he had existed to me for so many months only in dreams and reveries, but in them existed and still exists so livelily, so like a real thing, that although I know of his death, yet when I am alone and have been long silent, it seems to me as if I did not understand it. Methinks there is something awful in the thought, what an unknown being one’s own infant is to one—a fit of sound—a flash of light—a summer gust that is as it were created in the bosom of the calm air, that rises up we know not how, and goes we know not whither! But we say well; it goes! it is gone! and only in states of society in which the revealing voice of our most inward and abiding nature is no longer listened to (when we sport and juggle with abstract phrases, instead of representing our feelings and ideas), only then we say it ceases! I will not believe that it ceases—in this moving, stirring, and harmonious universe—I cannot believe it! Can cold and darkness come from the sun? where the sun is not, there is cold and darkness! But the living God is everywhere, and works everywhere—and where is there room for death? To look back on the life of my baby, how short it seems! but consider it referently to nonexistence, and what a manifold and majestic Thing does it not become? What a multitude of admirable actions, what a multitude of habits of actions it learnt even before it saw the light! and who shall count or conceive the infinity of its thoughts and feelings, its hopes, and fears, and joys, and pains, and desires, and presentiments, from the moment of its birth to the moment when the glass, through which we saw him darkly, was broken—and he became suddenly invisible to us? Out of the Mount that might not be touched, and that burnt with fire, out of darkness, and blackness, and tempest, and with his own Voice, which they who heard entreated that they might not hear it again, the most high God forbade us to use his name vainly. And shall we who are Christians, shall we believe that he himself uses his own power vainly? That like a child he builds palaces of mud and clay in the common road, and then he destroys them, as weary of his pastime, or leaves them to be trod under by the hoof of Accident? That God works by general laws are to me words without meaning or worse than meaningless—ignorance, and imbecility, and limitation must wish in generals. What and who are these horrible shadows necessity and general law, to which God himself must offer sacrifices—hecatombs of sacrifices? I feel a deep conviction that these shadows exist not—they are only the dreams of reasoning pride, that would fain find solutions for all difficulties without faith—that would make the discoveries which lie thick sown in the path of the eternal Future unnecessary; and so conceiting that there is sufficiency and completeness in the narrow present, weakens the presentiment of our wide and ever widening immortality. God works in each for all—most true—but more comprehensively true is it, that he works in all for each. I confess that the more I think, the more I am discontented with the doctrines of Priestley. He builds the whole and sole hope of future existence on the words and miracles of Jesus—yet doubts or denies the future existence of infants—only because according to his own system of materialism he has not discovered how they can be made conscious. But Jesus has declared that all who are in the grave shall arise—and that those who should arise to perceptible progression must be ever as the infant which He held in his arms and blessed. And although the Man Jesus had never appeared in the world, yet I am Quaker enough to believe, that in the heart of every man the Christ would have revealed himself, the Power of the Word, that was even in the wilderness. To me who am absent this faith is a real consolation,—and the few, the slow, the quiet tears which I shed, are the accompaniments of high and solemn thought, not the workings of pain or sorrow. When I return indeed, and see the vacancy that has been made—when nowhere anything corresponds to the form which will perhaps for ever dwell on my mind, then it is possible that a keener pang will come upon me. Yet I trust, my love! I trust, my dear Sara! that this event which has forced us to think of the death of what is most dear to us, as at all times probable, will in many and various ways be good for us. To have shared—nay, I should say—to have divided with any human being any one deep sensation of joy or of sorrow, sinks deep the foundations of a lasting love. When in moments of fretfulness and imbecility I am disposed to anger or reproach, it will, I trust, be always a restoring thought—“We have wept over the same little one,—and with whom I am angry? With her who so patiently and unweariedly sustained my poor and sickly infant through his long pains—with her, who, if I too should be called away, would stay in the deep anguish over my death-pillow! who would never forget me!” Ah, my poor Berkeley! A few weeks ago an Englishman desired me to write an epitaph on an infant who had died before its christening. While I wrote it, my heart with a deep misgiving turned my thoughts homewards.

It refers to the second question in the Church Catechism. We are well, my dear Sara. I hope to be home at the end of ten or eleven weeks. If you should be in Bristol, you will probably be shewn by Mr. Estlin three letters which I have written to him altogether—and one to Mr. Wade. Mr. Estlin will permit you to take the letters to Stowey that Poole may see them, and Poole will return them. I have no doubt but I shall repay myself by the work which I am writing, to such an amount, that I shall have spent out of my income only fifty pounds at the end of August. My love to your sisters—and love and duty to your mother. God bless you, my love! and shield us from deeper afflictions, or make us resigned unto them (and perhaps the latter blessedness is greater than the former).

Your affectionate and faithful husband,
S. T. Coleridge.

XCVII. TO THE SAME.

April 23, 1799.

My dear Sara,—Surely it is unnecessary for me to say how infinitely I languish to be in my native country, and with how many struggles I have remained even so long in Germany! I received your affecting letter, dated Easter Sunday; and, had I followed my impulses, I should have packed up and gone with Wordsworth and his sister, who passed through (and only passed through) this place two or three days ago. If they burn with such impatience to return to their native country, they who are all to each other, what must I feel with everything pleasant and everything valuable and everything dear to me at a distance—here, where I may truly say my only amusement is—to labour! But it is, in the strictest sense of the word, impossible to collect what I have to collect in less than six weeks from this day; yet I read and transcribe from eight to ten hours every day. Nothing could support me but the knowledge that if I return now we shall be embarrassed and in debt; and the moral certainty that having done what I am doing we shall be more than cleared—not to add that so large a work with so great a quantity and variety of information from sources so scattered and so little known, even in Germany, will of course establish my character for industry and erudition certainly; and, I would fain hope, for reflection and genius. This day in June I hope and trust that I shall be in England. Oh that the vessel could but land at Shurton Bars! Not that I should wish to see you and Poole immediately on my landing. No!—the sight, the touch of my native country, were sufficient for one whole feeling, the most deep unmingled emotion—but then and after a lonely walk of three miles—then, first of all, whom I knew, to see you and my Friend! It lessens the delight of the thought of my return that I must get at you through a tribe of acquaintances, damping the freshness of one’s joy! My poor little baby! At this time I see the corner of the room where his cradle stood—and his cradle too—and I cannot help seeing him in the cradle. Little lamb! and the snow would not melt on his limbs! I have some faint recollections that he had that difficulty of breathing once before I left England—or was it Hartley? “A child, a child is born, and the fond heart dances; and yet the childless are the most happy.” At Christmas[198] I saw a custom which pleased and interested me here. The children make little presents to their parents, and to one another, and the parents to the children. For three or four months before Christmas the girls are all busy, and the boys save up their pocket-money, to make or purchase these presents. What the present is to be is cautiously kept secret, and the girls have a world of contrivances to conceal it, such as working when they are at a visit, and the others are not with them, and getting up in the morning long before light, etc. Then on the evening before Christmas Day, one of the parlours is lighted up by the children, into which the parents must not go. A great yew bough is fastened on the table at a little distance from the wall, a multitude of little tapers are fastened in the bough, but not so as to burn it, till they are nearly burnt out, and coloured paper, etc., hangs and flutters from the twigs. Under this bough the children lay out in great neatness the presents they mean for their parents, still concealing in their pockets what they intend for each other. Then the parents are introduced, and each presents his little gift—and then they bring out the others, and present them to each other with kisses and embraces. Where I saw the scene there were eight or nine children of different ages; and the eldest daughter and the mother wept aloud for joy and tenderness, and the tears ran down the cheek of the father, and he clasped all his children so tight to his heart, as if he did it to stifle the sob that was rising within him. I was very much affected, and the shadow of the bough on the wall, and arching over on the ceiling, made a pretty picture—and then the raptures of the very little ones, when at last the twigs and thread-leaves began to catch fire and snap! Oh that was a delight for them! On the next day in the great parlour the parents lay out on the tables the presents for the children; a scene of more sober joy succeeds, as, on this day, after an old custom, the mother says privately to each of her daughters, and the father to each of his sons, that which he has observed most praiseworthy, and that which he has observed most faulty in their conduct. Formerly, and still in all the little towns and villages through the whole of North Germany, these presents were sent by all the parents of the village to some one fellow, who, in high buskins, a white robe, a mask, and an enormous flax wig, personates Knecht Rupert, that is, the servant Rupert. On Christmas night he goes round to every house and says that Jesus Christ his Master sent him there; the parents and older children receive him with great pomp of reverence, while the little ones are most terribly frightened. He then enquires for the children, and according to the character which he hears from the parent he gives them the intended presents, as if they came out of Heaven from Jesus Christ; or, if they should have been bad children, he gives the parents a rod, and, in the name of his Master Jesus, recommends them to use it frequently. About eight or nine years old, the children are let into the secret; and it is curious, how faithfully they all keep it. There are a multitude of strange superstitions among the bauers;—these still survive in spite of the efforts of the Clergy, who in the north of Germany, that is, in the Hanoverian, Saxon, and Prussian dominions, are almost all Deists. But they make little or no impressions on the bauers, who are wonderfully religious and fantastically superstitious, but not in the least priest-rid. But in the Catholic countries of Germany the difference is vast indeed! I met lately an intelligent and calm-minded man who had spent a considerable time at Marburg in the Bishopric of Paderborn in Westphalia. He told me that bead-prayers to the Holy Virgin are universal, and universally, too, are magical powers attributed to one particular formula of words which are absolutely jargons; at least, the words are to be found in no known language. The peasants believe it, however, to be a prayer to the Virgin, and happy is the man among them who is made confident by a priest that he can repeat it perfectly; for heaven knows what terrible calamity might not happen if any one should venture to repeat it and blunder. Vows and pilgrimages to particular images are still common among the bauers. If any one dies before the performance of his vow, they believe that he hovers between heaven and earth, and at times hobgoblins his relations till they perform it for him. Particular saints are believed to be eminently favourable to particular prayers, and he assured me solemnly that a little before he left Marburg a lady of Marburg had prayed and given money to have the public prayers at St. Erasmus’s Chapel to St. Erasmus—for what, think you?—that the baby, with which she was then pregnant, might be a boy with light hair and rosy cheeks. When their cows, pigs, or horses are sick they take them to the Dominican monks, who transcribe texts out of the holy books, and perform exorcisms. When men or women are sick they give largely to the Convent, who on good conditions dress them in Church robes, and lay a particular and highly venerated Crucifix on their breast, and perform a multitude of antic ceremonies. In general, my informer confessed that they cured the persons, which he seemed to think extraordinary, but which I think very natural. Yearly on St. Blasius’s Day unusual multitudes go to receive the Lord’s Supper; and while they are receiving it the monks hold a Blasius’s Taper (as it is called) before the forehead of the kneeling person, and then pray to St. Blasius to drive away all headaches for the ensuing year. Their wishes are often expressed in this form: “Mary, Mother of God, make her Son do so and so.” Yet with all this, from every information which I can collect (and I have had many opportunities of collecting various accounts), the peasants in the Catholic countries of Germany, but especially in Austria, are far better off, and a far happier and livelier race, than those in the Protestant lands.... I fill up the sheet with scattered customs put down in the order in which I happened to see them. The peasant children, wherever I have been, are dressed warm and tight, but very ugly; the dress looks a frock coat, some of coarse blue cloth, some of plaid, buttoned behind—the row of buttons running down the back, and the seamless, buttonless fore-part has an odd look. When the peasants marry, if the girl is of a good character, the clergyman gives her a Virgin Crown (a tawdry, ugly thing made of gold and silver tinsel, like the royal crowns in shape). This they wear with cropped, powdered, and pomatumed hair—in short, the bride looks ugliness personified. While I was at Ratzeburg a girl came to beg the pastor to let her be married in this crown, and she had had two bastards! The pastor refused, of course. I wondered that a reputable farmer should marry her; but the pastor told me that where a female bauer is the heiress, her having had a bastard does not much stand in her way; and yet, though little or no infamy attaches to it, the number of bastards is but small—two in seventy has been the average of Ratzeburg among the peasants. By the bye, the bells in Germany are not rung as ours, with ropes, but two men stand, one on each side of the bell, and each pushes the bell away from him with his foot. In the churches, what is a baptismal font in our churches is a great Angel with a bason in his hand; he draws up and down with a chain like a lamp. In a particular part of the ceremony down comes the great stone Angel with the bason, presenting it to the pastor, who, having taken quant. suff., up flies my Angel to his old place in the ceiling—you cannot conceive how droll it looked. The graves in the little village churchyards are in square or parallelogrammic wooden cases—they look like boxes without lids—and thorns and briars are woven over them, as is done in some parts of England. Perhaps you recollect that beautiful passage in Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Dying, “and the Summer brings briers to bud on our graves.” The shepherds with iron soled boots walk before the sheep, as in the East—you know our Saviour says—“My Sheep follow me.” So it is here. The dog and the shepherd walk first, the shepherd with his romantic fur, and generally knitting a pair of white worsted gloves—he walks on and his dog by him, and then follow the sheep winding along the roads in a beautiful stream! In the fields I observed a multitude of poles with bands and trusses of straw tied round the higher part and the top—on enquiry we found that they were put there for the owls to perch upon. And the owls? They catch the field mice, who do amazing damage in the light soil all throughout the north of Germany. The gallows near Göttingen, like that near Ratzeburg, is three great stone pillars, square, like huge tall chimneys, and connected with each other at the top by three iron bars with hooks to them—and near them is a wooden pillar with a wheel on the top of it on which the head is exposed, if the person instead of being hung is beheaded. I was frightened at first to see such a multitude of bones and skeletons of sheep, oxen, and horses, and bones as I imagined of men for many, many yards all round the gallows. I found that in Germany the hangman is by the laws of the Empire infamous—these hangmen form a caste, and their families marry with each other, etc.—and that all dead cattle, who have died, belong to them, and are carried by the owners to the gallows and left there. When their cattle are bewitched, or otherwise desperately sick, the peasants take them and tie them to the gallows—drowned dogs and kittens, etc., are thrown there—in short, the grass grows rank, and yet the bones overtop it (the fancy of human bones must, I suppose, have arisen in my ignorance of comparative anatomy). God bless you, my Love! I will write again speedily. When I was at Ratzeburg I wrote one wintry night in bed, but never sent you, three stanzas which, I dare say, you will think very silly, and so they are: and yet they were not written without a yearning, yearning, yearning Inside—for my yearning affects more than my heart. I feel it all within me.