His sketch is very beautiful, and has more expression than I ever found in his former productions—excepting, indeed, his Imogen.

Allston is hard at work on a large Scripture piece—the dead man recalled to life by touching the bones of the Prophet. He models every figure. Dawe, who was delighted with the Cupid and Psyche, seemed quite astonished at the facility and exquisiteness with which Allston modelled. Canova at Rome expressed himself to me in very warm terms of admiration on the same subject. He means to exhibit but two or at the most three pictures, all poetical or history painting, in part by my advice. It seemed to me impolitic to appear to be trying in half a dozen ways, as if his mind had not yet discovered its main current. The longer I live the more deeply am I convinced of the high importance, as a symptom, of the love of beauty in a young painter. It is neither honourable to a young man’s heart or head to attach himself year after year to old or deformed objects, comparatively too so easy, especially if bad drawing and worse colouring leaves the spectator’s imagination at lawless liberty, and he cries out, “How very like!” just as he would at a coal in the centre of the fire, or at a frost-figure on a window pane. It is on this, added to his quiet unenvious spirit, to his lofty feelings concerning his art, and to the religious purity of his moral character, that I chiefly rest my hopes of Allston’s future fame. His best productions seem to please him principally because he sees and has learnt something which enables him to promise himself, “I shall do better in my next.”

I have not been at the “Courier” office for some months past. I detest writing politics, even on the right side, and when I discovered that the “Courier” was not the independent paper I had been led to believe, and had myself over and over again asserted, I wrote no more for it. Greatly, indeed, do I prefer the present Ministers to the leaders of any other party, but indiscriminate support of any class of men I dare not give, especially when there is so easy and honourable an alternative as not to write politics at all, which, henceforth, nothing but blank necessity shall compel me to do. I will write for the Permanent, or not at all. “The Comet” therefore I have never seen or heard of it, yet most true it is that I myself have composed some verses on the comet, but I am quite certain that no one ever saw them, for the best of all reasons, that my own brain is the only substance on which they have been recorded. I will, however, consign them to paper, and send them to you with the “Courier” poem as soon as I can procure it, for the curiosity of the thing....

My most affectionate respects to Lady Beaumont, and believe me, dear Sir George, with heartfelt regard,

Your obliged and grateful friend,
S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. Were you in town, I should be very sorry, indeed, to see you in Fetter Lane.[77] The lectures were meant for the young men of the City. Several of my friends join to take notes, and if I can correct what they can shape out of them into any tolerable form, I will send them to you. On Monday I lecture on “Love and the Female Character as displayed by Shakespeare.” Good Dr. Bell is in town. He came from Keswick, all delight with my little Sara, and quite enchanted with Southey. Some flights of admiration in the form of questions to me (“Did you ever see anything so finely conceived? so profoundly thought? as this passage in his review on the Methodists? or on the Education?” etc.) embarrassed me in a very ridiculous way; and, I verily believe, that my odd way of hesitating left on Bell’s mind some shade of a suspicion, as if I did not like to hear my friend so highly extolled. Half a dozen words from Southey would have precluded this, without diminution to his own fame—I mean, in conversation with Dr. Bell.

CLXXXIV. TO J. J. MORGAN.

Keswick,[78] Sunday, February 28, 1812.

My dear Morgan,—I stayed a day in Kendal in order to collect the reprint of “The Friend,” and reached Keswick on Tuesday last before dinner, having taken Hartley and Derwent with me from Ambleside. Of course the first evening was devoted Laribus domesticis, to Southey and his and my children. My own are all the fondest father could pray for; and little Sara does honour to her mother’s anxieties, reads French tolerably, and Italian fluently, and I was astonished at her acquaintance with her native language. The word “hostile” occurring in what she read to me, I asked her what “hostile” meant? and she answered at once, “Why! inimical; only that ‘inimical’ is more often used for things and measures and not, as ‘hostile’ is, to persons and nations.” If I had dared, I should have urged Mrs. C. to let me take her to London for four or five months, and return with Southey, but I feared it might be inconvenient to you, and I knew it would be presumptuous in me to bring her to you. But she is such a sweet-tempered, meek, blue-eyed fairy and so affectionate, trustworthy, and really serviceable! Derwent is the self-same, fond, small, Samuel Taylor Coleridge as ever. When I went for them from Mr. Dawes,[79] he came in dancing for joy, while Hartley turned pale[80] and trembled all over,—then after he had taken some cold water, instantly asked me some questions about the connection of the Greek with the Latin, which latter he has just begun to learn. Poor Derwent, who has by no means strong health (having inherited his poor father’s tenderness of bowels and stomach, and consequently capriciousness of animal spirits), has complained to me (having no other possible grievance) “that Mr. Dawes does not love him, because he can’t help crying when he is scolded, and because he ain’t such a genius as Hartley—and that though Hartley should have done the same thing, yet all the others are punished, and Mr. Dawes only looks at Hartley and never scolds him, and that all the boys think it very unfair—he is a genius.” This was uttered in low spirits and a tenderness brought on by my petting, for he adores his brother. Indeed, God be praised, they all love each other. I was delighted that Derwent, of his own accord, asked me about little Miss Brent that used to play with him at Mr. and Mrs. Morgan’s, adding that he had almost forgot what sort of a lady she was, “only she was littler,—less I mean—(this was said hastily and laughing at his blunder) than Mama.” A gentleman who took a third of the chaise with me from Ambleside, and whom I found a well-informed and thinking man, said after two hours’ knowledge of us, that the two boys united would be a perfect representation of myself.

I trust I need not say that I should have written on the second day if nothing had happened; but from the dreadful dampness of the house, worse than it was in the rudest state when I first lived in it, and the weather, too, all storm and rain, I caught a violent cold which almost blinded me by inflammation of both my eyes, and for three days bore all the symptoms of an ague or intermittent fever. Knowing I had no time to lose, I took the most Herculean remedies, among others a solution of arsenic, and am now as well as when I left you, and see no reason to fear a relapse. I passed through Grasmere; but did not call on Wordsworth. I hear from Mrs. C. that he treats the affair as a trifle, and only wonders at my resenting it, and that Dorothy Wordsworth before my arrival expressed her confident hope that I should come to them at once! I who “for years past had been an ABSOLUTE NUISANCE in the family.” This illness has thrown me behindhand; so that I cannot quit Keswick till the end of the week. On Friday I shall return by way of Ambleside, probably spend a day with Charles Lloyd.... It will not surprise you that the statements respecting me and Montagu and Wordsworth have been grossly perverted: and yet, spite of all this, there is not a friend of Wordsworth’s, I understand, who does not severely blame him, though they execrate the Montagus yet more heavily. But the tenth part of the truth is not known. Would you believe it possible that Wordsworth himself stated my wearing powder as a proof positive that I never could have suffered any pain of mind from the affair, and that it was all pretence!! God forgive him! At Liverpool I shall either give lectures, if I can secure a hundred pounds for them, or return immediately to you. At all events, I shall not remain there beyond a fortnight, so that I shall be with you before you have changed houses. Mrs. Coleridge seems quite satisfied with my plans, and abundantly convinced of my obligations to your and Mary’s kindness to me. Nothing (she said) but the circumstance of my residing with you could reconcile her to my living in London. Southey is the semper idem. It is impossible for a good heart not to esteem and to love him; but yet the love is one fourth, the esteem all the remainder. His children are, 1. Edith, seven years; 2. Herbert, five; 3. Bertha, four; 4. Catharine, a year and a half.

I had hoped to have heard from you by this time. I wrote from Slough, from Liverpool, and from Kendal. Why need I send my kindest love to Mary and Charlotte? I would not return if I had a doubt that they believed me to be in the very inmost of my being their and your affectionate and grateful and constant friend,

S. T. Coleridge.

CLXXXV. TO HIS WIFE.

71, Berners Street, Tuesday, April 21, 1812.

My dear Love,—Everything is going on so very well, so much beyond my expectation, that I will not revert to anything unpleasant to damp good news with. The last receipt for the insurance is now before me, the date the 4th of May. Be assured that before April is past, you shall receive both receipts, this and the one for the present year, in a frank.

In the first place, my health, spirits, and disposition to activity have continued such since my arrival in town, that every one has been struck with the change, and the Morgans say they had never before seen me myself. I feel myself an altered man, and dare promise you that you shall never have to complain of, or to apprehend, my not opening and reading your letters. Ever since I have been in town, I have never taken any stimulus of any kind, till the moment of my getting into bed, except a glass of British white wine after dinner, and from three to four glasses of port, when I have dined out. Secondly, my lectures have been taken up most warmly and zealously by Sir Thomas Bernard,[81] Sir George Beaumont, Mr. Sotheby, etc., and in a few days, I trust that you will be agreeably surprised with the mode in which Sir T. B. hopes and will use his best exertions to have them announced. Thirdly, Gale and Curtis are in high spirits and confident respecting the sale of “The Friend,”[82] and the call for a second edition, after the complemental numbers have been printed, and not less so respecting the success of the other work, the Propædia (or Propaideia) Cyclica, and are desirous to have the terms properly ratified, and signed as soon as possible. Nothing intervenes to overgloom my mind, but the sad state of health of Mr. Morgan, a more faithful and zealous friend than whom no man ever possessed. Thank God! my safe arrival, the improvement of my health and spirits, and my smiling prospects have already exerted a favourable influence on him. Yet I dare not disguise from myself that there is cause for alarm to those who love and value him. But do not allude to this subject in your letters, for to be thought ill or to have his state of health spoken of, agitates and depresses him.

As soon as ever I have settled the lecture room, which perhaps will be Willis’s in Hanover Square, the price of which is at present ten guineas a time, I will the very first thing pay the insurance and send off a parcel of books for Hartley, Derwent, and dear Sara, whom I kissed seven times in the shape of her pretty letterlet.

My poor darling Derwent! I shall be most anxious to receive a letter from you, or from himself, about him.

In giving my love to Mrs. Lovell, tell her that I have not since the day after my arrival been able to go into the city, my business having employed me wholly either in writing or in traversing the West End of the town. I dined with Lady Beaumont and her sister on Saturday, for Sir George was engaged to Sir T. Bernard. He however came and sat with us to the very last moment, and I dine with him to-day, and Allston is to be of the party. The bust and the picture from Genevieve are at the Royal Academy, and already are talked of. Dawe and I will be of mutual service to each other. As soon as the pictures are settled, that is, in the first week of May, he means to treat himself with a fortnight’s relaxation at the Lakes. He is a very modest man, his manners not over polished, and his worst point is that he is (at least, I have found him so) a fearful questionist, whenever he thinks he can pick up any information, or ideas, poetical, historical, topographical, or artistical, that he can make bear on his profession. But he is sincere, friendly, strictly moral in every respect, I firmly believe even to innocence, and in point of cheerful indefatigableness of industry, in regularity, and temperance—in short, in a glad, yet quiet, devotion of his whole being to the art he has made choice of, he is the only man I ever knew who goes near to rival Southey—gentlemanly address, person, physiognomy, knowledge, learning, and genius being of course wholly excluded from the comparison. God knows my heart! and that it is my full belief and conviction, that taking all together, there does not exist the man who could without flattery or delusion be called Southey’s equal. It is quite delightful to hear how he is spoken of by all good people. Dawe will doubtless take him. Were S. and I rich men, we would have ourselves and all of you, short and tall, in one family picture. Pray receive Dawe as a friend. I called on Murray, who complained that by Dr. Bell’s delays and irresolutions and scruples, the book “On the Origin,”[83] etc., instead of 3,000 in three weeks, which he has no doubt would have been the sale had it been brought out at the fit time, will not now sell 300. I told him that I believed otherwise, but much would depend on the circumstance whether temper or prudence would have most influence on the Athenian critic and his friend Brougham. If, as I hoped, the former, and the work should be reviewed in the “Edinburgh Review,” if they took up the gauntlet thrown at them, then there was no doubt but that a strong tide of sale would set in. Though verily this gauntlet was of weighty metal, though of polished steel, and being thrown at rather than down, it was challenging a man to fight by a blow that threatened to brain him. I have seen Dr. Bell and shall dine with him at Sir T. Bernard’s on Monday next. The venerable Bishop of Durham[84] has sent me a very kind message, that though he cannot himself appear in a hired lecture room, yet he will be not only my subscriber but use his best influence with his acquaintance. I am very anxious that my books should be sent forward as soon as possible. They may be sent at three different times, with a week’s intervention. But there is one, scarcely a book, but a collection of loose sheets tied up together at Grasmere, which I want immediately, and, if possible, would have sent up by the coach from Kendal or Penrith. It is a German Romance with some name beginning with an A, followed by “oder Die Glückliche Inseln.” It makes two volumes, but several of the sheets are missing, at least were so when I put them together. If sent off immediately, it would be of serious benefit to me in my lectures. Miss Hutchinson knows them, and will probably recollect the sheets I allude to, and these are what I especially want.

One pair only of breeches were in the parcel, and I am sadly off for stockings, but the white and under ones I can buy here cheap, but if young Mr. White could procure half a dozen or even a dozen pair of black silk made as stout and weighty as possible, I would not mind giving seventeen shillings per pair, if only they can be relied on, which one cannot do in London. A double knock. I meant to read over your letter again, lest I should have forgot anything. If I have, I will answer it in my next.

God bless you and your affectionate husband,

S. T. Coleridge.

Has Southey read “Childe Harold”? All the world is talking of it. I have not, but from what I hear it is exactly on the plan that I myself had not only conceived six years ago, but have the whole scheme drawn out in one of my old memorandum books. My dear Edith, and my dear Moon![85] Though I have scarce room to write it, yet I love you very much.

CLXXXVI. TO THE SAME.

71, Berners Street, April 24, 1812.

My dear Sara,—Give my kind love to Southey, and inform him that I have, egomet his ipsis meis oculis, seen Nobs, alive, well, and in full fleece; that after the death of Dr. Samuel Dove,[86] of Doncaster, who did not survive the loss of his faithful wife, Mrs. Dorothy Dove, more than eleven months, Nobs was disposed of by his executors to Longman and Clements, Musical Instrument Manufacturers, whose grand pianoforte hearses he now draws in the streets of London. The carter was astonished at the enthusiasm with which I intreated him to stop for half a minute, and the embrace I gave to Nobs, who evidently understood me, and wistfully with such a sad expression in his eye, seemed to say, “Ah, my kind old master, Doctor Daniel, and ah! my mild mistress, his dear duteous Dolly Dove, my gratitude lies deeper than my obligation; it is not merely skin-deep! Ah, what I have been! Oh, what I am! his naked, neighing, night-wandering, new-skinned, nibbling, noblenursling, Nobs!”

His legs and hoofs are more than half sheepified, and his fleece richer than one ever sees in the Leicester breed, but not so fine as might have been the case had the merino cross been introduced before the surprising accident and more surprising remedy took place. More surprising I say, because the first happened to St. Bartholomew (for there were skinners even in the days of St. Bartholomew), but the other never before there was no Dr. Daniel Dove. I trust that Southey will now not hesitate to record and transmit to posterity so remarkable a fact. I am delighted, for now malice itself will not dare to attribute the story to my invention. If I can procure the money, I will attempt to purchase Nobs, and send him down to Keswick by short journeys for Herbert and Derwent to ride upon, provided you can get the field next us.

I have not been able to procure a frank, but I daresay you will be glad to receive the enclosed receipt even with the drawback of postage.

Everything, my dear, goes on as prosperously as you could yourself wish. Sir T. Bernard has taken Willis’s Rooms, King Street, St. James’s, for me, at only four guineas a week, fires, benches, etc., included, and I expect the lectures to commence on the first Tuesday in May. But at the present moment I need both the advice and the aid of Southey. The “Friends” have arrived in town. I am at work on the Supplemental Numbers, and it is of the last importance that they should be brought out as quickly as possible during the flush and fresh breeze of my popularity; but this I cannot do without knowing whether Mr. Wordsworth will transmit to me the two finishing Essays on Epitaphs.[87] It is, I know and feel, a very delicate business; yet I wish Southey would immediately write to Wordsworth and urge him to send them by the coach, either to J. J. Morgan, Esq., 71, Berners Street, or to Messrs. Gale and Curtis, Booksellers, Paternoster Row, with as little delay as possible, or if he decline it, that Southey should apprize me as soon as possible.

S. T. Coleridge.

The Morgans desire to be kindly remembered, and Charlotte Brent (tell Derwent) hopes he has not forgot his old playfellow.

CLXXXVII. TO CHARLES LAMB.

May 2, 1812.

My dear Charles,—I should almost deserve what I have suffered, if I refused even to put my life in hazard in defence of my own honour and veracity, and in satisfaction of the honour of a friend. I say honour, in the latter instance, singly, because I never felt as a matter of serious complaint, what was stated to have been said (for this, though painfully aggravated, was yet substantially true)—but by WHOM it was said, and to whom, and how and when. Grievously unseasonable therefore as it is, that I should again be overtaken and hurried back by the surge, just as I had begun to feel the firm ground under my feet—just as I had flattered myself, and given reason to my hospitable friends to flatter themselves, that I had regained tranquillity, and had become quite myself—at the time, too, when every thought should be given to my lectures, on the success or failure of my efforts in which no small part of my reputation and future prospects will depend—yet if Wordsworth, upon reflection, adheres to the plan proposed, I will not draw back. It is right, however, that I should state one or two things. First, that it has been my constant desire that evil should not propagate evil—or the unhappy accident become the means of spreading dissension. (2) That I never quarrelled with Mr. Montagu—say rather, for that is the real truth, that Mr. Montagu never was, or appeared to be, a man with whom I could, without self-contempt, allow myself to quarrel—and lastly, that in the present business there are but three possible cases—either (1) Mr. Wordsworth said what I solemnly aver that I most distinctly recollect Mr. Montagu’s representing him as having said, and which I understood, not merely as great unkindness and even cruelty, but as an intentional means of putting an end to our long friendship, or to the terms at least, under which it had for so long a period subsisted—or (2), Mr. Montagu has grossly misrepresented Wordsworth, and most cruelly and wantonly injured me—or (3), I have wantonly invented and deliberately persevered in atrocious falsehoods, which place me in the same relation to Mr. Montagu as (in the second case) Mr. Montagu would stand in to me. If, therefore, Mr. Montagu declares to my face that he did not say what I solemnly aver that he did—what must be the consequence, unless I am a more abject coward than I have hitherto suspected, I need not say. Be the consequences what they may, however, I will not shrink from doing my duty; but previously to the meeting I should very much wish to transmit to Wordsworth a statement which I long ago began, with the intention of sending it to Mrs. Wordsworth’s sister,—but desisted in consequence of understanding that she had already decided the matter against me. My reason for wishing this is that I think it right that Wordsworth should know, and have the means of ascertaining, some conversations which yet I could not publicly bring forward without hazarding great disquiet in a family known (though slightly) to Wordsworth—(2) Because common humanity would embarrass me in stating before a man what I and others think of his wife—and lastly, certain other points which my own delicacy and that due to Wordsworth himself and his family, preclude from being talked of. For Wordsworth ought not to forget that, whatever influence old associations may have on his mind respecting Montagu, yet that I never respected or liked him—for if I had ever in a common degree done so, I should have quarrelled with him long before we arrived in London. Yet all these facts ought to be known—because supposing Montagu to affirm what I am led to suppose he has—then nothing remains but the comparative probability of our two accounts, and for this the state of my feelings towards Wordsworth and his family, my opinion of Mr. and Mrs. Montagu, and my previous intention not to lodge with them in town, are important documents as far as they do not rely on my own present assertions. Woe is me, that a friendship of fifteen years should come to this! and such a friendship, in which I call God Almighty to be my witness, as I ever thought it no more than my duty, so did I ever feel a readiness to prefer him to myself, yea, even if life and outward reputation itself had been the pledge required. But this is now vain talking. Be it, however, remembered that I have never wandered beyond the one single complaint, that I had been cruelly and unkindly treated—that I made no charge against my friend’s veracity, even in respect to his charges against me—that I have explained the circumstance to those only who had already more or less perfectly become acquainted with our difference, or were certain to hear of it from others, and that except on this one point, no word of reproach, or even of subtraction from his good name, as a good man, or from his merits as a great man, ever escaped me. May God bless you, my dear Charles.

S. T. Coleridge.

CLXXXVIII. TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

71, Berners Street. Monday, May 4, 1812.

I will divide my statement, which I will endeavour to send you to-morrow, into two parts, in separate letters. The latter, commencing from the Sunday night, 28 October, 1810, that is, that on which the communication was made to me, and which will contain my solemn avowal of what was said by Mr. and Mrs. Montagu, you will make what use of you please—but the former I write to you, and in confidence—yet only as far as to your own heart it shall appear evident, that in desiring it I am actuated by no wish to shrink personally from any test, not involving an acknowledgement of my own degradation, and so become a false witness against myself, but only by delicacy towards the feelings of others, and the dread of spreading the curse of dissension. But, Wordsworth! the very message you sent by Lamb and which Lamb did not deliver to me from the anxiety not to add fuel to the flame, sufficiently proves what I had learnt on my first arrival at Keswick, and which alone prevented my going to Grasmere—namely, that you had prejudged the case. As soon as I was informed that you had denied having used certain expressions, I did not hesitate a moment (nor was it in my power to do so) to give you my fullest faith, and approve to my own consciousness the truth of my declaration, that I should have felt it as a blessing, though my life had the same instant been hazarded as the pledge, could I with firm conviction have given Montagu the lie, at the conclusion of his story, even as, at the very first sentence, I exclaimed—“Impossible! It is impossible!” The expressions denied were indeed only the most offensive part to the feelings—but at the same time I learnt that you did not hesitate instantly to express your conviction that Montagu never said those words and that I had invented them—or (to use your own words) “had forgotten myself.” Grievously indeed, if I know aught of my nature, must I have forgotten both myself and common honesty, could I have been villain enough to have invented and persevered in such atrocious falsehoods. Your message was that “if I declined an explanation, you begged I would no longer continue to talk about the affair.” When, Wordsworth, did I ever decline an explanation? From you I expected one, and had a right to expect it—for let Montagu have added what he may, still that which remained was most unkind and what I had little deserved from you, who might by a single question have learnt from me that I never made up my mind to lodge with Montagu and had tacitly acquiesced in it at Keswick to tranquillise Mrs. Coleridge, to whom Mrs. Montagu had made the earnest professions of watching and nursing me, and for whom this and her extreme repugnance to my original, and much wiser, resolution of going to Edinburgh and placing myself in the house, and under the constant eye, of some medical man, were the sole grounds of her assent that I should leave the North at all. Yet at least a score of times have I begun to write a detailed account, to Wales[88] and afterwards to Grasmere, and gave it up from excess of agitation,—till finally I learnt that all of your family had decided against me unheard—and that [you begged] I would no longer talk about it. If, Wordsworth, you had but done me the common justice of asking those with whom I have been most intimate and confidential since my first arrival in Town in Oct., 1810, you would have received other negative or positive proofs how little I needed the admonition or deserve the sarcasm. Talk about it? O God! it has been talked about! and that it had, was the sole occasion of my disclosing it even to Mary Lamb, the first person who heard of it from me and that not voluntarily—but that morning a friend met me, and communicated what so agitated me that then having previously meant to call at Lamb’s I was compelled to do so from faintness and universal trembling, in order to sit down. Even to her I did not intend to mention it; but alarmed by the wildness and paleness of my countenance and agitation I had no power to conceal, she entreated me to tell her what was the matter. In the first attempt to speak, my feelings overpowered me; an agony of weeping followed, and then, alarmed at my own imprudence and conscious of the possible effect on her health and mind if I left her in that state of suspense, I brought out convulsively some such words as—“Wordsworth, Wordsworth has given me up. He has no hope of me—I have been an absolute nuisance[89] in his family”—and when long weeping had relieved me, and I was able to relate the occurrence connectedly, she can bear witness for me that, disgraceful as it was that I should be made the topic of vulgar gossip, yet that “had the whole and ten times more been proclaimed by a speaking-trumpet from the chimneys, I should have smiled at it—or indulged indignation only as far as it excited me to pleasurable activity—but that you had said it, this and this only, was the sting! the scorpion-tooth!” Mr. Morgan and afterwards his wife and her sister were made acquainted with the whole case—and why? Not merely that I owed it to their ardent friendship, which has continued to be mainly my comfort and my only support, but because they had already heard of it, in part—because a most intimate and dear friend of Mr. and Mrs. Montagu’s had urged Mr. Morgan to call at the Montagus in order to be put on his guard against me. He came to me instantly, told me that I had enemies at work against my character, and pressed me to leave the hotel and to come home with him—with whom I have been ever since, with the exception of a few intervals when, from the bitter consciousness of my own infirmities and increasing irregularity of temper, I took lodgings, against his will, and was always by his zealous friendship brought back again. If it be allowed to call any one on earth Saviour, Morgan and his family have been my Saviours, body and soul. For my moral will was, and I fear is, so weakened relatively to my duties to myself, that I cannot act, as I ought to do, except under the influencing knowledge of its effects on those I love and believe myself loved by. To him likewise I explained the affair; but neither from him or his family has one word ever escaped me concerning it. Last autumn Mr. and Mrs. Southey came to town, and at Mr. Ray’s at Richmond, as we were walking alone in the garden, the subject was introduced, and it became my duty to state the whole affair to them, even as the means of transmitting it to you. With these exceptions I do not remember ever to have made any one my confidant—though in two or three instances I have alluded to the suspension of our familiar intercourse without explanation, but even here only where I knew or fully believed the persons to have already heard of it. Such was Mrs. Clarkson, who wrote to me in consequence of one sentence in a letter to her; yet even to her I entered into no detail, and disclosed nothing that was not necessary to my own defence in not continuing my former correspondence. In short, the one only thing which I have to blame in myself was that in my first letter to Sir G. Beaumont I had concluded with a desponding remark allusive to the breach between us, not in the slightest degree suspecting that he was ignorant of it. In the letters, which followed, I was compelled to say more (though I never detailed the words which had been uttered to me) in consequence of Lady Beaumont’s expressed apprehension and alarm lest in the advertisement for my lectures the sentence “concerning the Living Poets” contained an intention on my part to attack your literary merits. The very thought, that I could be imagined capable of feeling vindictively toward you at all, much more of gratifying the passion in so despicable as well as detestable manner, agitated me. I sent her Ladyship the verses composed after your recitation of the great Poem at Coleorton, and desired her to judge whether it was possible that a man, who had written that poem, could be capable of such an act, and in a letter to Sir G. B., anxious to remove from his mind the assumption that I had been agitated by the disclosure of any till then unknown actions of mine or parts of conduct, I endeavoured to impress him with the real truth that not the facts disclosed, but the manner and time and the person by whom and the person to whom they had been disclosed, formed the whole ground of the breach. And writing in great agitation I once again used the same words which had venially burst from me the moment Montagu had ended his account. “And this is cruel! this is base!” I did not reflect on it till it was irrevocable—and for that one word, the only word of positive reproach that ever escaped from me, I feel sorrow—and assure you, that there is no permanent feeling in my heart which corresponds to it. Talk about it? Those who have seen me and been with me, day by day, for so many many months could have told you, how anxiously every allusion to the subject was avoided—and with abundant reason—for immediate and palpable derangement of body as well as spirits regularly followed it. Besides, had there not existed in your mind—let me rather say, if ever there had existed any portion of esteem and regard for me since the autumn of 1810, would it have been possible that your quick and powerful judgement could have overlooked the gross improbability, that I should first invent and then scatter abroad for talk at public tables the phrases which (Mr. Robinson yesterday informed me) Mr. Sharon Turner was indelicate enough to trumpet abroad at Longman’s table? I at least will call on Mr. Sharon and demand his authority. It is my full conviction, that in no one of the hundred tables at which any particulars of our breach have been mentioned, could the authority be traced back to those who had received the account from myself.

It seemed unnatural to me, nay, it was unnatural to me to write to you or to any of your family with a cold exclusion of the feelings which almost overpower me even at this moment, and I therefore write this preparatory letter to disburthen my heart, as it were, before I sit down to detail my recollections simply, and unmixed with the anguish which, spite of my best efforts, accompany them.

But one thing more, the last complaint that you will hear from me, perhaps. When without my knowledge dear Mary Lamb, just then on the very verge of a relapse, wrote to Grasmere, was it kind or even humane to have returned such an answer, as Lamb deemed it unadvisable to shew me; but which I learnt from the only other person, who saw the answer, amounted in substance to a sneer on my reported high spirits and my wearing powder? When and to whom did I ever make a merit of my sufferings? Is it consistent now to charge me with going about complaining to everybody, and now with my high spirits? Was I to carry a gloomy face into every society? or ought I not rather to be grateful that in the natural activity of my intellect God had given me a counteracting principle to the intensity of my feelings, and a means of escaping from a part of the pressure? But for this I had been driven mad, and yet for how many months was there a continual brooding and going on of the one gnawing recollection behind the curtain of my outward being, even when I was most exerting myself, and exerting myself more in order the more to benumb it! I might have truly said with Desdemona:—

And as to the powder, it was first put in to prevent my taking cold after my hair had been thinned, and I was advised to continue it till I became wholly grey, as in its then state it looked as if I had dirty powder in my hair, and even when known to be only the everywhere-mixed-grey, yet contrasting with a face even younger than my real age it gave a queer and contradictory character to my whole appearance. Whatever be the result of this long-delayed explanation, I have loved you and yours too long and too deeply to have it in my own power to cease to do so.

S. T. Coleridge.

CLXXXIX. TO DANIEL STUART.

May 8, 1812.

My dear Stuart,—I send you seven or eight tickets,[90] entreating you, if pre-engagements or your health does not preclude it, to bring a group with you; as many ladies as possible; but gentlemen if you cannot muster ladies—for else I shall not only have been left in the lurch as to the actual receipts by my great patrons (the five hundred half-promised are likely to shrink below fifty) but shall absolutely make a ridiculous appearance. The tickets are transferable. If you can find occasion for more, pray send for them to me, as (what it really will be) a favour done to myself.

I am anxious to see you, and to learn how far Bath has improved or (to use a fashionable slang phrase) disimproved your health.

Sir James and Lady Mackintosh are I hear at Bath Hotel, Jermyn Street. Do you think it will be taken amiss if I enclosed two or three tickets and cards with my respectful congratulations on his safe return.[91] I abhor the doing anything that could be even interpreted into servility, and yet feel increasingly the necessity of not neglecting the courtesies of life....

God bless you, my dear sir, and your obliged and affectionate friend,

S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. Mr. Morgan has left his card for you.

CXC. TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

71, Berners Street,
Monday afternoon, 3 o’clock, May 11, 1812.

My dear Wordsworth,—I declare before God Almighty that at no time, even in my sorest affliction, did even the possibility occur to me of ever doubting your word. I never ceased for a moment to have faith in you, to love and revere you; though I was unable to explain an unkindness, which seemed anomalous in your character. Doubtless it would have been better, wiser, and more worthy of my relation to you, had I immediately written to you a full account of what had happened—especially as the person’s language concerning your family was such as nothing but the wild general counter-panegyric of the same person almost in the same breath of yourself—as a converser, etc.,—could have justified me in not resenting to the uttermost....[92] All these, added to what I mentioned in my letter to you, may not justify, but yet must palliate, the only offence I ever committed against you in deed or word or thought—that is, the not writing to you and trusting instead to our common friends. Since I left you my pocket books have been my only full confidants,[93]—and though instructed by prudence to write so as to be intelligible to no being on earth but yourself and your family, they for eighteen months together would furnish proof that in anguish or induration I yet never ceased both to honour and love you.

S. T. Coleridge.

I need not say, of course, that your presence at the Lectures, or anywhere else, will be gratifying to me.

CXCI. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

[May 12, 1812.]

My dear Southey,—The awful event of yester-afternoon has forced me to defer my Lectures to Tuesday, the 19th, by advice of all my patrons. The same thought struck us all at the same moment, so that our letters might be said to meet each other. I write now to urge you, if it be in your power, to give one day or two of your time to write something in your impressive way on that theme which no one I meet seems to feel as they ought to do,—which, I find scarcely any but ourselves estimate according to its true gigantic magnitude—I mean the sinking down of Jacobinism below the middle and tolerably educated classes into the readers and all-swallowing auditors in tap-rooms, etc.; and the [political sentiments in the] “Statesman,” “Examiner,” etc. I have ascertained that throughout the great manufacturing counties, Whitbread’s, Burdett’s, and Waithman’s speeches and the leading articles of the “Statesman” and “Examiner” are printed in ballad [shape] and sold at a halfpenny or a penny each. I was turned numb, and then sick, and then into a convulsive state of weeping on the first tidings—just as if Perceval[94] had been my near and personal friend. But good God! the atrocious sentiments universal among the populace, and even the lower order of householders. On my return from the “Courier,” where I had been to offer my services if I could do anything for them on this occasion, I was faint from the heat and much walking, and took that opportunity of going into the tap-room of a large public house frequented about one o’clock by the lower orders. It was really shocking, nothing but exultation! Burdett’s health drank with a clatter of pots and a sentiment given to at least fifty men and women—“May Burdett soon be the man to have sway over us!” These were the very words. “This is but the beginning.” “More of these damned scoundrels must go the same way, and then poor people may live.” “Every man might maintain his family decent and comfortable, if the money were not picked out of our pockets by these damned placemen.” “God is above the devil, I say, and down to Hell with him and all his brood, the Ministers, men of Parliament fellows.” “They won’t hear Burdett; no! he is a Christian man and speaks for the poor,” etc., etc. I do not think I have altered a word.

My love to Sara, and I have received everything right. The plate will go as desired, and among it a present to Sariola and Edith from good old Mr. Brent, who had great delight in hearing them talked of. It was wholly the old gentleman’s own thought. Bless them both!

The affair between Wordsworth and me seems settled, much against my first expectation from the message I received from him and his refusal to open a letter from me. I have not yet seen him, but an explanation has taken place. I sent by Robinson an attested, avowed statement of what Mr. and Mrs. Montagu told me, and Wordsworth has sent me an unequivocal denial of the whole in spirit and of the most offensive passages in letter as well as spirit, and I instantly informed him that were ten thousand Montagus to swear against it, I should take his word, not ostensibly only, but with inward faith!

To-morrow I will write out the passage from “Apuleius,” and send the letter to Rickman. It is seldom that want of leisure can be fairly stated as an excuse for not writing; but really for the last ten days I can honestly do it, if you will but allow a due portion to agitated feelings. The subscription is languid indeed compared with the expectations. Sir T. Bernard almost pledged himself for my success. However, he has done his best, and so has Lady Beaumont, who herself procured me near thirty names. I should have done better by myself for the present, but in the future perhaps it will be better as it is.

CXCII. TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.[95]

71, Berners Street,
Monday noon, December 7, 1812.

Write? My dear Friend! Oh that it were in my power to be with you myself instead of my letter. The Lectures I could give up; but the rehearsal of my Play commences this week, and upon this depends my best hopes of leaving town after Christmas, and living among you as long as I live. Strange, strange are the coincidences of things! Yesterday Martha Fricker dined here, and after tea I had asked question after question respecting your children, first one, then the other; but, more than all, concerning Thomas, till at length Mrs. Morgan said, “What ails you, Coleridge? Why don’t you talk about Hartley, Derwent, and Sara?” And not two hours ago (for the whole family were late from bed) I was asked what was the matter with my eyes? I told the fact, that I had awoke three times during the night and morning, and at each time found my face and part of the pillow wet with tears. “Were you dreaming of the Wordsworths?” she asked.—“Of the children?” I said, “No! not so much of them, but of Mrs. W. and Miss Hutchinson, and yourself and sister.”

Mrs. Morgan and her sister are come in, and I have been relieved by tears. The sharp, sharp pang at the heart needed it, when they reminded me of my words the very yester-night: “It is not possible that I should do otherwise than love Wordsworth’s children, all of them; but Tom is nearest my heart—I so often have him before my eyes, sitting on the little stool by my side, while I was writing my essays; and how quiet and happy the affectionate little fellow would be if he could but touch one, and now and then be looked at.”

O dearest friend! what comfort can I afford you? What comfort ought I not to afford, who have given you so much pain? Sympathy deep, of my whole being.... In grief, and in joy, in the anguish of perplexity, and in the fulness and overflow of confidence, it has been ever what it is! There is a sense of the word, Love, in which I never felt it but to you and one of your household! I am distant from you some hundred miles, but glad I am that I am no longer distant in spirit, and have faith, that as it has happened but once, so it never can happen again. An awful truth it seems to me, and prophetic of our future, as well as declarative of our present real nature, that one mere thought, one feeling of suspicion, jealousy, or resentment can remove two human beings farther from each other than winds or seas can separate their bodies.

The words “religious fortitude” occasion me to add that my faith in our progressive nature, and in all the doctrinal facts of Christianity, is become habitual in my understanding, no less than in my feelings. More cheering illustrations of our survival I have never received, than from the recent study of the instincts of animals, their clear heterogeneity from the reason and moral essence of man and yet the beautiful analogy. Especially, on the death of children, and of the mind in childhood, altogether, many thoughts have accumulated, from which I hope to derive consolation from that most oppressive feeling which hurries in upon the first anguish of such tidings as I have received; the sense of uncertainty, the fear of enjoyment, the pale and deathy gleam thrown over the countenances of the living, whom we love.... But this is bad comforting. Your own virtues, your own love itself, must give it. Mr. De Quincey has left town, and will by this time have arrived at Grasmere. On Sunday last I gave him a letter for you; but he (I have heard) did not leave town till Thursday night, by what accidents prevented I know not. In the oppression of spirits under which I wrote that letter, I did not make it clear that it was only Mr. Josiah’s half of the annuity[96] that was withdrawn from me. My answer, of course, breathed nothing but gratitude for the past.

I will write in a few days again to you. To-morrow is my lecture night, “On the human causes of the spread of Christianity, and its effects after the establishment of Christendom.” Dear Mary! dear Dorothy! dearest Sara! Oh, be assured, no thought relative to myself has half the influence in inspiring the wish and effort to appear and to act what I always in my will and heart have been, as the knowledge that few things could more console you than to see me healthy, and worthy of myself! Again and again, my dearest Wordsworth!!! I am affectionately and truly yours,

S. T. Coleridge.

CXCIII. TO HIS WIFE.

Wednesday afternoon [January 20,] 18[13].

My dear Sara,—Hitherto the “Remorse” has met with unexampled applause, but whether it will continue to fill the house, that is quite another question, and of this, my friends are, in my opinion, far, far too sanguine. I have disposed not of the copyright but of edition by edition to Mr. Pople, on terms advantageous to me as an author and honourable to him as a publisher. The expenses of printing and paper (at the trade-price) advertising, etc., are to be deducted from the total produce, and the net profits to be divided into three equal parts, of which Pople is to have one, and I the other two. And at any future time, I may publish it in any volume of my poems collectively. Mr. Arnold (the manager) has just left me. He called to urge me to exert myself a little with regard to the daily press, and brought with him “The Times”[97] of Monday as a specimen of the infernal lies of which a newspaper scribe can be capable. Not only is not one sentence in it true; but every one is in the direct face of a palpable truth. The misrepresentations must have been wilful. I must now, therefore, write to “The Times,” and if Walter refuses to insert, I will then, recording the circumstance, publish it in the “Morning Post,” “Morning Chronicle,” and “The Courier.” The dirty malice of Antony Pasquin[98] in the “Morning Herald” is below notice. This, however, will explain to you why the shortness of this letter, the main business of which is to desire you to draw upon Brent and Co., No. 103 Bishopsgate Street Within, for an hundred pounds, at a month’s date from the drawing, or, if that be objected to, for three weeks, only let me know which. In the course of a month I have no hesitation in promising you another hundred, and I hope likewise before Midsummer, if God grant me life, to repay you whatever you have expended for the children.

My wishes and purposes concerning Hartley and Derwent I will communicate as soon as this bustle and endless rat-a-tat-tat at our door is somewhat over. I concluded my Lectures last night most triumphantly, with loud, long, and enthusiastic applauses at my entrance, and ditto in yet fuller chorus as, and for some minutes after I had retired. It was lucky that (as I never once thought of the Lecture till I had entered the Lecture Box), the two last were the most impressive and really the best. I suppose that no dramatic author ever had so large a number of unsolicited, unknown yet predetermined plauditors in the theatre, as I had on Saturday night. One of the malignant papers asserted that I had collected all the saints from Mile End turnpike to Tyburn Bar. With so many warm friends, it is impossible, in the present state of human nature, that I should not have many unprovoked and unknown enemies. You will have heard that on my entering the box on Saturday night, I was discovered by the pit, and that they all turned their faces towards our box, and gave a treble cheer of claps.

I mention these things because it will please Southey to hear that there is a large number of persons in London who hail with enthusiasm my prospect of the stage’s being purified and rendered classical. My success, if I succeed (of which I assure you I entertain doubts in my opinion well founded, both from the want of a prominent actor for Ordonio, and from the want of vulgar pathos in the play itself—nay, there is not enough even of true dramatic pathos), but if I succeed, I succeed for others as well as myself....

S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. I pray you, my dear Sara! do take on yourself the charge of instantly sending off by the waggon Mr. Sotheby’s folio edition of all Petrarch’s Works, which I left at Grasmere. (I am ashamed to meet Sotheby till I have returned it.) At the same time my quarto MS. Book with the German Musical Play in it,[99] and the two folio volumes of the Greek Poets may go. For I want them hourly and I must try to imitate W. Scott in making hay while the sun shines.

Kisses and heartfelt loves for my sweet Sara, and scarce less for dear little Herbert and Edith.

CXCIV. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

71, Berners Street, Tuesday, February 8, 1813.

My dear Southey,—It is seldom that a man can with literal truth apologise for delay in writing; but for the last three weeks I have had more upon my hands and spirits than my health was equal to.

The first copy I can procure of the second edition (of the play) I will do my best to get franked to you. You will, I hope, think it much improved as a poem. Dr. Bell, who is all kindness and goodness, came to me in no small bustle this morning in consequence of “a censure passed on the ‘Remorse’ by a man of great talents, both in prose and verse, who was impartial, and thought highly of the work on the whole.” What was it, think you? There were many unequal lines in the Play, but which he did not choose to specify. Dr. Bell would not mention the critic’s name, but was very earnest with me to procure some indifferent person of good sense to read it over, by way of spectacles to an author’s own dim judgement. Soon after he left me I discovered that the critic was Gifford, who had said good-naturedly that I ought to be whipt for leaving so many weak and slovenly lines in so fine a poem. What the lines were he would not say and I do not care. Inequalities have every poem, even an Epic—much more a Dramatic Poem must have and ought to have. The question is, are they in their own place dissonances? If so I am the last man to stickle for them, who am nicknamed in the Green Room the “anomalous author,” from my utter indifference or prompt facility in sanctioning every omission that was suggested. That paragraph in the “Quarterly Review”[100] respecting me, as ridiculed in “Rejected Addresses,” was surely unworthy of a man of sense like Gifford. What reason could he have to suppose me a man so childishly irritable as to be provoked by a trifle so contemptible? If he had, how could he think it a parody at all? But the noise which the “Rejected Addresses” made, the notice taken of Smith the author by Lord Holland, Byron, etc., give a melancholy confirmation of my assertion in “The Friend” that “we worship the vilest reptile if only the brainless head be expiated by the sting of personal malignity in the tail.” I wish I could procure for you the “Examiner” and Drakard’s London Paper. They were forced to affect admiration of the Tragedy, but yet abuse me they must, and so comes the old infamous crambe bis millies cocta of the “sentimentalities, puerilities, whinings, and meannesses, both of style and thought,” in my former writings, but without (which is worth notice both in these gentlemen and in all our former Zoili), without one single quotation or reference in proof or exemplification. No wonder! for excepting the “Three Graves,” which was announced as not meant for poetry, and the poem on the Tethered Ass, with the motto Sermoni propriora,[101] and which, like your “Dancing Bear,” might be called a ludicro-splenetic copy of verses, with the diction purposely appropriate, they might (as at the first appearance of my poems they did) find, indeed, all the opposite vices. But if it had not been for the Preface to W.’s “Lyrical Ballads,” they would never themselves have dreamt of affected simplicity and meanness of thought and diction. This slang has gone on for fourteen or fifteen years against us, and really deserves to be exposed. As far as my judgement goes, the two best qualities of the tragedy are, first, the simplicity and unity of the plot, in respect of that which, of all the unities, is the only one founded on good sense—the presence of a one all-pervading, all-combining Principle. By Remorse I mean the anguish and disquietude arising from the self-contradiction introduced into the soul by guilt, a feeling which is good or bad according as the will makes use of it. This is expressed in the lines chosen as the motto:—