CHAPTER VI
A LAKE POET
1800-1803

CHAPTER VI
A LAKE POET
1800-1803

CX. TO THOMAS POOLE.

August 14, 1800.

My dear Poole,—Your two letters[235] I received exactly four days ago—some days they must have been lying at Ambleside before they were sent to Grasmere, and some days at Grasmere before they moved to Keswick.... It grieved me that you had felt so much from my silence. Believe me, I have been harassed with business, and shall remain so for the remainder of this year. Our house is a delightful residence, something less than half a mile from the lake of Keswick and something more than a furlong from the town. It commands both that lake and the lake of Bassenthwaite. Skiddaw is behind us; to the left, the right, and in front mountains of all shapes and sizes. The waterfall of Lodore is distinctly visible. In garden, etc., we are uncommonly well off, and our landlord, who resides next door in this twofold house, is already much attached to us. He is a quiet, sensible man, with as large a library as yours,—and perhaps rather larger,—well stored with encyclopædias, dictionaries, and histories, etc., all modern. The gentry of the country, titled and untitled, have all called or are about to call on me, and I shall have free access to the magnificent library of Sir Gilfrid Lawson. I wish you could come here in October after your harvesting, and stand godfather at the christening of my child. In October the country is in all its blaze of beauty.

We are well and the Wordsworths are well. The two volumes of the “Lyrical Ballads” will appear in about a fortnight or three weeks. Sara sends her best kind love to your mother. How much we rejoice in her health I need not say. Love to Ward, and to Chester, to whom I shall write as soon as I am at leisure. I was standing at the very top of Skiddaw, by a little shed of slate stones on which I had scribbled with a bit of slate my name among the other names. A lean-expression-faced man came up the hill, stood beside me a little while, then, on running over the names, exclaimed, “Coleridge! I lay my life that is the poet Coleridge!”

God bless you, and for God’s sake never doubt that I am attached to you beyond all other men.

S. T. Coleridge.

CXI. TO SIR H. DAVY.

Thursday night, October 9, 1800.

My dear Davy,—I was right glad, glad with a stagger of the heart, to see your writing again. Many a moment have I had all my France and England curiosity suspended and lost, looking in the advertisement front column of the “Morning Post Gazeteer” for Mr. Davy’s Galvanic habitudes of charcoal.—Upon my soul I believe there is not a letter in those words round which a world of imagery does not circumvolve; your room, the garden, the cold bath, the moonlight rocks, Barristed, Moore, and simple-looking Frere, and dreams of wonderful things attached to your name,—and Skiddaw, and Glaramara, and Eagle Crag, and you, and Wordsworth, and me, on the top of them! I pray you do write to me immediately, and tell me what you mean by the possibility of your assuming a new occupation. Have you been successful to the extent of your expectations in your late chemical inquiries?

As to myself, I am doing little worthy the relation. I write for Stuart in the “Morning Post,” and I am compelled by the god Pecunia—which was one name of the supreme Jupiter—to give a volume of letters from Germany, which will be a decent lounge book, and not an atom more. The “Christabel” was running up to 1,300 lines,[236] and was so much admired by Wordsworth, that he thought it indelicate to print two volumes with his name, in which so much of another man’s was included; and, which was of more consequence, the poem was in direct opposition to the very purpose for which the lyrical ballads were published, viz., an experiment to see how far those passions which alone give any value to extraordinary incidents were capable of interesting, in and for themselves, in the incidents of common life. We mean to publish the “Christabel,” therefore, with a long blank-verse poem of Wordsworth’s, entitled “The Pedlar.”[237] I assure you I think very differently of “Christabel.” I would rather have written “Ruth,” and “Nature’s Lady,” than a million such poems. But why do I calumniate my own spirit by saying “I would rather”? God knows it is as delightful to me that they are written. I know that at present, and I hope that it will be so; my mind has disciplined itself into a willing exertion of its powers, without any reference to their comparative value.

I cannot speak favourably of W.’s health, but, indeed, he has not done common justice to Dr. Beddoes’s kind prescriptions. I saw his countenance darken, and all his hopes vanish, when he saw the prescriptions—his scepticism concerning medicines! nay, it is not enough scepticism! Yet, now that peas and beans are over, I have hopes that he will in good earnest make a fair and full trial. I rejoice with sincere joy at Beddoes’s recovery.

Wordsworth is fearful you have been much teased by the printers on his account, but you can sympathise with him. The works which I gird myself up to attack as soon as money concerns will permit me are the Life of Lessing, and the Essay on Poetry. The latter is still more at my heart than the former: its title would be an essay on the elements of poetry,—it would be in reality a disguised system of morals and politics. When you write,—and do write soon,—tell me how I can get your essay on the nitrous oxide. If you desired Johnson to have one sent to Lackington’s, to be placed in Mr. Crosthwaite’s monthly parcel for Keswick, I should receive it. Are your galvanic discoveries important? What do they lead to? All this is ultra-crepidation, but would to Heaven I had as much knowledge as I have sympathy!

My wife and children are well; the baby was dying some weeks ago, so the good people would have it baptized; his name is Derwent Coleridge,[238] so called from the river, for, fronting our house, the Greta runs into the Derwent. Had it been a girl the name should have been Greta. By the bye, Greta, or rather Grieta, is exactly the Cocytus of the Greeks. The word, literally rendered in modern English, is “the loud lamenter;” to griet in the Cambrian dialect, signifying to roar aloud for grief or pain, and it does roar with a vengeance! I will say nothing about spring—a thirsty man tries to think of anything but the stream when he knows it to be ten miles off! God bless you!

Your most affectionate
S. T. Coleridge.

CXII. TO THE SAME.

October 18, 1800.

My dear Davy,—Our mountains northward end in the mountain Carrock,—one huge, steep, enormous bulk of stones, desolately variegated with the heath plant; at its foot runs the river Calder, and a narrow vale between it and the mountain Bowscale, so narrow, that in its greatest width it is not more than a furlong. But that narrow vale is so green, so beautiful, there are moods in which a man might weep to look at it. On this mountain Carrock, at the summit of which are the remains of a vast Druid circle of stones, I was wandering, when a thick cloud came on, and wrapped me in such darkness that I could not see ten yards before me, and with the cloud a storm of wind and hail, the like of which I had never before seen and felt. At the very summit is a cone of stones, built by the shepherds, and called the Carrock Man. Such cones are on the tops of almost all our mountains, and they are all called men. At the bottom of the Carrock Man I seated myself for shelter, but the wind became so fearful and tyrannous, that I was apprehensive some of the stones might topple down upon me, so I groped my way farther down and came to three rocks, placed on this wise , each one supported by the other like a child’s house of cards, and in the hollow and screen which they made I sate for a long while sheltered, as if I had been in my own study in which I am now writing: there I sate with a total feeling worshipping the power and “eternal link” of energy. The darkness vanished as by enchantment; far off, far, far off to the south, the mountains of Glaramara and Great Gable and their family appeared distinct, in deepest, sablest blue. I rose, and behind me was a rainbow bright as the brightest. I descended by the side of a torrent, and passed, or rather crawled (for I was forced to descend on all fours), by many a naked waterfall, till, fatigued and hungry (and with a finger almost broken, and which remains swelled to the size of two fingers), I reached the narrow vale, and the single house nestled in ash and sycamores. I entered to claim the universal hospitality of this country; but instead of the life and comfort usual in these lonely houses, I saw dirt, and every appearance of misery—a pale woman sitting by a peat fire. I asked her for bread and milk, and she sent a small child to fetch it, but did not rise herself. I eat very heartily of the black, sour bread, and drank a bowl of milk, and asked her to permit me to pay her. “Nay,” says she, “we are not so scant as that—you are right welcome; but do you know any help for the rheumatics, for I have been so long ailing that I am almost fain to die?” So I advised her to eat a great deal of mustard, having seen in an advertisement something about essence of mustard curing the most obstinate cases of rheumatism. But do write me, and tell me some cure for the rheumatism; it is in her shoulders, and the small of her back chiefly. I wish much to go off with some bottles of stuff to the poor creature. I should walk the ten miles as ten yards. With love and honour, my dear Davy,

Yours,
S. T. Coleridge.

CXIII. TO THE SAME.

Greta Hall, Tuesday night, December 2, 1800.

My dear Davy,—By an accident I did not receive your letter till this evening. I would that you had added to the account of your indisposition the probable causes of it. It has left me anxious whether or no you have not exposed yourself to unwholesome influences in your chemical pursuits. There are few beings both of hope and performance, but few who combine the “are” and the “will be.” For God’s sake, therefore, my dear fellow, do not rip open the bird that lays the golden eggs. I have not received your book. I read yesterday a sort of medical review about it. I suppose Longman will send it to me when he sends down the “Lyrical Ballads” to Wordsworth. I am solicitous to read the latter part. Did there appear to you any remote analogy between the case I translated from the German Magazine and the effects produced by your gas? Did Carlisle[239] ever communicate to you, or has he in any way published his facts concerning pain which he mentioned when we were with him? It is a subject which exceedingly interests me. I want to read something by somebody expressly on pain, if only to give an arrangement to my own thoughts, though if it were well treated I have little doubt it would revolutionize them. For the last month I have been trembling on through sands and swamps of evil and bodily grievance. My eyes have been inflamed to a degree that rendered reading and writing scarcely possible; and, strange as it seems, the act of metre composition, as I lay in bed, perceptibly affected them, and my voluntary ideas were every minute passing, more or less transformed into vivid spectra. I had leeches repeatedly applied to my temples, and a blister behind my ear—and my eyes are now my own, but in the place where the blister was, six small but excruciating boils have appeared, and harass me almost beyond endurance. In the mean time my darling Hartley has been taken with a stomach illness, which has ended in the yellow jaundice; and this greatly alarms me. So much for the doleful! Amid all these changes, and humiliations, and fears, the sense of the Eternal abides in me, and preserves unsubdued my cheerful faith, that all I endure is full of blessings!

At times, indeed, I would fain be somewhat of a more tangible utility than I am; but so I suppose it is with all of us—one while cheerful, stirring, feeling in resistance nothing but a joy and a stimulus; another while drowsy, self-distrusting, prone to rest, loathing our own self-promises, withering our own hopes—our hopes, the vitality and cohesion of our being!

I purpose to have “Christabel” published by itself—this I publish with confidence—but my travels in Germany come from me now with mortal pangs. Nothing but the most pressing necessity could have induced me—and even now I hesitate and tremble. Be so good as to have all that is printed of “Christabel” sent to me per post.

Wordsworth has nearly finished the concluding poem. It is of a mild, unimposing character, but full of beauties to those short-necked men who have their hearts sufficiently near their heads—the relative distance of which (according to citizen Tourdes, the French translator of Spallanzani) determines the sagacity or stupidity of all bipeds and quadrupeds.

There is a deep blue cloud over the heavens; the lake, and the vale, and the mountains are all in darkness; only the summits of all the mountains in long ridges, covered with snow, are bright to a dazzling excess. A glorious scene! Hartley was in my arms the other evening, looking at the sky; he saw the moon glide into a large cloud. Shortly after, at another part of the cloud, several stars sailed in. Says he, “Pretty creatures! they are going in to see after their mother moon.”

Remember me kindly to King. Write as often as you can; but above all things, my loved and honoured dear fellow, do not give up the idea of letting me and Skiddaw see you. God love you!

S. T. Coleridge.

Tobin writes me that Thompson[240] has made some lucrative discovery. Do you know aught about it? Have you seen T. Wedgwood since his return?

CXIV. TO THOMAS POOLE.

Greta Hall, Keswick, Saturday night, December 5, 1800.

My dearest Friend,—I have been prevented from answering your last letter entirely by the state of my eyes, and my wish to write more fully to you than their weakness would permit. For the last month and more I have indeed been a very crazy machine.... That consequence of this long-continued ill-health which I most regret is, that it has thrown me so sadly behindhand in the performance of my engagements with the bookseller, that I almost fear I shall not be able to raise money enough by Christmas to make it prudent for me to journey southward. I shall, however, try hard for it. My plan was to go to London, and make a faint trial whether or no I could get a sort of dramatic romance, which I had more than half finished, upon the stage, and from London to visit Stowey and Gunville. Dear little Hartley has been ill in a stomach complaint which ended in the yellow jaundice, and frightened me sorely, as you may well believe. But, praise be to God, he is recovered and begins to look like himself. He is a very extraordinary creature, and if he live will, I doubt not, prove a great genius. Derwent is a fat, pretty child, healthy and hungry. I deliberated long whether I should not call him Thomas Poole Coleridge, and at last gave up the idea only because your nephew is called Thomas Poole, and because if ever it should be my destiny once again to live near you, I believed that such a name would give pain to some branches of your family. You will scarcely exact a very severe account of what a man has been doing who has been obliged for days and days together to keep his bed. Yet I have not been altogether idle, having in my own conceit gained great light into several parts of the human mind which have hitherto remained either wholly unexplained or most falsely explained. To one resolution I am wholly made up, to wit, that as soon as I am a freeman in the world of money I will never write a line for the express purpose of money (but only as believing it good and useful, in some way or other). Although I am certain that I have been greatly improving both in knowledge and power in these last twelve months, yet still at times it presses upon me with a painful weight that I have not evidenced a more tangible utility. I have too much trifled with my reputation. You have conversed much with Davy; he is delighted with you. What do you think of him? Is he not a great man, think you?... I and my wife were beyond measure delighted by your account of your mother’s health. Give our best, kindest loves to her. Charles Lloyd has settled at Ambleside, sixteen miles from Keswick. I shall not see him. If I cannot come, I will write you a very, very long letter, containing the most important of the many thoughts and feelings which I want to communicate to you, but hope to do it face to face.

Give my love to Ward, and to J. Chester. How is poor old Mr. Rich and his wife?

God have you ever in his keeping, making life tranquil to you. Believe me to be what I have been ever, and am, attached to you one degree more at least than to any other living man.

S. T. Coleridge.

CXV. TO SIR H. DAVY.

February 3, 1801.

My dear Davy,—I can scarcely reconcile it to my conscience to make you pay postage for another letter. Oh, what a fine unveiling of modern politics it would be if there were published a minute detail of all the sums received by government from the post establishment, and of all the outlets in which the sums so received flowed out again! and, on the other hand, all the domestic affections which had been stifled, all the intellectual progress that would have been, but is not, on account of the heavy tax, etc., etc. The letters of a nation ought to be paid for as an article of national expense. Well! but I did not take up this paper to flourish away in splenetic politics. A gentleman resident here, his name Calvert,[241] an idle, good-hearted, and ingenious man, has a great desire to commence fellow-student with me and Wordsworth in chemistry. He is an intimate friend of Wordsworth’s, and he has proposed to W. to take a house which he (Calvert) has nearly built, called Windy Brow, in a delicious situation, scarce half a mile from Greta Hall, the residence of S. T. Coleridge, Esq., and so for him (Calvert) to live with them, that is, Wordsworth and his sister. In this case he means to build a little laboratory, etc. Wordsworth has not quite decided, but is strongly inclined to adopt the scheme, because he and his sister have before lived with Calvert on the same footing, and are much attached to him; because my health is so precarious and so much injured by wet, and his health, too, is like little potatoes, no great things, and therefore Grasmere (thirteen miles from Keswick) is too great a distance for us to enjoy each other’s society without inconvenience, as much as it would be profitable for us both; and, likewise, because he feels it more necessary for him to have some intellectual pursuit less closely connected with deep passion than poetry, and is of course desirous, too, not to be so wholly ignorant of knowledge so exceedingly important. However, whether Wordsworth come or no, Calvert and I have determined to begin and go on. Calvert is a man of sense and some originality, and is, besides, what is well called a handy man. He is a good practical mechanic, etc., and is desirous to lay out any sum of money that is necessary. You know how long, how ardently I have wished to initiate myself in chemical science, both for its own sake and in no small degree likewise, my beloved friend, that I may be able to sympathise with all that you do and think. Sympathise blindly with it all I do even now, God knows! from the very middle of my heart’s heart, but I would fain sympathise with you in the light of knowledge. This opportunity is exceedingly precious to me, as on my own account I could not afford the least additional expense, having been already, by long and successive illnesses, thrown behindhand so much that for the next four or five months I fear, let me work as hard as I can, I shall not be able to do what my heart within me burns to do, that is, to concentre my free mind to the affinities of the feelings with words and ideas under the title of “Concerning Poetry, and the nature of the Pleasures derived from it.” I have faith that I do understand the subject, and I am sure that if I write what I ought to do on it, the work would supersede all the books of metaphysics, and all the books of morals too. To whom shall a young man utter his pride, if not to a young man whom he loves?

I beg you, therefore, my dear Davy, to write me a long letter when you are at leisure, informing me: Firstly, What books it will be well for me and Calvert to purchase. Secondly, Directions for a convenient little laboratory. Thirdly, To what amount apparatus would run in expense, and whether or no you would be so good as to superintend its making at Bristol. Fourthly, Give me your advice how to begin. And, fifthly, and lastly, and mostly, do send a drop of hope to my parched tongue, that you will, if you can, come and visit me in the spring. Indeed, indeed, you ought to see this country, this beautiful country, and then the joy you would send into me!

The shape of this paper will convince you with what eagerness I began this letter; I really did not see that it was not a sheet.

I have been thinking vigorously during my illness, so that I cannot say that my long, long wakeful nights have been all lost to me. The subject of my meditations has been the relations of thoughts to things; in the language of Hume, of ideas to impressions. I may be truly described in the words of Descartes: I have been “res cogitans, id est, dubitans, affirmans, negans, pauca intelligens, multa ignorans, volens, nolens, imaginans etiam, et sentiens.” I please myself with believing that you will receive no small pleasure from the result of these broodings, although I expect in you (in some points) a determined opponent, but I say of my mind in this respect: “Manet imperterritus ille hostem magnanimum opperiens, et mole suâ stat.” Every poor fellow has his proud hour sometimes, and this I suppose is mine.

I am better in every respect than I was, but am still very feeble. The weather has been woefully against me for the last fortnight, having rained here almost incessantly. I take quantities of bark, but the effect is (to express myself with the dignity of science) x = 0000000, and I shall not gather strength, or that little suffusion of bloom which belongs to my healthy state, till I can walk out.

God bless you, my dear Davy! and your ever affectionate friend,

S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. An electrical machine, and a number of little knickknacks connected with it, Mr. Calvert has.—Write.

CXVI. TO THOMAS POOLE.

Monday, March 16, 1801.

My dear Friend,—The interval since my last letter has been filled up by me in the most intense study. If I do not greatly delude myself, I have not only completely extricated the notions of time and space, but have overthrown the doctrine of association, as taught by Hartley, and with it all the irreligious metaphysics of modern infidels—especially the doctrine of necessity. This I have done; but I trust that I am about to do more—namely, that I shall be able to evolve all the five senses, that is, to deduce them from one sense, and to state their growth and the causes of their difference, and in this evolvement to solve the process of life and consciousness. I write this to you only, and I pray you, mention what I have written to no one. At Wordsworth’s advice, or rather fervent entreaty, I have intermitted the pursuit. The intensity of thought, and the number of minute experiments with light and figure, have made me so nervous and feverish that I cannot sleep as long as I ought and have been used to do; and the sleep which I have is made up of ideas so connected, and so little different from the operations of reason, that it does not afford me the due refreshment. I shall therefore take a week’s respite, and make “Christabel” ready for the press; which I shall publish by itself, in order to get rid of all my engagements with Longman. My German Book I have suffered to remain suspended chiefly because the thoughts which had employed my sleepless nights during my illness were imperious over me; and though poverty was staring me in the face, yet I dared behold my image miniatured in the pupil of her hollow eye, so steadily did I look her in the face; for it seemed to me a suicide of my very soul to divert my attention from truths so important, which came to me almost as a revelation. Likewise, I cannot express to you, dear Friend of my heart! the loathing which I once or twice felt when I attempted to write, merely for the bookseller, without any sense of the moral utility of what I was writing. I shall therefore, as I said, immediately publish my “Christabel,” with two essays annexed to it, on the “Preternatural” and on “Metre.”—This done, I shall propose to Longman, instead of my Travels (which, though nearly done, I am exceedingly anxious not to publish, because it brings me forward in a personal way, as a man who relates little adventures of himself to amuse people, and thereby exposes me to sarcasm and the malignity of anonymous critics, and is, besides, beneath me, ...) I shall propose to Longman to accept instead of these Travels a work on the originality and merits of Locke, Hobbes, and Hume, which work I mean as a pioneer to my greater work, and as exhibiting a proof that I have not formed opinions without an attentive perusal of the works of my predecessors, from Aristotle to Kant.

I am confident that I can prove that the reputation of these three men has been wholly unmerited, and I have in what I have already written traced the whole history of the causes that effected this reputation entirely to Wordsworth’s satisfaction.

You have seen, I hope, the “Lyrical Ballads.” In the divine poem called “Michael,” by an infamous blunder[242] of the printer, near twenty lines are omitted in page 210, which makes it nearly unintelligible. Wordsworth means to write to you and to send them together with a list of the numerous errata. The character of the “Lyrical Ballads” is very great, and will increase daily. They have extolled them in the “British Critic.” Ask Chester (to whom I shall write in a week or so concerning his German books) for Greenough’s address, and be so kind as to send it immediately. Indeed, I hope for a long letter from you, your opinion of the L. B., the preface, etc. You know, I presume, that Davy is appointed Director of the Laboratory, and Professor at the Royal Institution? I received a very affectionate letter from him on the occasion. Love to all. We are all well, except, perhaps, myself. Write! God love you and

S. T. Coleridge.

CXVII. TO THE SAME.

Monday, March 23, 1801.

My dear Friend,—I received your kind letter of the 14th. I was agreeably disappointed in finding that you had been interested in the letter respecting Locke. Those which follow are abundantly more entertaining and important; but I have no one to transcribe them. Nay, three letters are written which have not been sent to Mr. Wedgwood,[243] because I have no one to transcribe them for me, and I do not wish to be without copies. Of that letter which you have I have no copy. It is somewhat unpleasant to me that Mr. Wedgwood has never answered my letter requesting his opinion of the utility of such a work, nor acknowledged the receipt of the long letter containing the evidences that the whole of Locke’s system, as far as it was a system, and with the exclusion of those parts only which have been given up as absurdities by his warmest admirers, preëxisted in the writings of Descartes, in a far more pure, elegant, and delightful form. Be not afraid that I shall join the party of the Little-ists. I believe that I shall delight you by the detection of their artifices. Now Mr. Locke was the founder of this sect, himself a perfect Little-ist.

My opinion is thus: that deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling, and that all truth is a species of revelation. The more I understand of Sir Isaac Newton’s works, the more boldly I dare utter to my own mind, and therefore to you, that I believe the souls of five hundred Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare or a Milton. But if it please the Almighty to grant me health, hope, and a steady mind (always the three clauses of my hourly prayers), before my thirtieth year I will thoroughly understand the whole of Newton’s works. At present I must content myself with endeavouring to make myself entire master of his easier work, that on Optics. I am exceedingly delighted with the beauty and neatness of his experiments, and with the accuracy of his immediate deductions from them; but the opinions founded on these deductions, and indeed his whole theory is, I am persuaded, so exceedingly superficial as without impropriety to be deemed false. Newton was a mere materialist. Mind, in his system, is always passive,—a lazy Looker-on on an external world. If the mind be not passive, if it be indeed made in God’s Image, and that, too, in the sublimest sense, the Image of the Creator, there is ground for suspicion that any system built on the passiveness of the mind must be false, as a system. I need not observe, my dear friend, how unutterably silly and contemptible these opinions would be if written to any but to another self. I assure you, solemnly assure you, that you and Wordsworth are the only men on earth to whom I would have uttered a word on this subject.

It is a rule, by which I hope to direct all my literary efforts, to let my opinions and my proofs go together. It is insolent to differ from the public opinion in opinion, if it be only opinion. It is sticking up little i by itself, i against the whole alphabet. But one word with meaning in it is worth the whole alphabet together. Such is a sound argument, an incontrovertible fact.

Oh, for a Lodge in a land where human life was an end to which labour was only a means, instead of being, as it is here, a mere means of carrying on labour. I am oppressed at times with a true heart-gnawing melancholy when I contemplate the state of my poor oppressed country. God knows, it is as much as I can do to put meat and bread on my own table, and hourly some poor starving wretch comes to my door to put in his claim for part of it. It fills me with indignation to hear the croaking account which the English emigrants send home of America. “The society so bad, the manners so vulgar, the servants so insolent!” Why, then, do they not seek out one another and make a society? It is arrant ingratitude to talk so of a land in which there is no poverty but as a consequence of absolute idleness; and to talk of it, too, with abuse comparatively with England, with a place where the laborious poor are dying with grass in their bellies. It is idle to talk of the seasons, as if that country must not needs be miserably governed in which an unfavourable season introduces a famine. No! no! dear Poole, it is our pestilent commerce, our unnatural crowding together of men in cities, and our government by rich men, that are bringing about the manifestations of offended Deity. I am assured that such is the depravity of the public mind, that no literary man can find bread in England except by mis-employing and debasing his talents; that nothing of real excellence would be either felt or understood. The annuity which I hold, perhaps by a very precarious tenure, will shortly from the decreasing value of money become less than one half what it was when first allowed to me. If I were allowed to retain it, I would go and settle near Priestley, in America. I shall, no doubt, get a certain price for the two or three works which I shall next publish, but I foresee they will not sell. The booksellers, finding this, will treat me as an unsuccessful author, that is, they will employ me only as an anonymous translator at a guinea a sheet. I have no doubt that I could make £500 a year if I liked. But then I must forego all desire of truth and excellence. I say I would go to America if Wordsworth would go with me, and we could persuade two or three farmers of this country, who are exceedingly attached to us, to accompany us. I would go, if the difficulty of procuring sustenance in this country remain in the state and degree in which it is at present; not on any romantic scheme, but merely because society has become a matter of great indifference to me. I grow daily more and more attached to solitude; but it is a matter of the utmost importance to be removed from seeing and suffering want.

God love you, my dear friend.

S. T. Coleridge.

CXVIII. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

Greta Hall, Keswick, [May 6, 1801].

My dear Southey,—I wrote you a very, very gloomy letter; and I have taken blame to myself for inflicting so much pain on you without any adequate motive. Not that I exaggerated anything, as far as the immediate present is concerned; but had I been in better health and a more genial state of sensation, I should assuredly have looked out upon a more cheerful future. Since I wrote you, I have had another and more severe fit of illness, which has left me weak, very weak, but with so calm a mind that I am determined to believe that this fit was bonâ fide the last. Whether I shall be able to pass the next winter in this country is doubtful; nor is it possible I should know till the fall of the leaf. At all events, you will (I hope and trust, and if need were, entreat) spend as much of the summer and autumn with us as will be in your power, and if our healths should permit it, I am confident there will be no other solid objection to our living together in the same house, divided. We have ample room,—room enough, and more than enough, and I am willing to believe that the blessed dreams we dreamt some six years ago may be auguries of something really noble which we may yet perform together.

We wait impatiently, anxiously, for a letter announcing your arrival. Indeed, the article Falmouth has taken precedence of the Leading Paragraph with me for the last three weeks. Our best love to Edith. Derwent is the boast of the county; the little river god is as beautiful as if he had been the child of Venus Anaduomene previous to her emersion. Dear Hartley! we are at times alarmed by the state of his health, but at present he is well. If I were to lose him, I am afraid it would exceedingly deaden my affection for any other children I may have.

A very metaphysical account of fathers calling their children rogues, rascals, and little varlets, etc.

God bless you, my dear Southey! I need not say, Write.

S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. We shall have peas, beans, turnips (with boiled leg of mutton), cauliflowers, French beans, etc., etc., endless! We have a noble garden.

CXIX. TO THE SAME.

Wednesday, July 22, 1801.

My dear Southey,—Yesterday evening I met a boy on an ass, winding down as picturisk a glen as eye ever looked at, he and his beast no mean part of the picture. I had taken a liking to the little blackguard at a distance, and I could have downright hugged him when he gave me a letter in your handwriting. Well, God be praised! I shall surely see you once more, somewhere or other. If it be really impracticable for you to come to me, I will doubtless do anything rather than not see you, though, in simple truth, travelling in chaises, or coaches even, for one day is sure to lay me up for a week. But do, do, for heaven’s sake, come and go the shortest way, however dreary it be; for there is enough to be seen when you get to our house. If you did but know what a flutter the old moveable at my left breast has been in since I read your letter. I have not had such a fillip for many months. My dear Edith; how glad you were to see old Bristol again!

I am again climbing up that rock of convalescence from which I have been so often washed off and hurried back; but I have been so unusually well these last two days that I should begin to look the damsel Hope full in the face, instead of sheep’s-eyeing her, were it not that the weather has been so unusually hot, and that is my joy. Yes, sir! we will go to Constantinople; but as it rains there, which my gout loves as the devil does holy water, the Grand Turk shall shew the exceeding attachment he will no doubt form towards us by appointing us his viceroys in Egypt. I will be Supreme Bey of that showerless district, and you shall be my supervisor. But for God’s sake make haste and come to me, and let us talk of the sands of Arabia while we are floating in our lazy boat on Keswick Lake, with our eyes on massy Skiddaw, so green and high. Perhaps Davy might accompany you. Davy will remain unvitiated; his deepest and most recollectable delights have been in solitude, and the next to those with one or two whom he loved. He is placed, no doubt, in a perilous desert of good things; but he is connected with the present race of men by a very awful tie, that of being able to confer immediate benefit on them; and the cold-blooded, venom-toothed snake that winds around him shall be only his coat of arms, as God of Healing.

I exceedingly long to see “Thalaba,” and perhaps still more to read “Madoc” over again. I never heard of any third edition of my poems. I think you must have confused it with the L. B. Longman could not surely be so uncouthly ill-mannered as not to write to me to know if I wished to make any corrections or additions. If I am well enough, I mean to alter, with a devilish sweep of revolution, my Tragedy, and publish it in a little volume by itself, with a new name, as a poem. But I have no heart for poetry. Alas! alas! how should I? who have passed nine months with giddy head, sick stomach, and swoln knees. My dear Southey! it is said that long sickness makes us all grow selfish, by the necessity which it imposes of continuously thinking about ourselves. But long and sleepless nights are a fine antidote.

Oh, how I have dreamt about you! Times that have been, and never can return, have been with me on my bed of pain, and how I yearned towards you in those moments. I myself can know only by feeling it over again. But come “strengthen the weak hands, and confirm the feeble knees. Then shall the lame man leap as a hart, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”

I am here, in the vicinity of Durham, for the purpose of reading from the Dean and Chapter’s Library an ancient of whom you may have heard, Duns Scotus! I mean to set the poor old Gemman on his feet again; and in order to wake him out of his present lethargy, I am burning Locke, Hume, and Hobbes under his nose. They stink worse than feather or assafœtida. Poor Joseph! [Cottle] he has scribbled away both head and heart. What an affecting essay I could write on that man’s character! Had he gone in his quiet way on a little pony, looking about him with a sheep’s-eye cast now and then at a short poem, I do verily think from many parts of the “Malvern Hill,” that he would at last have become a poet better than many who have had much fame, but he would be an Epic, and so

... Write immediately, directing Mr. Coleridge, Mr. George Hutchinson’s,[245] Bishop’s Middleham, Rushiford, Durham, and tell me when you set off, and I will contrive and meet you at Liverpool, where, if you are jaded with the journey, we can stay a day or two at Dr. Crompton’s, and chat a bit with Roscoe and Curry,[246] whom you will like as men far, far better than as writers. O Edith; how happy Sara will be, and little Hartley, who uses the air of the breezes as skipping-ropes, and fat Derwent, so beautiful, and so proud of his three teeth, that there’s no bearing of him!

God bless you, dear Southey, and

S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. Remember me kindly to Danvers and Mrs. Danvers.

[Care of] Mrs. Danvers,
Kingsdown Parade, Bristol.

CXX. TO THE SAME.

Durham, Saturday, July 25, 1801.

My dear Southey,—I do loathe cities, that’s certain. I am in Durham, at an inn,—and that, too, I do not like, and have dined with a large parcel of priests all belonging to the cathedral, thoroughly ignorant and hard-hearted. I have had no small trouble in gaining permission to have a few books sent to me eight miles from the place, which nobody has ever read in the memory of man. Now you will think what follows a lie, and it is not. I asked a stupid haughty fool, who is the Librarian of the Dean and Chapter’s Library in this city, if it had Leibnitz. He answered, “We have no Museum in this Library for natural curiosities; but there is a Mathematical Instrument setter in the town, who shews such animalcula through a glass of great magnifying powers.” Heaven and earth! he understood the word “live nits.” Well, I return early to-morrow to Middleham; to a quiet good family that love me dearly—a young farmer and his sister, and he makes very droll verses in the northern dialects and in the metre of Burns, and is a great humourist, and the woman is so very good a woman that I have seldom indeed seen the like of her. Death! that everywhere there should be one or two good and excellent people like these, and that they should not have the power given ’em ... to whirl away the rest to Hell!

I do not approve the Palermo and Constantinople scheme, to be secretary to a fellow that would poison you for being a poet, while he is only a lame verse-maker. But verily, dear Southey! it will not suit you to be under any man’s control, or biddances. What if you were a consul? ’Twould fix you to one place, as bad as if you were a parson. It won’t do. Now mark my scheme! St. Nevis is the most lovely as well as the most healthy island in the W. Indies. Pinney’s[247] estate is there, and he has a country-house situated in a most heavenly way, a very large mansion. Now between you and me I have reason to believe that not only this house is at my service, but many advantages in a family way that would go one half to lessen the expenses of living there, and perhaps Pinney would appoint us sinecure negro-drivers, at a hundred a year each, or some other snug and reputable office, and, perhaps, too, we might get some office in which there is quite nothing to do under the Governor. Now I and my family, and you and Edith, and Wordsworth and his sister might all go there, and make the Island more illustrious than Cos or Lesbos! A heavenly climate, a heavenly country, and a good house. The seashore so near us, dells and rocks and streams. Do now think of this. But say nothing about it on account of old Pinney. Wordsworth would certainly go if I went. By the living God, it is my opinion that we should not leave three such men behind us. N. B. I have every reason to believe Keswick (and Cumberland and Westmoreland in general) full as dry a climate as Bristol. Our rains fall more certainly in certain months, but we have fewer rainy days, taking the year through. As to cold, I do not believe the difference perceptible by the human body. But I feel that there is no relief for me in any part of England. Very hot weather brings me about in an instant, and I relapse as soon as it coldens.

You say nothing of your voyage homeward, or the circumstances that preceded it. This, however, I far rather hear from your mouth than your letters. Come! and come quickly. My love to Edith, and remember me kindly to Mary and Martha and Eliza and Mrs. Fricker. My kind respects to Charles and Mrs. Danvers. Is Davy with you? If he is, I am sure he speaks affectionately of me. God bless you! Write.

S. T. Coleridge.

CXXI. TO THE SAME.

Scarborough, August 1, 1801.

My dear Southey,—On my return from Durham (I foolishly walked back), I was taken ill, and my left knee swelled “pregnant with agony,” as Mr. Dodsley says in one of his poems. Dr. Fenwick[248] has earnestly persuaded me to try horse-exercise and warm sea-bathing, and I took the opportunity of riding with Sara Hutchinson to her brother Tom, who lives near the place, where I can ride to and fro, and bathe with no other expense there than that of the bath. The fit comes on me either at nine at night, or two in the morning. In the former case it continues nine hours, in the latter five. I am often literally sick with pain. In the daytime, however, I am well, surprisingly so indeed, considering how very little sleep I am able to snatch. Your letter was sent after me, and arrived here this morning, and but that my letter can reach you on the 5th of this month, I would immediately set off again, though I arrived here only last night. But I am unwilling not to try the baths for one week. If, therefore, you have not made the immediate preparation you may stay one week longer at Bristol. But if you have, you must look at the lake, and play with my babies three or four days, though this grieves me. I do not like it. I want to be with you, and to meet you even to the very verge of the Lake Country. I would far rather that you would stay a week at Grasmere (which is on the road, fourteen miles from Keswick), with Wordsworth, than go on to Keswick, and I not there. Oh, how you will love Grasmere!

All I ever wish of you with regard to wintering at Keswick is to stay with me till you find the climate injurious. When I read that cheerful sentence, “We will climb Skiddaw this year and scale Etna the next,” with a right piteous and humorous smile did I ogle my poor knee, which at this present moment is larger than the thickest part of my thigh.

A little Quaker girl (the daughter of the great Quaker mathematician Slee, a friend of anti-negro-trade Clarkson, who has a house at the foot of Ulleswater, which Slee Wordsworth dined with, a pretty parenthesis!), this little girl, four years old, happened after a very hearty meal to eructate, while Wordsworth was there. Her mother looked at her, and the little creature immediately and formally observed: “Yan belks when yan’s fu, and when yan’s empty.” That is, “One belches when one’s full and when one’s empty.” Since that time this is a favourite piece of slang at Grasmere and Greta Hall, whenever we talk of poor Joey, George Dyer, and other perseverants in the noble trade of scribbleism.

Wrangham,[249] who lives near here, one of your anthology friends, has married again, a lady of a neat £700 a year. His living by the Inclosure [Act] will be something better than £600, besides what little fortune he had with his last wife, who died in the first year. His present wife’s cousin observed, “Mr. W. is a lucky man: his present lady is very weakly and delicate.” I like the idea of a man’s speculating in sickly wives. It would be no bad character for a farce.

That letter £ was a kind-hearted, honest, well-spoken citizen. The three strokes which did for him were, as I take it, (1), the Ictus Cardiacus, which devitalized his moral heart; (2ondly) the stroke of the apoplexy in his head; and (thirdly) a stroke of the palsy in his right hand, which produces a terrible shaking and impotence in the very attempt to reach his breeches pocket. O dear Southey! what incalculable blessings, worthy of thanksgiving in Heaven, do we not owe to our being and having been poor! No man’s heart can wholly stand up against property. My love to Edith.

S. T. Coleridge.

CXXII. TO THOMAS POOLE.

Keswick, September 19, 1801.

By a letter from Davy I have learnt, Poole, that your mother is with the Blessed. I have given her the tears and the pang which belong to her departure, and now she will remain to me forever, what she had long been—a dear and venerable image, often gazed at by me in imagination, and always with affection and filial piety. She was the only being whom I ever felt in the relation of Mother; and she is with God! We are all with God!

What shall I say to you! I can only offer a prayer of thanksgiving for you, that you are one who has habitually connected the act of thought with that of feeling; and that your natural sorrow is so mingled up with a sense of the omnipresence of the Good Agent, that I cannot wish it to be other than what I know it is. The frail and the too painful will gradually pass away from you, and there will abide in your spirit a great and sacred accession to those solemn Remembrances and faithful Hopes in which, and by which, the Almighty lays deep the foundations of our continuous Life, and distinguishes us from the Brutes that perish. As all things pass away, and those habits are broken up which constituted our own and particular Self, our nature by a moral instinct cherishes the desire of an unchangeable Something, and thereby awakens or stirs up anew the passion to promote permanent good, and facilitates that grand business of our existence—still further, and further still, to generalise our affections, till Existence itself is swallowed up in Being, and we are in Christ even as He is in the Father.

It is among the advantages of these events that they learn us to associate a keen and deep feeling with all the old good phrases, all the reverend sayings of comfort and sympathy, that belong, as it were, to the whole human race. I felt this, dear Poole! as I was about to write my old

God bless you, and love you for ever and ever!

Your affectionate friend,
S. T. Coleridge.

Would it not be well if you were to change the scene awhile! Come to me, Poole! No—no—no. You have none that love you so well as I. I write with tears that prevent my seeing what I am writing.

CXXIII. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

Nether Stowey, Bridgewater, December 31, 1801.

Dear Southey,—On Xmas Day I breakfasted with Davy, with the intention of dining with you; but I returned very unwell, and in very truth in so utter a dejection of spirits as both made it improper for me to go anywhither, and a most unfit man to be with you. I left London on Saturday morning, 4 o’clock, and for three hours was in such a storm as I was never before out in, for I was atop of the coach—rain, and hail, and violent wind, with vivid flashes of lightning, that seemed almost to alternate with the flash-like re-emersions of the waning moon, from the ever-shattered, ever-closing clouds. However, I was armed cap-a-pie in a complete panoply, namely, in a huge, most huge, roquelaure, which had cost the government seven guineas, and was provided for the emigrants in the Quiberon expedition, one of whom, falling sick, stayed behind and parted with his cloak to Mr. Howel,[250] who lent it me. I dipped my head down, shoved it up—and it proved a complete tent to me. I was as dry as if I had been sitting by the fire. I arrived at Bath at eleven o’clock at night, and spent the next day with Warren, who has gotten a very sweet woman to wife and a most beautiful house and situation at Whitcomb on the Hill over the bridge. On Monday afternoon I arrived at Stowey. I am a good deal better; but my bowels are by no means de-revolutionized. So much for me. I do not know what I am to say to you of your dear mother. Life passes away from us in all modes and ways, in our friends, in ourselves. We all “die daily.” Heaven knows that many and many a time I have regarded my talents and requirements as a porter’s burthen, imposing on me the capital duty of going on to the end of the journey, when I would gladly lie down by the side of the road, and become the country for a mighty nation of maggots. For what is life, gangrened, as it is with me, in its very vitals, domestic tranquillity? These things being so, I confess that I feel for you, but not for the event, as for the event only by an act of thought, and not by any immediate shock from the like feeling within myself. When I return to town I can scarcely tell. I have not yet made up my mind whether or no I shall move Devonward. My relations wish to see me, and I wish to avoid the uneasy feeling I shall have, if I remain so near them without gratifying the wish. No very brotherly mood of mind, I must confess—but it is, nine tenths of it at least, a work of their own doing. Poole desires to be remembered to you. Remember me to your wife and Mrs. Lovell.

God bless you and

S. T. Coleridge.

CXXIV. TO HIS WIFE.

King Street, Covent Garden, [February 24, 1802.]

My dear Love,—I am sure it will make you happy to hear that both my health and spirits have greatly improved, and I have small doubts that a residence of two years in a mild and even climate will, with God’s blessing, give me a new lease in a better constitution. You may be well assured that I shall do nothing rashly, but our journey thither I shall defray by letters to Poole and the Wedgwoods, or more probably addressed to Mawman, the bookseller, who will honour my drafts in return. Of course I shall not go till I have earned all the money necessary for the journey that I can. The plan will be this, unless you can think of any better. Wordsworth will marry soon after my return, and he, Mary, and Dorothy will be our companions and neighbours. Southey means, if it is in his power, to pass into Spain that way. About July we shall all set sail from Liverpool to Bordeaux. Wordsworth has not yet settled whether he shall be married from Gallow Hill or at Grasmere. But they will of course make a point that either Sarah shall be with Mary or Mary with Sarah previous to so long a parting. If it be decided that Sarah is to come to Grasmere, I shall return by York, which will be but a few miles out of the way, and bring her. At all events, I shall stay a few days at Derby,—for whom, think you, should I meet in Davy’s lecture-room but Joseph Strutt? He behaved most affectionately to me, and pressed me with great earnestness to pass through Darley (which is on the road to Derby) and stay a few days at his house among my old friends. I assure you I was much affected by his kind and affectionate invitation (though I felt a little awkward, not knowing whom I might venture to ask after). I could not bring out the word “Mrs. Evans,” and so said, “Your sister, sir? I hope she is well!”

On Sunday I dined at Sir William Rush’s, and on Monday likewise, and went with them to Mrs. Billington’s Benefit. ’Twas the “Beggar’s Opera;” it was perfection! I seem to have acquired a new sense by hearing her. I wished you to have been there. I assure you I am quite a man of fashion; so many titled acquaintances and handsome carriages stopping at my door, and fine cards. And then I am such an exquisite judge of music and painting, and pass criticisms on furniture and chandeliers, and pay such very handsome compliments to all women of fashion, that I do verily believe that if I were to stay three months in town and have tolerable health and spirits, I should be a Thing in vogue,—the very tonish poet and Jemmy-Jessamy-fine-talker in town. If you were only to see the tender smiles that I occasionally receive from the Honourable Mrs. Damer! you would scratch her eyes out for jealousy! And then there’s the sweet (N. B. musky) Lady Charlotte ——! Nay, but I won’t tell you her name,—you might perhaps take it into your head to write an anonymous letter to her, and distrust our little innocent amour.

Oh that I were at Keswick with my darlings! My Hartley and my fat Derwent! God bless you, my dear Sarah! I shall return in love and cheerfulness, and therefore in pleasurable convalescence, if not in health. We shall try to get poor dear little Robert into Christ’s Hospital; that wretch of a Quaker will do nothing. The skulking rogue! just to lay hold of the time when Mrs. Lovell was on a visit to Southey; there was such low cunning in the thought.

Remember me most kindly to Mr. and Mrs. Wilkinson, and tell Mr. Jackson that I have not shaken a hand since I quitted him with more esteem and glad feeling than I shall soon, I trust, shake his with. God bless you, and your affectionate and faithful husband (notwithstanding the Honourable Mrs. D. and Lady Charlotte!),

S. T. Coleridge.

CXXV. TO W. SOTHEBY.

Greta Hall, Keswick, Tuesday, July 13, 1802.

My dear Sir,—I had written you a letter and was about to have walked to the post with it when I received yours from Luff.[251] It gave me such lively pleasure that I threw my letter into the fire, for it related chiefly to the “Erste Schiffer” of Gesner, and I could not endure that my first letter to you should begin with a subject so little interesting to my heart or understanding. I trust that you are before this at the end of your journey, and that Mrs. and Miss Sotheby have so completely recovered themselves as to have almost forgotten all the fatigue except such instances of it as it may be pleasant to them to remember. Why need I say how often I have thought of you since your departure, and with what hope and pleasurable emotion? I will acknowledge to you that your very, very kind letter was not only a pleasure to me, but a relief to my mind; for, after I had left you on the road between Ambleside and Grasmere, I was dejected by the apprehension that I had been unpardonably loquacious, and had oppressed you, and still more Mrs. Sotheby, with my many words so impetuously uttered! But in simple truth, you were yourselves, in part, the innocent causes of it. For the meeting with you, the manner of the meeting, your kind attentions to me, the deep and healthful delight which every impressive and beautiful object seemed to pour out upon you; kindred opinions, kindred pursuits, kindred feelings in persons whose habits, and, as it were, walk of life, have been so different from my own,—these and more than these, which I would but cannot say, all flowed in upon me with unusually strong impulses of pleasure,—and pleasure in a body and soul such as I happen to possess “intoxicates more than strong wine.” However, I promise to be a much more subdued creature when you next meet me, for I had but just recovered from a state of extreme dejection, brought on in part by ill health, partly by other circumstances; and solitude and solitary musings do of themselves impregnate our thoughts, perhaps, with more life and sensation than will leave the balance quite even. But you, my dear sir! looked at a brother poet with a brother’s eyes. Oh that you were now in my study and saw, what is now before the window at which I am writing,—that rich mulberry-purple which a floating cloud has thrown on the lake, and that quiet boat making its way through it to the shore!

We have had little else but rain and squally weather since you left us till within the last three days. But showery weather is no evil to us; and even that most oppressive of all weathers, hot, small drizzle, exhibits the mountains the best of any. It produced such new combinations of ridges in the Lodore and Borrowdale mountains on Saturday morning that I declare, had I been blindfolded and so brought to the prospect, I should scarcely have known them again. It was a dream such as lovers have,—a wild and transfiguring, yet enchantingly lovely dream, of an object lying by the side of the sleeper. Wordsworth, who has walked through Switzerland, declared that he never saw anything superior, perhaps nothing equal, in the Alps.

The latter part of your letter made me truly happy. Uriel himself should not be half as welcome; and indeed he, I must admit, was never any great favourite of mine. I always thought him a bantling of zoneless Italian muses, which Milton heard cry at the door of his imagination and took in out of charity. However, come as you may, carus mihi expectatusque venies.[252] De cœteris rebus si quid agendum est, et quicquid sit agendum, ut quam rectissime agantur omni meâ curâ, operâ, diligentiâ, gratiâ providebo.[253]

On my return to Keswick, I reperused the “Erste Schiffer” with great attention, and the result was an increasing disinclination to the business of translating it; though my fancy was not a little flattered by the idea of seeing my rhymes in such a gay livery.—As poor Giordano Bruno[254] says in his strange, yet noble poem, “De Immenso et Innumerabili,”—