I wrote the lines at nineteen, and published them many years ago in the “Morning Post” as a fragment, and as they are but twelve lines, I will transcribe them:—

I met these lines yesterday by accident, and ill as they are written there seemed to me a force and distinctness of image in them that were buds of promise in a schoolboy performance, though I am giving them perhaps more than their deserts in thus assuring them a reading from you. I have finished the “First Navigator,” and Mr. Tomkins[269] may have it whenever he wishes. It would be gratifying to me if you would look it over and alter anything you like. My whole wish and purpose is to serve Mr. Tomkins, and you are not only much more in the habit of writing verse than I am, but must needs have a better tact of what will offend that class of readers into whose hands a showy publication is likely to fall. I do not mean, my dear sir, to impose on you ten minutes’ thought, but often currente oculo a better phrase or position of words will suggest itself. As to the ten pounds, it is more than the thing is worth, either in German or English. Mr. Tomkins will better give the true value of it by kindly accepting what is given with kindness. Two or three copies presented in my name, one to each of the two or three friends of mine who are likely to be pleased with a fine book,—this is the utmost I desire or will receive. I shall for the ensuing quarter send occasional verses, etc., to the “Morning Post,” under the signature Ἔστησε, and I mention this to you because I have some intention of translating Voss’s “Idylls” in English hexameter, with a little prefatory essay on modern hexameters. I have discovered that the poetical parts of the Bible and the best parts of Ossian are little more than slovenly hexameters, and the rhythmical prose of Gesner is still more so, and reads exactly like that metre in Boethius’ and Seneca’s tragedies, which consists of the latter half of the hexameter. The thing is worth an experiment, and I wish it to be considered merely as an experiment. I need not say that the greater number of the verses signed Ἔστησε be such as were never meant for anything else but the peritura charta of the “Morning Post.”

I had written thus far when your letter of the 16th arrived, franked on the 23d from Weymouth, with a polite apology from Mr. Bedingfell (if I have rightly deciphered the name) for its detention. I am vexed I did not write immediately on my return home, but I waited, day after day, in hopes of the “Orestes,” etc. It is an old proverb that “extremes meet,” and I have often regretted that I had not noted down as they incurred the interesting instances in which the proverb is verified. The newest subject, though brought from the planets (or asteroids) Ceres and Pallas, could not excite my curiosity more than “Orestes.” I will write immediately to Mr. Clarkson, who resides at the foot of Ulleswater, and beg him to walk into Penrith, and ask at all the inns if any parcel have arrived; if not, I will myself write to Mr. Faulder and inform him of the failure. There is a subject of great merit in the ancient mythology hitherto untouched—I believe so, at least. But for the mode of the death, which mingles the ludicrous and terrible, but which might be easily altered, it is one of the finest subjects for tragedy that I am acquainted with. Medea, after the murder of her children [having] fled to the court of the old King Pelias, was regarded with superstitious horror, and shunned or insulted by the daughters of Pelias, till, hearing of her miraculous restoration of Æson, they conceived the idea of recalling by her means the youth of their own father. She avails herself of their credulity, and so works them up by pretended magical rites that they consent to kill their father in his sleep and throw him into the magic cauldron. Which done, Medea leaves them with bitter taunts of triumph. The daughters are called Asteropæa, Autonoe, and Alcestis. Ovid alludes briefly to this story in the couplet,—

What a thing to have seen a tragedy raised on this fable by Milton, in rivalry of the “Macbeth” of Shakespeare! The character of Medea, wandering and fierce, and invested with impunity by the strangeness and excess of her guilt, and truly an injured woman on the other hand and possessed of supernatural powers! The same story is told in a very different way by some authors, and out of their narrations matter might be culled that would very well coincide with and fill up the main incidents—her imposing the sacred image of Diana on the priesthood of Iolcus, and persuading them to join with her in inducing the daughters of Pelias to kill their father; the daughters under the persuasion that their father’s youth would be restored, the priests under the faith that the goddess required the death of the old king, and that the safety of the country depended on it. In this way Medea might be suffered to escape under the direct protection of the priesthood, who may afterwards discover the delusion. The moral of the piece would be a very fine one.

Wordsworth wrote a very animated account of his difficulties and his joyous meeting with you, which he calls the happy rencontre or fortunate rainstorm. Oh! that you had been with me during a thunder-storm[270] on Thursday, August the 3d! I was sheltered (in the phrase of the country, lownded) in a sort of natural porch on the summit of Sca Fell, the central mountain of our Giants, said to be higher than Skiddaw or Helvellyn, and in chasm, naked crag, bursting springs, and waterfall the most interesting, without a rival. When the cloud passed away, to my right and left, and behind me, stood a great national convention of mountains which our ancestors most descriptively called Copland, that is, the Land of Heads. Before me the mountains died away down to the sea in eleven parallel ridges; close under my feet, as it were, were three vales: Wastdale, with its lake; Miterdale and Eskdale, with the rivers Irt, Mite, and Esk seen from their very fountains to their fall into the sea at Ravenglass Bay, which, with these rivers, form to the eye a perfect trident.

Turning round, I looked through Borrowdale out upon the Derwentwater and the Vale of Keswick, even to my own house, where my own children were. Indeed, I had altogether a most interesting walk through Newlands to Buttermere, over the fells to Ennerdale, to St. Bees; up Wastdale to Sca Fell, down Eskdale to Devock Lake, Ulpha Kirk, Broughton Mills, Tarver, Coniston, Windermere, Grasmere, Keswick. If it would entertain you, I would transcribe my notes and send them you by the first opportunity. I have scarce left room for my best wishes to Mrs. and Miss Sotheby, and affectionate wishes for your happiness and all who constitute it.

With unfeigned esteem, dear sir,

Yours, etc.,
S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. I am ashamed to send you a scrawl so like in form to a servant wench’s first letter. You will see that the first half was written before I received your last letter.

CXXX. TO THE SAME.

Greta Hall, Keswick, September 10, 1802.

My dear Sir,—The books have not yet arrived, and I am wholly unable to account for the delay. I suspect that the cause of it may be Mr. Faulder’s mistake in sending them by the Carlisle waggon. A person is going to Carlisle on Monday from this place, and will make diligent inquiry, and, if he succeed, still I cannot have them in less than a week, as they must return to Penrith and there wait for the next Tuesday’s carrier. I ought, perhaps, to be ashamed of my weakness, but I must confess I have been downright vexed by the business. Every cart, every return-chaise from Penrith has renewed my hopes, till I began to play tricks with my own impatience, and say, “Well, I take it for granted that I shan’t get them for these seven days,” etc.,—with other of those half-lies that fear begets on hope. You have imposed a pleasing task on me in requesting the minutiæ of my opinions concerning your “Orestes.” Whatever these opinions may be, the disclosure of them will be a sort of map of my mind, as a poet and reasoner, and my curiosity is strongly excited. I feel you a man of genius in the choice of the subject. It is my faith that the genus irritabile is a phrase applicable only to bad poets. Men of great genius have, indeed, as an essential of their composition, great sensibility, but they have likewise great confidence in their own powers, and fear must always precede anger in the human mind. I can with truth say that, from those I love, mere general praise of anything I have written is as far from giving me pleasure as mere general censure; in anything, I mean, to which I have devoted much time or effort. “Be minute, and assign your reasons often, and your first impressions always, and then blame or praise. I care not which, I shall be gratified.” These are my sentiments, and I assuredly believe that they are the sentiments of all who have indeed felt a true call to the ministry of song. Of course, I, too, will act on the golden rule of doing to others what I wish others to do unto me. But, while I think of it, let me say that I should be much concerned if you applied this to the “First Navigator.” It would absolutely mortify me if you did more than look over it, and when a correction suggested itself to you, take your pen and make it, and let the copy go to Tomkins. What they have been, I shall know when I see the thing in print; for it must please the present times if it please any, and you have been far more in the fashionable world than I, and must needs have a finer and surer tact of that which will offend or disgust in the higher circles of life. Yet it is not what I should have advised Tomkins to do, and that is one reason why I cannot and will not accept more than a brace of copies from him. I do not like to be associated in a man’s mind with his losses. If he have the translation gratis, he must take it on his own judgment; but when a man pays for a thing, and he loses by it, the idea will creep in, spite of himself, that the failure was in part owing to the badness of the translation. While I was translating the “Wallenstein,” I told Longman it would never answer; when I had finished it I wrote to him and foretold that it would be waste paper on his shelves, and the dullness charitably laid upon my shoulders. Longman lost two hundred and fifty pounds by the work, fifty pounds of which had been paid to me,—poor pay, Heaven knows! for a thick octavo volume of blank verse; and yet I am sure that Longman never thinks of me but “Wallenstein” and the ghosts of his departed guineas dance an ugly waltz round my idea. This would not disturb me a tittle, if I thought well of the work myself. I should feel a confidence that it would win its way at last; but this is not the case with Gesner’s “Der erste Schiffer.” It may as well lie here till Tomkins wants it. Let him only give me a week’s notice, and I will transmit it to you with a large margin. Bowles’s stanzas on “Navigation”[271] are among the best in that second volume, but the whole volume is wofully inferior to its predecessor. There reigns through all the blank verse poems such a perpetual trick of moralizing everything, which is very well, occasionally, but never to see or describe any interesting appearance in nature without connecting it, by dim analogies, with the moral world proves faintness of impression. Nature has her proper interest, and he will know what it is who believes and feels that everything has a life of its own, and that we are all One Life. A poet’s heart and intellect should be combined, intimately combined and unified with the great appearances of nature, and not merely held in solution and loose mixture with them, in the shape of formal similes. I do not mean to exclude these formal similes; there are moods of mind in which they are natural, pleasing moods of mind, and such as a poet will often have, and sometimes express; but they are not his highest and most appropriate moods. They are “sermoni propriora,” which I once translated “properer for a sermon.” The truth is, Bowles has indeed the sensibility of a poet, but he has not the passion of a great poet. His latter writings all want native passion. Milton here and there supplies him with an appearance of it, but he has no native passion because he is not a thinker, and has probably weakened his intellect by the haunting fear of becoming extravagant. Young, somewhere in one of his prose works, remarks that there is as profound a logic in the most daring and dithyrambic parts of Pindar as in the “Organon” of Aristotle. The remark is a valuable one.

That this is deep in our nature, I felt when I was on Scafell. I involuntarily poured forth a hymn[273] in the manner of the Psalms, though afterwards I thought the ideas, etc., disproportionate to our humble mountains.... You will soon see it in the “Morning Post,” and I should be glad to know whether and how far it pleased you. It has struck me with great force lately that the Psalms afford a most complete answer to those who state the Jehovah of the Jews, as a personal and national God, and the Jews as differing from the Greeks only in calling the minor Gods Cherubim and Seraphim, and confining the word “God” only to their Jupiter. It must occur to every reader that the Greeks in their religious poems address always the Numina Loci, the Genii, the Dryads, the Naiads, etc., etc. All natural objects were dead, mere hollow statues, but there was a Godkin or Goddessling included in each. In the Hebrew poetry you find nothing of this poor stuff, as poor in genuine imagination as it is mean in intellect. At best, it is but fancy, or the aggregating faculty of the mind, not imagination or the modifying and coadunating faculty. This the Hebrew poets appear to me to have possessed beyond all others, and next to them the English. In the Hebrew poets each thing has a life of its own, and yet they are all our life. In God they move and live and have their being; not had, as the cold system of Newtonian Theology represents, but have. Great pleasure indeed, my dear sir, did I receive from the latter part of your letter. If there be any two subjects which have in the very depths of my nature interested me, it has been the Hebrew and Christian Theology, and the Theology of Plato. Last winter I read the Parmenides and the Timæus with great care, and oh, that you were here—even in this howling rainstorm that dashes itself against my windows—on the other side of my blazing fire, in that great armchair there! I guess we should encroach on the morning ere we parted. How little the commentators of Milton have availed themselves of the writings of Plato, Milton’s darling! But alas, commentators only hunt out verbal parallelisms—numen abest. I was much impressed with this in all the many notes on that beautiful passage in “Comus” from l. 629 to 641. All the puzzle is to find out what plant Hæmony is; which they discover to be the English spleenwort, and decked out as a mere play and licence of poetic fancy with all the strange properties suited to the purpose of the drama. They thought little of Milton’s platonizing spirit, who wrote nothing without an interior meaning. “Where more is meant than meets the ear,” is true of himself beyond all writers. He was so great a man that he seems to have considered fiction as profane unless where it is consecrated by being emblematic of some truth. What an unthinking and ignorant man we must have supposed Milton to be, if, without any hidden meaning, he had described it as growing in such abundance that the dull swain treads on it daily, and yet as never flowering. Such blunders Milton of all others was least likely to commit. Do look at the passage. Apply it as an allegory of Christianity, or, to speak more precisely, of the Redemption by the Cross, every syllable is full of light! “A small unsightly root.”—“To the Greeks folly, to the Jews a stumbling-block”—“The leaf was darkish and had prickles on it”—“If in this life only we have hope, we are of all men the most miserable,” and a score of other texts. “But in another country, as he said, Bore a bright golden flower”—“The exceeding weight of glory prepared for us hereafter”—“But not in this soil; Unknown and like esteemed and the dull swain Treads on it daily with his clouted shoon”—The promises of Redemption offered daily and hourly, and to all, but accepted scarcely by any—“He called it Hæmony.” Now what is Hæmony? αἷμα οἶνος, Blood-wine. “And he took the wine and blessed it and said, ‘This is my Blood,’”—the great symbol of the Death on the Cross. There is a general ridicule cast on all allegorising of poets. Read Milton’s prose works, and observe whether he was one of those who joined in this ridicule. There is a very curious passage in Josephus [De Bello Jud. 6, 7, cap. 25 (vi. § 3)] which is, in its literal meaning, more wild and fantastically absurd than the passage in Milton; so much so, that Lardner quotes it in exultation and says triumphantly, “Can any man who reads it think it any disparagement to the Christian Religion that it was not embraced by a man who would believe such stuff as this? God forbid that it should affect Christianity, that it is not believed by the learned of this world!” But the passage in Josephus, I have no doubt, is wholly allegorical.

Ἔστησε signifies “He hath stood,”[274] which, in these times of apostasy from the principles of freedom or of religion in this country, and from both by the same persons in France, is no unmeaning signature, if subscribed with humility, and in the remembrance of “Let him that stands take heed lest he fall!” However, it is, in truth, no more than S. T. C. written in Greek—Es tee see.

Pocklington will not sell his house, but he is ill, and perhaps it may be to be sold, but it is sunless all winter.

God bless you, and
S. T. Coleridge.

CXXXI. TO THE SAME.

Greta Hall, Keswick, Tuesday, September 27, 1802.

My dear Sir,—The river is full, and Lodore is full, and silver-fillets come out of clouds and glitter in every ravine of all the mountains; and the hail lies like snow, upon their tops, and the impetuous gusts from Borrowdale snatch the water up high, and continually at the bottom of the lake it is not distinguishable from snow slanting before the wind—and under this seeming snow-drift the sunshine gleams, and over all the nether half of the Lake it is bright and dazzles, a cauldron of melted silver boiling! It is in very truth a sunny, misty, cloudy, dazzling, howling, omniform day, and I have been looking at as pretty a sight as a father’s eyes could well see—Hartley and little Derwent running in the green where the gusts blow most madly, both with their hair floating and tossing, a miniature of the agitated trees, below which they were playing, inebriate both with the pleasure—Hartley whirling round for joy, Derwent eddying, half-willingly, half by the force of the gust,—driven backward, struggling forward, and shouting his little hymn of joy. I can write thus to you, my dear sir, with a confident spirit; for when I received your letter on the 22nd, and had read the “family history,” I laid down the sheet upon my desk, and sate for half an hour thinking of you, dreaming of you, till the tear grown cold upon my cheek awoke me from my reverie. May you live long, long, thus blessed in your family, and often, often may you all sit around one fireside. Oh happy should I be now and then to sit among you—your pilot and guide in some of your summer walks!

Or, what would be still better, I could talk to you (and, if you were here now, to an accompaniment of winds that would well suit the subject) instead of writing to you concerning your “Orestes.” When we talk we are our own living commentary, and there are so many running notes of look, tone, and gesture, that there is small danger of being misunderstood, and less danger of being imperfectly understood—in writing; but no! it is foolish to abuse a good substitute because it is not all that the original is,—so I will do my best and, believe me, I consider this letter which I am about to write as merely an exercise of my own judgment—a something that may make you better acquainted, perhaps, with the architecture and furniture of my mind, though it will probably convey to you little or nothing that had not occurred to you before respecting your own tragedy. One thing I beg solicitously of you, that, if anywhere I appear to speak positively, you will acquit me of any correspondent feeling. I hope that it is not a frequent feeling with me in any case, and, that if it appear so, I am belied by my own warmth of manner. In the present instance it is impossible. I have been too deeply impressed by the work, and I am now about to give you, not criticisms nor decisions, but a history of my impressions, and, for the greater part, of my first impressions, and if anywhere there seem anything like a tone of warmth or dogmatism, do, my dear sir, be kind enough to regard it as no more than a way of conveying to you the whole of my meaning; or, for I am writing too seriously, as the dexterous toss, necessary to turn an idea out of its pudding-bag, round and unbroken.

[No signature.]

Several pages of minute criticisms on Sotheby’s “Orestes” form part of the original transcript of the letter.

CXXXII. TO HIS WIFE.

St. Clear, Caermarthen, Tuesday, November 16, 1802.

My dear Love,—I write to you from the New Passage, Saturday morning, November 13. We had a favourable passage, dined on the other side, and proceeded in a post-chaise to Usk, and from thence to Abergavenny, where we supped and slept and breakfasted—a vile supper, vile beds, and vile breakfast. From Abergavenny to Brecon, through the vale of Usk, I believe, nineteen miles of most delightful country. It is not indeed comparable with the meanest part of our Lake Country, but hills, vale, and river, cottages and woods are nobly blended, and, thank Heaven, I seldom permit my past greater pleasures to lessen my enjoyment of present charms. Of the things which this nineteen miles has in common with our whole vale of Keswick (which is about nineteen miles long), I may say that the two vales and the two rivers are equal to each other, that the Keswick vale beats the Welsh one all hollow in cottages, but is as much surpassed by it in woods and timber trees. I am persuaded that every tree in the south of England has three times the number of leaves that a tree of the same sort and size has in Cumberland or Westmoreland, and there is an incomparably larger number of very large trees. Even the Scotch firs luxuriate into beauty and pluminess, and the larches are magnificent creatures indeed, in S. Wales. I must not deceive you, however, with all the advantages. S. Wales, if you came into it with the very pictures of Keswick, Ulleswater, Grasmere, etc., in your fancy, and were determined to hold them, and S. Wales together with all its richer fields, woods, and ancient trees, would needs appear flat and tame as ditchwater. I have no firmer persuasion than this, that there is no place in our island (and, saving Switzerland, none in Europe perhaps), which really equals the vale of Keswick, including Borrowdale, Newlands, and Bassenthwaite. O Heaven! that it had but a more genial climate! It is now going on for the eighteenth week since they have had any rain here, more than a few casual refreshing showers, and we have monopolized the rain of the whole kingdom. From Brecon to Trecastle—a churchyard, two or three miles from Brecon, is belted by a circle of the largest and noblest yews I ever saw—in a belt, to wit; they are not so large as the yew in Borrowdale or that in Lorton, but so many, so large and noble, I never saw before—and quite glowing with those heavenly-coloured, silky-pink-scarlet berries. From Trecastle to Llandovery, where we found a nice inn, an excellent supper, and good beds. From Llandovery to Llandilo—from Llandilo to Caermarthen, a large town all whitewashed—the roofs of the houses all whitewashed! a great town in a confectioner’s shop, on Twelfth-cake-Day, or a huge snowpiece at a distance. It is nobly situated along a hill among hills, at the head of a very extensive vale. From Caermarthen after dinner to St. Clear, a little hamlet nine miles from Caermarthen, three miles from the sea (the nearest seaport being Llangan, pronounced Larne, on Caermarthen Bay—look in the map), and not quite a hundred miles from Bristol. The country immediately round is exceedingly bleak and dreary—just the sort of country that there is around Shurton, etc. But the inn, the Blue Boar, is the most comfortable little public-house I was ever in. Miss S. Wedgwood left us this morning (we arrived here at half past four yesterday evening) for Crescelly, Mr. Allen’s seat (the Mrs. Wedgwood’s father), fifteen miles from this place, and T. Wedgwood is gone out cock-shooting, in high glee and spirits. He is very much better than I expected to have found him—he says, the thought of my coming, and my really coming so immediately, has sent a new life into him. He will be out all the mornings. The evenings we chat, discuss, or I read to him. To me he is a delightful and instructive companion. He possesses the finest, the subtlest mind and taste I have ever yet met with. His mind resembles that miniature in my “Three Graves:”[275]—

I continue in excellent health, compared with my state at Keswick.... I have now left off beer too, and will persevere in it. I take no tea; in the morning coffee, with a teaspoonful of ginger in the last cup; in the afternoon a large cup of ginger-tea, and I take ginger at twelve o’clock at noon, and a glass after supper. I find not the least inconvenience from any quantity, however large. I dare say I take a large table-spoonful in the course of the twenty-four hours, and once in the twenty-four hours (but not always at the same time) I take half a grain of purified opium, equal to twelve drops of laudanum, which is not more than an eighth part of what I took at Keswick, exclusively of beer, brandy, and tea, which last is undoubtedly a pernicious thing—all which I have left off, and will give this regimen a fair, complete trial of one month, with no other deviation than that I shall sometimes lessen the opiate, and sometimes miss a day. But I am fully convinced, and so is T. Wedgwood, that to a person with such a stomach and bowels as mine, if any stimulus is needful, opium in the small quantities I now take it is incomparably better in every respect than beer, wine, spirits, or any fermented liquor, nay, far less pernicious than even tea. It is my particular wish that Hartley and Derwent should have as little tea as possible, and always very weak, with more than half milk. Read this sentence to Mary, and to Mrs. Wilson. I should think that ginger-tea, with a good deal of milk in it, would be an excellent thing for Hartley. A teaspoonful piled up of ginger would make a potful of tea, that would serve him for two days. And let him drink it half milk. I dare say that he would like it very well, for it is pleasant with sugar, and tell him that his dear father takes it instead of tea, and believes that it will make his dear Hartley grow. The whole kingdom is getting ginger-mad. My dear love! I have said nothing of Italy, for I am as much in the dark as when I left Keswick, indeed much more. For I now doubt very much whether we shall go or no. Against our going you must place T. W.’s improved state of health, and his exceeding dislike to continental travelling, and horror of the sea, and his exceeding attachment to his family; for our going, you must place his past experience, the transiency of his enjoyments, the craving after change, and the effect of a cold winter, especially if it should come on wet or sleety. His determinations are made so rapidly, that two or three days of wet weather with a raw cold air might have such an effect on his spirits, that he might go off immediately to Naples, or perhaps for Teneriffe, which latter place he is always talking about. Look out for it in the Encyclopædia. Again, these latter causes make it not impossible that the pleasure he has in me as a companion may languish. I must subscribe myself in haste,

Your dear husband,
S. T. Coleridge.

The mail is waiting.

CXXXIII. TO THE REV. J. P. ESTLIN.

Crescelly, near Narbarth, Pembrokeshire,
December 7, 1802.

My dear Friend,—I took the liberty of desiring Mrs. Coleridge to direct a letter for me to you, fully expecting to have seen you; but I passed rapidly through Bristol, and left it with Mr. Wedgwood immediately—I literally had no time to see any one. I hope, however, to see you on my return, for I wish very much to have some hours’ conversation with you on a subject that will not cease to interest either of us while we live at least, and I trust that is a synonym of “for ever!”... Have you seen my different essays in the “Morning Post”?[276]—the comparison of Imperial Rome and France, the “Once a Jacobin, always a Jacobin,” and the two letters to Mr. Fox? Are my politics yours?

Have you heard lately from America? A gentleman informed me that the progress of religious Deism in the middle Provinces is exceedingly rapid, that there are numerous congregations of Deists, etc., etc. Would to Heaven this were the case in France! Surely, religious Deism is infinitely nearer the religion of our Saviour than the gross idolatry of Popery, or the more decorous, but not less genuine, idolatry of a vast majority of Protestants. If there be meaning in words, it appears to me that the Quakers and Unitarians are the only Christians, altogether pure from Idolatry, and even of these I am sometimes jealous, that some of the Unitarians make too much an Idol of their one God. Even the worship of one God becomes Idolatry in my convictions, when, instead of the Eternal and Omnipresent, in whom we live and move and have our Being, we set up a distinct Jehovah, tricked out in the anthropomorphic attributes of Time and successive Thoughts, and think of him as a Person, from whom we had our Being. The tendency to Idolatry seems to me to lie at the root of all our human vices—it is our original Sin. When we dismiss three Persons in the Deity, only by subtracting two, we talk more intelligibly, but, I fear, do not feel more religiously—for God is a Spirit, and must be worshipped in spirit.

O my dear sir! it is long since we have seen each other—believe me, my esteem and grateful affection for you and Mrs. Estlin has suffered no abatement or intermission—nor can I persuade myself that my opinions, fully stated and fully understood, would appear to you to differ essentially from your own. My creed is very simple—my confession of Faith very brief. I approve altogether and embrace entirely the Religion of the Quakers, but exceedingly dislike the sect, and their own notions of their own Religion. By Quakerism I understand the opinions of George Fox rather than those of Barclay—who was the St. Paul of Quakerism.—I pray for you and yours!

S. T. Coleridge.

CXXXIV. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

Christmas Day, 1802.

My dear Southey,—I arrived at Keswick with T. Wedgwood on Friday afternoon, that is to say, yesterday, and had the comfort to find that Sara was safely brought to bed, the morning before, that is on Thursday, half-past six, of a healthy Girl. I had never thought of a girl as a possible event; the words child and man-child were perfect synonyms in my feelings. However, I bore the sex with great fortitude, and she shall be called Sara. Both Mrs. Coleridge and the Coleridgiella are as well as can be. I left the little one sucking at a great rate. Derwent and Hartley are both well.

I was at Cote[277] in the beginning of November, and of course had calculated on seeing you, and, above all, on seeing little Edith’s physiognomy, among the certain things of my expedition, but I had no sooner arrived at Cote than I was forced to quit it, T. Wedgwood having engaged to go into Wales with his sister. I arrived at Cote in the afternoon, and till late evening did not know or conjecture that we were to go off early in the next morning. I do not say this for you,—you must know how earnestly I yearn to see you,—but for Mr. Estlin, who expressed himself wounded by the circumstance. When you see him, therefore, be so good as to mention this to him. I was much affected by Mrs. Coleridge’s account of your health and eyes. God have mercy on us! We are all sick, all mad, all slaves! It is a theory of mine that virtue and genius are diseases of the hypochondriacal and scrofulous genera, and exist in a peculiar state of the nerves and diseased digestion, analogous to the beautiful diseases that colour and variegate certain trees. However, I add, by way of comfort, that it is my faith that the virtue and genius produce the disease, not the disease the virtue, etc., though when present it fosters them. Heaven knows, there are fellows who have more vices than scabs, and scabs countless, with fewer ideas than plaisters. As to my own health it is very indifferent. I am exceedingly temperate in everything, abstain wholly from wine, spirits, or fermented liquors, almost wholly from tea, abjure all fermentable and vegetable food, bread excepted, and use that sparingly; live almost entirely on eggs, fish, flesh, and fowl, and thus contrive not to be ill. But well I am not, and in this climate never shall be. A deeply ingrained though mild scrofula is diffused through me, and is a very Proteus. I am fully determined to try Teneriffe or Gran Canaria, influenced to prefer them to Madeira solely by the superior cheapness of living. The climate and country are heavenly, the inhabitants Papishes, all of whom I would burn with fire and faggot, for what didn’t they do to us Christians under bloody Queen Mary? Oh the Devil sulphur-roast them! I would have no mercy on them, unless they drowned all their priests, and then, spite of the itch (which they have in an inveterate degree, rich and poor, gentle and simple, old and young, male and female), would shake hands with them ungloved.

By way of one impudent half line in this meek and mild letter—will you go with me? “I” and “you” mean mine and yours, of course. Remember you are to give me Thomas Aquinas and Scotus Erigena.

God bless you and

S. T. Coleridge.

I can have the best letters and recommendation. My love and their sisters to Mary and Edith, and if you see Mrs. Fricker, be so good as to tell her that she will hear from me or Sara in the course of ten days.

CXXXV. TO THOMAS WEDGWOOD.

[The text of this letter, which was first published in Cottle’s “Reminiscences,” 1849, p. 450, has been collated with that of the original.]

Keswick, January 9, 1803.

My dear Wedgwood,—I send you two letters, one from your dear sister, the second from Sharp, by which you will see at what short notice I must be off, if I go to the Canaries. If your last plan continue in full force in your mind, of course I have not even the phantom of a wish thitherward struggling, but if aught have happened to you, in the things without, or in the world within, to induce you to change the plan in itself, or the plan relatively to me, I think I could raise the money, at all events, and go and see. But I would a thousand-fold rather go with you whithersoever you go. I shall be anxious to hear how you have gone on since I left you. Should you decide in favour of a better climate somewhere or other, the best scheme I can think of is that in some part of Italy or Sicily which we both liked. I would look out for two houses. Wordsworth and his family would take the one, and I the other, and then you might have a home either with me, or, if you thought of Mr. and Mrs. Luff, under this modification, one of your own; and in either case you would have neighbours, and so return to England when the homesickness pressed heavy upon you, and back to Italy when it was abated, and the climate of England began to poison your comforts. So you would have abroad, in a genial climate, certain comforts of society among simple and enlightened men and women; and I should be an alleviation of the pang which you will necessarily feel, always, as often as you quit your own family.

I know no better plan: for travelling in search of objects is, at best, a dreary business, and whatever excitement it might have had, you must have exhausted it. God bless you, my dear friend. I write with dim eyes, for indeed, indeed, my heart is very full of affectionate sorrowful thoughts toward you.

I found Mrs. Coleridge not so well as I expected, but she is better to-day—and I, myself, write with difficulty, with all the fingers but one of my right hand very much swollen. Before I was half up Kirkstone the storm had wetted me through and through, and before I reached the top it was so wild and outrageous, that it would have been unmanly to have suffered the poor woman (guide) to continue pushing on, up against such a torrent of wind and rain; so I dismounted and sent her home with the storm to her back. I am no novice in mountain mischiefs, but such a storm as this was I never witnessed, combining the intensity of the cold with the violence of the wind and rain. The rain-drops were pelted or, rather, slung against my face by the gusts, just like splinters of flint, and I felt as if every drop cut my flesh. My hands were all shrivelled up like a washerwoman’s, and so benumbed that I was obliged to carry my stick under my arm. Oh, it was a wild business! Such hurry-skurry of clouds, such volleys of sound! In spite of the wet and the cold, I should have had some pleasure in it but for two vexations: first, an almost intolerable pain came into my right eye, a smarting and burning pain; and secondly, in consequence of riding with such cold water under my seat, extremely uneasy and burthensome feelings attacked my groin, so that, what with the pain from the one, and the alarm from the other, I had no enjoyment at all!

Just at the brow of the hill I met a man dismounted, who could not sit on horseback. He seemed quite scared by the uproar, and said to me, with much feeling, “Oh, sir, it is a perilous buffeting, but it is worse for you than for me, for I have it at my back.” However I got safely over, and, immediately, all was calm and breathless, as if it was some mighty fountain just on the summit of Kirkstone, that shot forth its volcano of air, and precipitated huge streams of invisible lava down the road to Patterdale.

I went on to Grasmere. I was not at all unwell when I arrived there, though wet of course to the skin. My right eye had nothing the matter with it, either to the sight of others, or to my own feelings, but I had a bad night, with distressful dreams, chiefly about my eye; and awaking often in the dark I thought it was the effect of mere recollection, but it appeared in the morning that my right eye was bloodshot, and the lid swollen. That morning, however, I walked home, and before I reached Keswick my eye was quite well, but I felt unwell all over. Yesterday I continued unusually unwell all over me till eight o’clock in the evening. I took no laudanum or opium, but at eight o’clock, unable to bear the stomach uneasiness and aching of my limbs, I took two large teaspoonsfull of ether in a wine-glass of camphorated gum water, and a third teaspoonfull at ten o’clock, and I received complete relief,—my body calmed, my sleep placid,—but when I awoke in the morning my right hand, with three of the fingers, was swollen and inflamed.... This has been a very rough attack, but though I am much weakened by it, and look sickly and haggard, yet I am not out of heart. Such a bout, such a “perilous buffeting,” was enough to have hurt the health of a strong man. Few constitutions can bear to be long wet through in intense cold. I fear it will tire you to death to read this prolix scrawled story, but my health, I know, interests you. Do continue to send me a few lines by the market people on Friday—I shall receive it on Tuesday morning.

Affectionately, dear friend, yours ever,
S. T. Coleridge.

[Addressed “T. Wedgwood, Esq., C. Luff’s Esq., Glenridding, Ulleswater.”]

CXXXVI. TO HIS WIFE.

[London], Monday, April 4, 1803.

My dear Sara,—I have taken my place for Wednesday night, and, barring accidents, shall arrive at Penrith on Friday noon. If Friday be a fine morning, that is, if it do not rain, you will get Mr. Jackson to send a lad with a horse or pony to Penruddock. The boy ought to be at Penruddock by twelve o’clock that his horse may bait and have a feed of corn. But if it be rain, there is no choice but that I must take a chaise. At all events, if it please God, I shall be with you by Friday, five o’clock, at the latest. You had better dine early. I shall take an egg or two at Penrith and drink tea at home. For more than a fortnight we have had burning July weather. The effect on my health was manifest, but Lamb objected, very sensibly, “How do you know what part may not be owing to the excitement of bustle and company?” On Friday night I was unwell and restless, and uneasy in limbs and stomach, though I had been extremely regular. I told Lamb on Saturday morning that I guessed the weather had changed. But there was no mark of it; it was hotter than ever. On Saturday evening my right knee and both my ankles swelled and were very painful; and within an hour after there came a storm of wind and rain. It continued raining the whole night. Yesterday it was a fine day, but cold; to-day the same, but I am a great deal better, and the swelling in my ankle is gone down and that in my right knee much decreased. Lamb observed that he was glad he had seen all this with his own eyes; he now knew that my illness was truly linked with the weather, and no whim or restlessness of disposition in me. It is curious, but I have found that the weather-glass changed on Friday night, the very hour that I found myself unwell. I will try to bring down something for Hartley, though toys are so outrageously dear, and I so short of money, that I shall be puzzled.

To-day I dine again with Sotheby. He had informed me that ten gentlemen who have met me at his house desired him to solicit me to finish the “Christabel,” and to permit them to publish it for me; and they engaged that it should be in paper, printing, and decorations the most magnificent thing that had hitherto appeared. Of course I declined it. The lovely lady shan’t come to that pass! Many times rather would I have it printed at Soulby’s on the true ballad paper. However, it was civil, and Sotheby is very civil to me.

I had purposed not to speak of Mary Lamb, but I had better write it than tell it. The Thursday before last she met at Rickman’s a Mr. Babb, an old friend and admirer of her mother. The next day she smiled in an ominous way; on Sunday she told her brother that she was getting bad, with great agony. On Tuesday morning she laid hold of me with violent agitation and talked wildly about George Dyer. I told Charles there was not a moment to lose; and I did not lose a moment, but went for a hackney-coach and took her to the private mad-house at Hugsden. She was quite calm, and said it was the best to do so. But she wept bitterly two or three times, yet all in a calm way. Charles is cut to the heart. You will send this note to Grasmere or the contents of it, though, if I have time, I shall probably write myself to them to-day or to-morrow.

Yours affectionately,
S. T. Coleridge.

CXXXVII. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

Keswick, Wednesday, July 2, 1803.

My dear Southey,—You have had much illness as well as I, but I thank God for you, you have never been equally diseased in voluntary power with me. I knew a lady who was seized with a sort of asthma which she knew would be instantly relieved by a dose of ether. She had the full use of her limbs, and was not an arm’s-length from the bell, yet could not command voluntary power sufficient to pull it, and might have died but for the accidental coming in of her daughter. From such as these the doctrines of materialism and mechanical necessity have been deduced; and it is some small argument against the truth of these doctrines that I have perhaps had a more various experience, a more intuitive knowledge of such facts than most men, and yet I do not believe these doctrines. My health is middling. If this hot weather continue, I hope to go on endurably, and oh, for peace! for I forbode a miserable winter in this country. Indeed, I am rather induced to determine on wintering in Madeira, rather than staying at home. I have enclosed ten pounds for Mrs. Fricker. Tell her I wish it were in my power to increase this poor half year’s mite; but ill health keeps me poor. Bella is with us, and seems likely to recover. I have not seen the “Edinburgh Review.” The truth is that Edinburgh is a place of literary gossip, and even I have had my portion of puff there, and of course my portion of hatred and envy. One man puffs me up—he has seen and talked with me; another hears him, goes and reads my poems, written when almost a boy, and candidly and logically hates me, because he does not admire my poems, in the proportion in which one of his acquaintance had admired me. It is difficult to say whether these reviewers do you harm or good.

You read me at Bristol a very interesting piece of casuistry from Father Somebody, the author, I believe, of the “Theatre Critic,” respecting a double infant. If you do not immediately want it, or if my using it in a book of logic, with proper acknowledgment, will not interfere with your use of it, I should be extremely obliged to you if you would send it me without delay. I rejoice to hear of the progress of your History. The only thing I dread is the division of the European and Colonial History. In style you have only to beware of short, biblical, and pointed periods. Your general style is delightfully natural and yet striking.

You may expect certain explosions in the “Morning Post,” Coleridge versus Fox, in about a week. It grieved me to hear (for I have a sort of affection for the man) from Sharp, that Fox had not read my two letters, but had heard of them, and that they were mine, and had expressed himself more wounded by the circumstance than anything that had happened since Burke’s business. Sharp told this to Wordsworth, and told Wordsworth that he had been so affected by Fox’s manner, that he himself had declined reading the two letters. Yet Sharp himself thinks my opinions right and true; but Fox is not to be attacked, and why? Because he is an amiable man; and not by me, because he had thought highly of me, etc., etc. O Christ! this is a pretty age in the article morality! When I cease to love Truth best of all things, and Liberty the next best, may I cease to live: nay, it is my creed that I should thereby cease to live, for as far as anything can be called probable in a subject so dark, it seems to me most probable that our immortality is to be a work of our own hands.

All the children are well, and love to hear Bella talk of Margaret. Love to Edith and to Mary and

S. T. Coleridge.

I have received great delight and instruction from Scotus Erigena. He is clearly the modern founder of the school of Pantheism; indeed he expressly defines the divine nature as quæ fit et facit, et creat et creatur; and repeatedly declares creation to be manifestation, the epiphany of philosophers. The eloquence with which he writes astonished me, but he had read more Greek than Latin, and was a Platonist rather than an Aristotelian. There is a good deal of omne meus oculus in the notion of the dark ages, etc., taken intensively; in extension it might be true. They had wells: we are flooded ankle high: and what comes of it but grass rank or rotten? Our age eats from that poison-tree of knowledge yclept “Too-Much and Too-Little.” Have you read Paley’s last book?[278] Have you it to review? I could make a dashing review of it.

CXXXVIII. TO THE SAME.

Keswick, July, 1803.

My dear Southey,—... I write now to propose a scheme,[279] or rather a rude outline of a scheme, of your grand work. What harm can a proposal do? If it be no pain to you to reject it, it will be none to me to have it rejected. I would have the work entitled Bibliotheca Britannica, or an History of British Literature, bibliographical, biographical, and critical. The two last volumes I would have to be a chronological catalogue of all noticeable or extant books; the others, be the number six or eight, to consist entirely of separate treatises, each giving a critical biblio-biographical history of some one subject. I will, with great pleasure, join you in learning Welsh and Erse; and you, I, Turner, and Owen,[280] might dedicate ourselves for the first half-year to a complete history of all Welsh, Saxon, and Erse books that are not translations that are the native growth of Britain. If the Spanish neutrality continues, I will go in October or November to Biscay, and throw light on the Basque.

Let the next volume contain the history of English poetry and poets, in which I would include all prose truly poetical. The first half of the second volume should be dedicated to great single names, Chaucer and Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton and Taylor, Dryden and Pope; the poetry of witty logic,—Swift, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne; I write par hasard, but I mean to say all great names as have either formed epochs in our taste, or such, at least, as are representative; and the great object to be in each instance to determine, first, the true merits and demerits of the books; secondly, what of these belong to the age—what to the author quasi peculium. The second half of the second volume should be a history of poetry and romances, everywhere interspersed with biography, but more flowing, more consecutive, more bibliographical, chronological, and complete. The third volume I would have dedicated to English prose, considered as to style, as to eloquence, as to general impressiveness; a history of styles and manners, their causes, their birth-places and parentage, their analysis....

These three volumes would be so generally interesting, so exceedingly entertaining, that you might bid fair for a sale of the work at large. Then let the fourth volume take up the history of metaphysics, theology, medicine, alchemy, common canon, and Roman law, from Alfred to Henry VII.; in other words, a history of the dark ages in Great Britain: the fifth volume—carry on metaphysics and ethics to the present day in the first half; the second half, comprise the theology of all the reformers. In the fourth volume there would be a grand article on the philosophy of the theology of the Roman Catholic religion; in this (fifth volume), under different names,—Hooker, Baxter, Biddle, and Fox,—the spirit of the theology of all the other parts of Christianity. The sixth and seventh volumes must comprise all the articles you can get, on all the separate arts and sciences that have been treated of in books since the Reformation; and, by this time, the book, if it answered at all, would have gained so high a reputation that you need not fear having whom you liked to write the different articles—medicine, surgery, chemistry, etc., etc., navigation, travellers, voyagers, etc., etc. If I go into Scotland, shall I engage Walter Scott to write the history of Scottish poets? Tell me, however, what you think of the plan. It would have one prodigious advantage: whatever accident stopped the work, would only prevent the future good, not mar the past; each volume would be a great and valuable work per se. Then each volume would awaken a new interest, a new set of readers, who would buy the past volumes of course; then it would allow you ample time and opportunities for the slavery of the catalogue volumes, which should be at the same time an index to the work, which would be in very truth a pandect of knowledge, alive and swarming with human life, feeling, incident. By the bye, what a strange abuse has been made of the word encyclopædia! It signifies properly, grammar, logic, rhetoric, and ethics, and metaphysics, which last, explaining the ultimate principle of grammar—log.—rhet., and eth.—formed a circle of knowledge.... To call a huge unconnected miscellany of the omne scibile, in an arrangement determined by the accident of initial letters, an encyclopædia is the impudent ignorance of your Presbyterian book-makers. Good night!

God bless you!
S. T. C.

CXXXIX. TO THE SAME.

Keswick, Sunday, August 7, 1803.

(Read the last lines first; I send you this letter merely to show you how anxious I have been about your work.)

My dear Southey,—The last three days I have been fighting up against a restless wish to write to you. I am afraid lest I should infect you with my fears rather than furnish you with any new arguments, give you impulses rather than motives, and prick you with spurs that had been dipped in the vaccine matter of my own cowardliness. While I wrote that last sentence, I had a vivid recollection, indeed an ocular spectrum, of our room in College Street, a curious instance of association. You remember how incessantly in that room I used to be compounding these half-verbal, half-visual metaphors. It argues, I am persuaded, a particular state of general feeling, and I hold that association depends in a much greater degree on the recurrence of resembling states of feeling than on trains of ideas, that the recollection of early childhood in latest old age depends on and is explicable by this, and if this be true, Hartley’s system totters. If I were asked how it is that very old people remember visually only the events of early childhood, and remember the intervening spaces either not at all or only verbally, I should think it a perfectly philosophical answer that old age remembers childhood by becoming “a second childhood!” This explanation will derive some additional value if you would look into Hartley’s solution of the phenomena—how flat, how wretched! Believe me, Southey! a metaphysical solution, that does not instantly tell you something in the heart is grievously to be suspected as apocryphal. I almost think that ideas never recall ideas, as far as they are ideas, any more than leaves in a forest create each other’s motion. The breeze it is that runs through them—it is the soul, the state of feeling. If I had said no one idea ever recalls another, I am confident that I could support the assertion. And this is a digression.—My dear Southey, again and again I say, that whatever your plan may be, I will contrive to work for you with equal zeal if not with equal pleasure. But the arguments against your plan weigh upon me the more heavily, the more I reflect; and it could not be otherwise than that I should feel a confirmation of them from Wordsworth’s complete coincidence—I having requested his deliberate opinion without having communicated an iota of my own. You seem to me, dear friend, to hold the dearness of a scarce work for a proof that the work would have a general sale, if not scarce. Nothing can be more fallacious than this. Burton’s Anatomy used to sell for a guinea to two guineas. It was republished. Has it paid the expense of reprinting? Scarcely. Literary history informs us that most of those great continental bibliographies, etc., were published by the munificence of princes, or nobles, or great monasteries. A book from having had little or no sale, except among great libraries, may become so scarce that the number of competitors for it, though few, may be proportionally very great. I have observed that great works are nowadays bought, not for curiosity or the amor proprius, but under the notion that they contain all the knowledge a man may ever want, and if he has it on his shelf why there it is, as snug as if it were in his brain. This has carried off the encyclopædia, and will continue to do so. I have weighed most patiently what you said respecting the persons and classes likely to purchase a catalogue of all British books. I have endeavoured to make some rude calculation of their numbers according to your own numeration table, and it falls very short of an adequate number. Your scheme appears to be in short faulty, (1) because, everywhere, the generally uninteresting, the catalogue part will overlay the interesting parts; (2) because the first volume will have nothing in it tempting or deeply valuable, for there is not time or room for it; (3) because it is impossible that any one of the volumes can be executed as well as they would otherwise be from the to-and-fro, now here, now there motion of the mind, and employment of the industry. Oh how I wish to be talking, not writing, for my mind is so full that my thoughts stifle and jam each other. And I have presented them as shapeless jellies, so that I am ashamed of what I have written—it so imperfectly expresses what I meant to have said. My advice certainly would be, that at all events you should make some classification. Let all the law books form a catalogue per se, and so forth; otherwise it is not a book of reference, without an index half as large as the work itself. I see no well-founded objection to the plan which I first sent. The two main advantages are that, stop where you will, you are in harbour, you sail in an archipelago so thickly clustered, (that) at each island you take in a completely new cargo, and the former cargo is in safe housage; and (2dly) that each labourer working by the piece, and not by the day, can give an undivided attention in some instances for three or four years, and bring to the work the whole weight of his interest and reputation.... An encyclopædia appears to me a worthless monster. What surgeon, or physician, professed student of pure or mixed mathematics, what chemist or architect, would go to an encyclopædia for his books? If valuable treatises exist on these subjects in an encyclopædia, they are out of their place—an equal hardship on the general reader, who pays for whole volumes which he cannot read, and on the professed student of that particular subject, who must buy a great work which he does not want in order to possess a valuable treatise, which he might otherwise have had for six or seven shillings. You omit those things only from your encyclopædia which are excrescences—each volume will set up the reader, give him at once connected trains of thought and facts, and a delightful miscellany for lounge-reading. Your treatises will be long in exact proportion to their general interest. Think what a strange confusion it will make, if you speak of each book, according to its date, passing from an Epic Poem to a treatise on the treatment of sore legs? Nobody can become an enthusiast in favour of the work.... A great change of weather has come on, heavy rain and wind, and I have been very ill, and still I am in uncomfortable restless health. I am not even certain whether I shall not be forced to put off my Scotch tour; but if I go, I go on Tuesday. I shall not send off this letter till this is decided.

God bless you and

S. T. C.

CXL. TO HIS WIFE.

Friday afternoon, 4 o’clock, Sept. (1), [1803].

My dear Sara,—I write from the Ferry of Ballater.... This is the first post since the day I left Glasgow. We went thence to Dumbarton (look at Stoddart’s tour, where there is a very good view of Dumbarton Rock and Tower), thence to Loch Lomond, and a single house called Luss—horrible inhospitality and a fiend of a landlady! Thence eight miles up the Lake to E. Tarbet, where the lake is so like Ulleswater that I could scarcely see the difference; crossed over the lake and by a desolate moorland walked to another lake, Loch Katrine, up to a place called Trossachs, the Borrowdale of Scotland, and the only thing which really beats us. You must conceive the Lake of Keswick pushing itself up a mile or two into Borrowdale, winding round Castle Crag, and in and out among all the nooks and promontories, and you must imagine all the mountains more detachedly built up, a general dislocation; every rock its own precipice, with trees young and old. This will give you some faint idea of the place, of which the character is extreme intricacy of effect produced by very simple means. One rocky, high island, four or five promontories, and a Castle Crag, just like that in the gorge of Borrowdale, but not so large. It rained all the way, all the long, long day. We slept in a hay-loft,—that is, Wordsworth, I, and a young man who came in at the Trossachs and joined us. Dorothy had a bed in the hovel, which was varnished so rich with peat smoke an apartment of highly polished [oak] would have been poor to it—it would have wanted the metallic lustre of the smoke-varnished rafters. This was [the pleasantest] evening I had spent since my tour; for Wordsworth’s hypochondriacal feelings keep him silent and self-centred. The next day it still was rain and rain; the ferry-boat was out for the preaching, and we stayed all day in the ferry wet to the skin. Oh, such a wretched hovel! But two Highland lassies,[281] who kept house in the absence of the ferryman and his wife, were very kind, and one of them was beautiful as a vision, and put both Dorothy and me in mind of the Highland girl in William’s “Peter Bell.”[282] We returned to E. Tarbet, I with the rheumatism in my head. And now William proposed to me to leave them and make my way on foot to Loch Katrine, the Trossachs, whence it is only twenty miles to Stirling, where the coach runs through to Edinburgh. He and Dorothy resolved to fight it out. I eagerly caught at the proposal; for the sitting in an open carriage in the rain is death to me, and somehow or other I had not been quite comfortable. So on Monday I accompanied them to Arrochar, on purpose to see the Cobbler which had impressed me so much in Mr. Wilkinson’s drawings; and there I parted with them, having previously sent on all my things to Edinburgh by a Glasgow carrier who happened to be at E. Tarbet. The worst thing was the money. They took twenty-nine guineas, and I six—all our remaining cash. I returned to E. Tarbet; slept there that night; the next day walked to the very head of Loch Lomond to Glen Falloch, where I slept at a cottage-inn, two degrees below John Stanley’s (but the good people were very kind),—meaning from hence to go over the mountains to the head of Loch Katrine again; but hearing from the gude man of the house that it was 40 miles to Glencoe (of which I had formed an idea from Wilkinson’s drawings), and having found myself so happy alone (such blessing is there in perfect liberty!) I walked off. I have walked forty-five miles since then, and, except during the last mile, I am sure I may say I have not met with ten houses. For eighteen miles there are but two habitations! and all that way I met no sheep, no cattle, only one goat! All through moorlands with huge mountains, some craggy and bare, but the most green, with deep pinky channels worn by torrents. Glencoe interested me, but rather disappointed me. There was no superincumbency of crag, and the crags not so bare or precipitous as I had expected. I am now going to cross the ferry for Fort William, for I have resolved to eke out my cash by all sorts of self-denial, and to walk along the whole line of the Forts. I am unfortunately shoeless; there is no town where I can get a pair, and I have no money to spare to buy them, so I expect to enter Perth barefooted. I burnt my shoes in drying them at the boatman’s hovel on Loch Katrine, and I have by this means hurt my heel. Likewise my left leg is a little inflamed, and the rheumatism in the right of my head afflicts me sorely when I begin to grow warm in my bed, chiefly my right eye, ear, cheek, and the three teeth; but, nevertheless, I am enjoying myself, having Nature with solitude and liberty—the liberty natural and solitary, the solitude natural and free! But you must contrive somehow or other to borrow ten pounds, or, if that cannot be, five pounds, for me, and send it without delay, directed to me at the Post Office, Perth. I guess I shall be there in seven days or eight at the furthest; and your letter will be two days getting thither (counting the day you put it into the office at Keswick as nothing); so you must calculate, and if this letter does not reach you in time, that is, within five days from the date hereof, you must then direct to Edinburgh. I will make five pounds do (you must borrow of Mr. Jackson), and I must beg my way for the last three or four days! It is useless repining, but if I had set off myself in the Mail for Glasgow or Stirling, and so gone by foot, as I am now doing, I should have saved twenty-five pounds; but then Wordsworth would have lost it.

I have said nothing of you or my dear children. God bless us all! I have but one untried misery to go through, the loss of Hartley or Derwent, ay, or dear little Sara! In my health I am middling. While I can walk twenty-four miles a day, with the excitement of new objects, I can support myself; but still my sleep and dreams are distressful, and I am hopeless. I take no opiates ... nor have I any temptation; for since my disorder has taken this asthmatic turn opiates produce none but positively unpl[easant effects].