God love you.

XXXIX. TO THE SAME.

Autumn, 1794.

Last night, dear Southey, I received a special invitation from Dr. Edwards[70] (the great Grecian of Cambridge and heterodox divine) to drink tea and spend the evening. I there met a councillor whose name is Lushington, a democrat, and a man of the most powerful and Briarean intellect. I was challenged on the subject of pantisocracy, which is, indeed, the universal topic at the University. A discussion began and continued for six hours. In conclusion, Lushington and Edwards declared the system impregnable, supposing the assigned quantum of virtue and genius in the first individuals. I came home at one o’clock this morning in the honest consciousness of having exhibited closer argument in more elegant and appropriate language than I had ever conceived myself capable of. Then my heart smote me, for I saw your letter on the propriety of taking servants with us. I had answered that letter, and feel conviction that you will perceive the error into which the tenderness of your nature had led you. But other queries obtruded themselves on my understanding. The more perfect our system is, supposing the necessary premises, the more eager in anxiety am I that the necessary premises exist. O for that Lyncean eye that can discover in the acorn of Error the rooted and widely spreading oak of Misery! Quære: should not all who mean to become members of our community be incessantly meliorating their temper and elevating their understandings? Qu.: whether a very respectable quantity of acquired knowledge (History, Politics, above all, Metaphysics, without which no man can reason but with women and children) be not a prerequisite to the improvement, of the head and heart? Qu.: whether our Women have not been taught by us habitually to contemplate the littleness of individual comforts and a passion for the novelty of the scheme rather than a generous enthusiasm of Benevolence? Are they saturated with the Divinity of Truth sufficiently to be always wakeful? In the present state of their minds, whether it is not probable that the Mothers will tinge the minds of the infants with prejudication? The questions are meant merely as motives to you, Southey, to the strengthening the minds of the Women, and stimulating them to literary acquirements. But, Southey, there are Children going with us. Why did I never dare in my disputations with the unconvinced to hint at this circumstance? Was it not because I knew, even to certainty of conviction, that it is subversive of rational hopes of a permanent system? These children,—the little Frickers, for instance, and your brothers,—are they not already deeply tinged with the prejudices and errors of society? Have they not learned from their schoolfellows Fear and Selfishness, of which the necessary offsprings are Deceit and desultory Hatred? How are we to prevent them from infecting the minds of our children? By reforming their judgments? At so early an age, can they have felt the ill consequences of their errors in a manner sufficiently vivid to make this reformation practicable? How can we insure their silence concerning God, etc.? Is it possible they should enter into our motives for this silence? If not, we must produce their Obedience by Terror. Obedience? Terror? The repetition is sufficient. I need not inform you that they are as inadequate as inapplicable. I have told you, Southey, that I will accompany you on an imperfect system. But must our system be thus necessarily imperfect? I ask the question that I may know whether or not I should write the Book of Pantisocracy.

I received your letter of Oyez; it brought a smile on a countenance that for these three weeks has been cloudy and stern in its solitary hours. In company, wit and laughter are Duties. Slovenly? I could mention a lady of fashionable rank, and most fashionable ideas, who declared to Caldwell that I (S. T. Coleridge) was a man of the most courtly and polished manners, of the most gentlemanly address she had ever met with. But I will not crow! Slovenly, indeed!

XL. TO THE REV. GEORGE COLERIDGE.

Thursday, November 6, 1794.

My dear Brother,—Your letter of this morning gave me inexpressible consolation. I thought that I perceived in your last the cold and freezing features of alienated affection. Surely, said I, I have trifled with the spirit of love, and it has passed away from me! There is a vice of such powerful venom, that one grain of it will poison the overflowing goblet of a thousand virtues. This vice constitution seems to have implanted in me, and habit has made it almost Omnipotent. It is indolence![71] Hence, whatever web of friendship my presence may have woven, my absence has seldom failed to unravel. Anxieties that stimulate others infuse an additional narcotic into my mind. The appeal of duty to my judgment, and the pleadings of affection at my heart, have been heard indeed, and heard with deep regard. Ah! that they had been as constantly obeyed. But so it has been. Like some poor labourer, whose night’s sleep has but imperfectly refreshed his overwearied frame, I have sate in drowsy uneasiness, and doing nothing have thought what a deal I had to do. But I trust that the kingdom of reason is at hand, and even now cometh!

How often and how unkindly are the ebullitions of youthful disputations mistaken for the result of fixed principles. People have resolved that I am a dηmocrat, and accordingly look at everything I do through the spectacles of prejudication. In the feverish distemperature of a bigoted aristocrat’s brain, some phantom of Dηmocracy threatens him in every corner of my writings.

“Are these lines in character,” observed a sensible friend of mine, “in a speech on the death of the man whom it just became the fashion to style ‘The ambitious Theocrat’?” “I fear not,” was my answer, “I gave way to my feelings.” The first speech of Adelaide,[73] whose Automaton is this character? Who spoke through Le Gendre’s mouth,[74] when he says, “Oh, what a precious name is Liberty To scare or cheat the simple into slaves”? But in several parts I have, it seems, in the strongest language boasted the impossibility of subduing France. Is not this sentiment highly characteristic? Is it forced into the mouths of the speakers? Could I have even omitted it without evident absurdity? But, granted that it is my own opinion, is it an anti-pacific one? I should have classed it among the anti-polemics. Again, are all who entertain and express this opinion dηmocrats? God forbid! They would be a formidable party indeed! I know many violent anti-reformists, who are as violent against the war on the ground that it may introduce that reform, which they (perhaps not unwisely) imagine would chant the dirge of our constitution. Solemnly, my brother, I tell you, I am not a dηmocrat. I see, evidently, that the present is not the highest state of society of which we are capable. And after a diligent, I may say an intense, study of Locke, Hartley, and others who have written most wisely on the nature of man, I appear to myself to see the point of possible perfection, at which the world may perhaps be destined to arrive. But how to lead mankind from one point to the other is a process of such infinite complexity, that in deep-felt humility I resign it to that Being “Who shaketh the Earth out of her place, and the pillars thereof tremble,” “Who purifieth with Whirlwinds, and maketh the Pestilence his Besom,” Who hath said, “that violence shall no more be heard of; the people shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat;” “the wolf and the lamb shall feed together.” I have been asked what is the best conceivable mode of meliorating society. My answer has been this: “Slavery is an abomination to my feeling of the head and the heart. Did Jesus teach the abolition of it? No! He taught those principles of which the necessary effect was to abolish all slavery. He prepared the mind for the reception before he poured the blessing.” You ask me what the friend of universal equality should do. I answer: “Talk not politics. Preach the Gospel!”

Yea, my brother! I have at all times in all places exerted my power in the defence of the Holy One of Nazareth against the learning of the historian, the libertinism of the wit, and (his worst enemy) the mystery of the bigot! But I am an infidel, because I cannot thrust my head into a mud gutter, and say, “How deep I am!” And I am a dηmocrat, because I will not join in the maledictions of the despotist—because I will bless all men and curse no one! I have been a fool even to madness; and I am, therefore, an excellent hit for calumny to aim her poisoned probabilities at! As the poor flutterer, who by hard struggling has escaped from the bird-limed thornbush, still bears the clammy incumbrance on his feet and wings, so I am doomed to carry about with me the sad mementos of past imprudence and anguish from which I have been imperfectly released.

Mr. Potter of Emanuel drives me up to town in his phaeton, on Saturday morning. Of course I shall see you on Sunday. Poor Smerdon! the reports concerning his literary plagiarism (as far as concerns my assistance) are falsehoods. I have felt much for him, and on the morning I received your letter I poured forth these incondite rhymes. Of course they are meant for a brother’s eye.

God love you, dear brother, and your affectionate and grateful

S. T. Coleridge.

XLI. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

December 11, 1794.

My dear Southey,—I sit down to write to you, not that I have anything particular to say, but it is a relief, and forms a very respectable part in my theory of “Escapes from the Folly of Melancholy.” I am so habituated to philosophizing that I cannot divest myself of it, even when my own wretchedness is the subject. I appear to myself like a sick physician, feeling the pang acutely, yet deriving a wonted pleasure from examining its progress and developing its causes.

Your poems and Bowles’ are my only morning companions. “The Retrospect!”[76] Quod qui non prorsus amat et deperit, illum omnes et virtutes et veneres odere! It is a most lovely poem, and in the next edition of your works shall be a perfect one. The “Ode to Romance”[77] is the best of the odes. I dislike that to Lycon, excepting the last stanza, which is superlatively fine. The phrase of “let honest truth be vain” is obscure. Of your blank verse odes, “The Death of Mattathias”[78] is by far the best. That you should ever write another, Pulcher Apollo veta! Musæ prohibete venustæ! They are to poetry what dumb-bells are to music; they can be read only for exercise, or to make a man tired that he may be sleepy. The sonnets are wonderfully inferior to those which I possess of yours, of which that “To Valentine”[79] (“If long and lingering seem one little day The motley crew of travellers among”); that on “The Fire”[80] (not your last, a very so-so one); on “The Rainbow”[81] (particularly the four last lines), and two or three others, are all divine and fully equal to Bowles. Some parts of “Miss Rosamund”[82] are beautiful—the working scene, and that line with which the poem ought to have concluded, “And think who lies so cold and pale below.” Of the “Pauper’s Funeral,”[83] that part in which you have done me the honour to imitate me is by far the worst; the thought has been so much better expressed by Gray. On the whole (like many of yours), it wants compactness and totality; the same thought is repeated too frequently in different words. That all these faults may be remedied by compression, my editio purgata of the poem shall show you.

Now! Is it not a beautiful poem? Of the sonnet, “No more the visionary soul shall dwell,”[84] I wrote the whole but the second and third lines. Of the “Old Man in the Snow,”[85] ten last lines entirely, and part of the four first. Those ten lines are, perhaps, the best I ever did write.

Lovell has no taste or simplicity of feeling. I remarked that when a man read Lovell’s poems he mus cus (that is a rapid way of pronouncing “must curse”), but when he thought of Southey’s, he’d “buy on!” For God’s sake let us have no more Bions or Gracchus’s. I abominate them! Southey is a name much more proper and handsome, and, I venture to prophesy, will be more famous. Your “Chapel Bell”[86] I love, and have made it, by a few alterations and the omission of one stanza (which, though beautiful quoad se, interrupted the run of the thought “I love to see the aged spirit soar”), a perfect poem. As it followed the “Exiled Patriots,” I altered the second and fourth lines to, “So freedom taught, in high-voiced minstrel’s weed;” “For cap and gown to leave the patriot’s meed.”

The last verse now runs thus:—

Would not this be a fine subject for a wild ode?

I shall set about one when I am in a humour to abandon myself to all the diableries that ever met the eye of a Fuseli!

Le Grice has jumbled together all the quaint stupidity he ever wrote, amounting to about thirty pages, and published it in a book about the size and dimensions of children’s twopenny books. The dedication is pretty. He calls the publication “Tineum;”[87] for what reason or with what meaning would give Madame Sphinx a complete victory over Œdipus.

A wag has handed about, I hear, an obtuse angle of wit, under the name of “An Epigram.” ’Tis almost as bad as the subject.

Of the following sonnet, the four last lines were written by Lamb, a man of uncommon genius. Have you seen his divine sonnet of “O! I could laugh to hear the winter winds,” etc.?

The four last lines are beautiful, but they have no particular meaning which “that thought is vain” does not convey. And I cannot write without a body of thought. Hence my poetry is crowded and sweats beneath a heavy burden of ideas and imagery! It has seldom ease. The little song ending with “I heav’d the painless sigh for thee!” is an exception, and, accordingly, I like it the best of all I ever wrote. My sonnets to eminent contemporaries are among the better things I have written. That to Erskine is a bad specimen. I have written ten, and mean to write six more. In “Fayette” I unwittingly (for I did not know it at the time) borrowed a thought from you.

I will conclude with a little song of mine,[90] which has no other merit than a pretty simplicity of silliness.

I am a complete necessitarian, and understand the subject as well almost as Hartley himself, but I go farther than Hartley, and believe the corporeality of thought, namely, that it is motion. Boyer thrashed Favell most cruelly the day before yesterday, and I sent him the following note of consolation: “I condole with you on the unpleasant motions, to which a certain uncouth automaton has been mechanized; and am anxious to know the motives that impinged on its optic or auditory nerves so as to be communicated in such rude vibrations through the medullary substance of its brain, thence rolling their stormy surges into the capillaments of its tongue, and the muscles of its arm. The diseased violence of its thinking corporealities will, depend upon it, cure itself by exhaustion. In the mean time I trust that you have not been assimilated in degradation by losing the ataxy of your temper, and that necessity which dignified you by a sentience of the pain has not lowered you by the accession of anger or resentment.”

God love you, Southey! My love to your mother!

S. T. Coleridge.

XLII. TO THE SAME.

Wednesday, December 17, 1794.

When I am unhappy a sigh or a groan does not feel sufficient to relieve the oppression of my heart. I give a long whistle. This by way of a detached truth.

“How infinitely more to be valued is integrity of heart than effulgence of intellect!” A noble sentiment, and would have come home to me, if for “integrity” you had substituted “energy.” The skirmishes of sensibility are indeed contemptible when compared with the well-disciplined phalanx of right-onward feelings. O ye invincible soldiers of virtue, who arrange yourselves under the generalship of fixed principles, that you would throw up your fortifications around my heart! I pronounce this a very sensible, apostrophical, metaphorical rant.

I dined yesterday with Perry and Grey (the proprietor and editor of the “Morning Chronicle”) at their house, and met Holcroft. He either misunderstood Lovell, or Lovell misunderstood him. I know not which, but it is very clear to me that neither of them understands nor enters into the views of our system. Holcroft opposes it violently and thinks it not virtuous. His arguments were such as Nugent and twenty others have used to us before him; they were nothing. There is a fierceness and dogmatism of conversation in Holcroft for which you receive little compensation either from the veracity of his information, the closeness of his reasoning, or the splendour of his language. He talks incessantly of metaphysics, of which he appears to me to know nothing, to have read nothing. He is ignorant as a scholar, and neglectful of the smaller humanities as a man. Compare him with Porson! My God! to hear Porson crush Godwin, Holcroft, etc. They absolutely tremble before him! I had the honour of working H. a little, and by my great coolness and command of impressive language certainly did him over. “Sir!” said he, “I never knew so much real wisdom and so much rank error meet in one mind before!” “Which,” answered I, “means, I suppose, that in some things, sir, I agree with you, and in others I do not.” He absolutely infests you with atheism; and his arguments are such that the nonentities of Nugent consolidate into oak or ironwood by comparison! As to his taste in poetry, he thinks lightly, or rather contemptuously, of Bowles’ sonnets; the language flat and prosaic and inharmonious, and the sentiments only fit for girls! Come, come, Mr. Holcroft, as much unintelligible metaphysics and as much bad criticism as you please, but no blasphemy against the divinity of a Bowles! Porson idolizes the sonnets. However it happened, I am higher in his good graces than he in mine. If I am in town I dine with him and Godwin, etc., at his house on Sunday.

I am astonished at your preference of the “Elegy.” I think it the worst thing you ever wrote.

Why, ’tis almost as bad as Lovell’s “Farmhouse,” and that would be at least a thousand fathoms deep in the dead sea of pessimism.

These two stanzas are exquisite, but the lovely thought of the “hot sun,” etc., as pitiless as proud prosperity loses part of its beauty by the time being night. It is among the chief excellences of Bowles that his imagery appears almost always prompted by surrounding scenery.

Before you write a poem you should say to yourself, “What do I intend to be the character of this poem; which feature is to be predominant in it?” So you make it unique. But in this poem now Charlotte speaks and now the Poet. Assuredly the stanzas of Memory, “three worst of fiends,” etc., and “gay fancy fond and frolic” are altogether poetical. You have repeated the same rhymes ungracefully, and the thought on which you harp so long recalls too forcibly the Εὕδεις βρέφος of Simonides. Unfortunately the “Adventurer” has made this sweet fragment an object of popular admiration. On the whole, I think it unworthy of your other “Botany Bay Eclogues,” yet deem the two stanzas above selected superior almost to anything you ever wrote; quod est magna res dicere, a great thing to say.

Tell me which you like the best of the above two. I have written one to Godwin, but the mediocrity of the eight first lines is most miserably magazinish! I have plucked, therefore, these scentless road-flowers from the chaplet, and entreat thee, thou river god of Pieria, to weave into it the gorgeous water-lily from thy stream, or the far-smelling violets on thy bank. The last six lines are these:—

Give me your minutest opinion concerning the following sonnet, whether or no I shall admit it into the number. The move of bepraising a man by enumerating the beauties of his polygraph is at least an original one; so much so that I fear it will be somewhat unintelligible to those whose brains are not του ἀμείνονος πηλοῦ. (You have read S.’s poetry and know that the fancy displayed in it is sweet and delicate to the highest degree.)

I will give the second number as deeming that it possesses mind:—

How do you like it?

I took the liberty—Gracious God! pardon me for the aristocratic frigidity of that expression—I indulged my feelings by sending this among my Contemporary Sonnets:

God love you and your mother and Edith and Sara and Mary and little Eliza, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., and

S. T. Coleridge.

[The following lines in Southey’s handwriting are attached to this letter:—

XLIII. TO THE SAME.

Monday morning, December, 1794.

My dear Southey,—I will not say that you treat me coolly or mysteriously, yet assuredly you seem to look upon me as a man whom vanity, or some other inexplicable cause, has alienated from the system, or what could build so injurious a suspicion? Wherein, when roused to the recollection of my duty, have I shrunk from the performance of it? I hold my life and my feeble feelings as ready sacrifices to justice—καυκάω ὑπορᾶς γάρ. I dismiss a subject so painful to me as self-vindication; painful to me only as addressing you on whose esteem and affection I have rested with the whole weight of my soul.

Southey! I must tell you that you appear to me to write as a man who is aweary of the world because it accords not with his ideas of perfection. Your sentiments look like the sickly offspring of disgusted pride. It flies not away from the couches of imperfection because the patients are fretful and loathsome.

Why, my dear, very dear Southey, do you wrap yourself in the mantle of self-centring resolve, and refuse to us your bounden quota of intellect? Why do you say, “I, I, I will do so and so,” instead of saying, as you were wont to do, “It is all our duty to do so and so, for such and such reasons”?

For God’s sake, my dear fellow, tell me what we are to gain by taking a Welsh farm. Remember the principles and proposed consequences of pantisocracy, and reflect in what degree they are attainable by Coleridge, Southey, Lovell, Burnett, and Co., some five men going partners together? In the next place, supposing that we have proved the preponderating utility of our aspheterizing in Wales, let us by our speedy and united inquiries discover the sum of money necessary, whether such a farm with so very large a house is to be procured without launching our frail and unpiloted bark on a rough sea of anxieties. How much is necessary for the maintenance of so large a family—eighteen people for a year at least?

I have read my objections to Lovell. If he has not answered them altogether to my fullest conviction, he has however shown me the wretchedness that would fall on the majority of our party from any delay in so forcible a light, that if three hundred pounds be adequate to the commencement of the system (which I very much doubt), I am most willing to give up all my views and embark immediately with you.

If it be determined that we shall go to Wales (for which I now give my vote), in what time? Mrs. Lovell thinks it impossible that we should go in less than three months. If this be the case, I will accept of the reporter’s place to the “Telegraph,” live upon a guinea a week, and transmit the [? balance], finishing in the same time my “Imitations.”

However, I will walk to Bath to-morrow morning and return in the evening.

Mr. and Mrs. Lovell, Sarah, Edith, all desire their best love to you, and are anxious concerning your health.

May God love you and your affectionate

S. T. Coleridge.

XLIV. TO MARY EVANS.

(?) December, 1794.

Too long has my heart been the torture house of suspense. After infinite struggles of irresolution, I will at last dare to request of you, Mary, that you will communicate to me whether or no you are engaged to Mr. ——. I conjure you not to consider this request as presumptuous indelicacy. Upon mine honour, I have made it with no other design or expectation than that of arming my fortitude by total hopelessness. Read this letter with benevolence—and consign it to oblivion.

For four years I have endeavoured to smother a very ardent attachment; in what degree I have succeeded you must know better than I can. With quick perceptions of moral beauty, it was impossible for me not to admire in you your sensibility regulated by judgment, your gaiety proceeding from a cheerful heart acting on the stores of a strong understanding. At first I voluntarily invited the recollection of these qualities into my mind. I made them the perpetual object of my reveries, yet I entertained no one sentiment beyond that of the immediate pleasure annexed to the thinking of you. At length it became a habit. I awoke from the delusion, and found that I had unwittingly harboured a passion which I felt neither the power nor the courage to subdue. My associations were irrevocably formed, and your image was blended with every idea. I thought of you incessantly; yet that spirit (if spirit there be that condescends to record the lonely beatings of my heart), that spirit knows that I thought of you with the purity of a brother. Happy were I, had it been with no more than a brother’s ardour!

The man of dependent fortunes, while he fosters an attachment, commits an act of suicide on his happiness. I possessed no establishment. My views were very distant; I saw that you regarded me merely with the kindness of a sister. What expectations could I form? I formed no expectations. I was ever resolving to subdue the disquieting passion; still some inexplicable suggestion palsied my efforts, and I clung with desperate fondness to this phantom of love, its mysterious attractions and hopeless prospects. It was a faint and rayless hope![95] Yet it soothed my solitude with many a delightful day-dream. It was a faint and rayless hope! Yet I nursed it in my bosom with an agony of affection, even as a mother her sickly infant. But these are the poisoned luxuries of a diseased fancy. Indulge, Mary, this my first, my last request, and restore me to reality, however gloomy. Sad and full of heaviness will the intelligence be; my heart will die within me. I shall, however, receive it with steadier resignation from yourself, than were it announced to me (haply on your marriage day!) by a stranger. Indulge my request; I will not disturb your peace by even a look of discontent, still less will I offend your ear by the whine of selfish sensibility. In a few months I shall enter at the Temple and there seek forgetful calmness, where only it can be found, in incessant and useful activity.

Were you not possessed of a mind and of a heart above the usual lot of women, I should not have written you sentiments that would be unintelligible to three fourths of your sex. But our feelings are congenial, though our attachment is doomed not to be reciprocal. You will not deem so meanly of me as to believe that I shall regard Mr. —— with the jaundiced eye of disappointed passion. God forbid! He whom you honour with your affections becomes sacred to me. I shall love him for your sake; the time may perhaps come when I shall be philosopher enough not to envy him for his own.

S. T. Coleridge.

I return to Cambridge to-morrow morning.

Miss Evans, No. 17 Sackville Street, Piccadilly.

XLV. TO THE SAME.

December 24, 1794.

I have this moment received your letter, Mary Evans. Its firmness does honour to your understanding, its gentleness to your humanity. You condescend to accuse yourself—most unjustly! You have been altogether blameless. In my wildest day-dream of vanity, I never supposed that you entertained for me any other than a common friendship.

To love you, habit has made unalterable. This passion, however, divested as it now is of all shadow of hope, will lose its disquieting power. Far distant from you I shall journey through the vale of men in calmness. He cannot long be wretched, who dares be actively virtuous.

I have burnt your letters—forget mine; and that I have pained you, forgive me!

May God infinitely love you!

S. T. Coleridge.

XLVI. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

December, 1794.

I am calm, dear Southey! as an autumnal day, when the sky is covered with gray moveless clouds. To love her, habit has made unalterable. I had placed her in the sanctuary of my heart, nor can she be torn from thence but with the strings that grapple it to life. This passion, however, divested as it now is of all shadow of hope, seems to lose its disquieting power. Far distant, and never more to behold or hear of her, I shall sojourn in the vale of men, sad and in loneliness, yet not unhappy. He cannot be long wretched who dares be actively virtuous. I am well assured that she loves me as a favourite brother. When she was present, she was to me only as a very dear sister; it was in absence that I felt those gnawings of suspense, and that dreaminess of mind, which evidence an affection more restless, yet scarcely less pure than the fraternal. The struggle has been well nigh too much for me; but, praised be the All-Merciful! the feebleness of exhausted feelings has produced a calm, and my heart stagnates into peace.

Southey! my ideal standard of female excellence rises not above that woman. But all things work together for good. Had I been united to her, the excess of my affection would have effeminated my intellect. I should have fed on her looks as she entered into the room, I should have gazed on her footsteps when she went out from me.

To lose her! I can rise above that selfish pang. But to marry another. O Southey! bear with my weakness. Love makes all things pure and heavenly like itself,—but to marry a woman whom I do not love, to degrade her whom I call my wife by making her the instrument of low desire, and on the removal of a desultory appetite to be perhaps not displeased with her absence! Enough! These refinements are the wildering fires that lead me into vice. Mark you, Southey! I will do my duty.

I have this moment received your letter. My friend, you want but one quality of mind to be a perfect character. Your sensibilities are tempestuous; you feel indignation at weakness. Now Indignation is the handsome brother of Anger and Hatred. His looks are “lovely in terror,” yet still remember who are his relations. I would ardently that you were a necessitarian, and (believing in an all-loving Omnipotence) an optimist. That puny imp of darkness yclept scepticism, how could it dare to approach the hallowed fires that burn so brightly on the altar of your heart?

Think you I wish to stay in town? I am all eagerness to leave it; and am resolved, whatever be the consequence, to be at Bath by Saturday. I thought of walking down.

I have written to Bristol and said I could not assign a particular time for my leaving town. I spoke indefinitely that I might not disappoint.

I am not, I presume, to attribute some verses addressed to S. T. C., in the “Morning Chronicle,” to you. To whom? My dear Allen! wherein has he offended? He did never promise to form one of our party. But of all this when we meet. Would a pistol preserve integrity? So concentrate guilt? no very philosophical mode of preventing it. I will write of indifferent subjects. Your sonnet,[96] “Hold your mad hands!” is a noble burst of poetry; and—but my mind is weakened and I turn with selfishness of thought to those wilder songs that develop my lonely feelings. Sonnets are scarcely fit for the hard gaze of the public. I read, with heart and taste equally delighted, your prefatory sonnet.[97] I transcribe it, not so much to give you my corrections, as for the pleasure it gives me.