Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“ In a letter to Sir G. Beaumont, dated February 11, 1805, Wordsworth writes: “I can say nothing higher of my ever-dear brother than that he was worthy of his sister, who is now weeping beside me, and of the friendship of Coleridge; meek, affectionate, silently enthusiastic, loving all quiet things, and a poet in everything but words.” “We have had no tidings of Coleridge. I tremble for the moment when he is to hear of my brother’s death; it will distress him to the heart, and his poor body cannot bear sorrow. He loved my brother, and he knows how we at Grasmere loved him.” ”

“ The whole plan of my literary life I have now laid down, and the exact order in which I shall execute it, if God vouchsafe me life and adequate health; and I have sober though confident expectations that I shall render a good account of what may have appeared to you and others, a distracting manifoldness in my objects and attainments. You are nobly employed,—most worthily of you. You are made to endear yourself to mankind as an immediate benefactor: I must throw my bread on the waters. You sow corn and I plant the olive. Different evils beset us. ”

“ S. T. Coleridge.
CCXXXI. TO JAMES GILLMAN. October 28, 1822.
Dear Friend,—Words, I know, are not wanted between you and me. But there are occasions so awful, there may be instances and manifestations so affecting, and drawing up with them so long a train from behind, so many folds of recollection, as they come onward on one’s mind, that it seems but a mere act of justice to one’s self, a debt we owe to the dignity of our moral nature, to give them some record—a relief, which the spirit of man asks and demands to contemplate in some outward symbol of what it is inwardly solemnizing. ”

“ My heart aches so cruelly that I do not dare trust myself to the writing of any tenderness either to you, my dear, or to our dear children. Be assured, I feel with deep though sad affection toward you, and hold your character in general in more than mere esteem—in reverence.... I do not gather strength so fast as I had expected; but this I attribute to my very great anxiety. I am indeed very feeble, but after fifty-five days of such horrors, following the dreary heart-wasting of a year and more, it is a wonder that I am as I am. I sent you from Malta £110, and a duplicate in a second letter. ”

“ But, in vain, have I tried to recall any one moment since my quitting the University, or any one occasion, in which I have either thought, felt, spoken, or intentionally acted of or in relation to my brother, otherwise than as one who loved in him father and brother in one, and who independent of the fraternal relation and the remembrance of his manifold goodness and kindness to me from boyhood to early manhood should have chosen him above all I had known as the friend of my inmost soul. Never have man’s feeling and character been more cruelly misrepresented than mine. ”

“ S. T. Coleridge.
CXCVIII. TO THE SAME. Friday, May 27, 1814.
My dear Cottle,—Gladness be with you, for your convalescence, and equally so, at the hope which has sustained and tranquillised you through your imminent peril. Far otherwise is, and hath been, my state; yet I too am grateful; yet I cannot rejoice. I feel, with an intensity unfathomable by words, my utter nothingness, impotence, and worthlessness, in and for myself. I have learned what a sin is, against an infinite imperishable being, such as is the soul of man! ”

“ Hartley will receive his and Derwent’s Spillekins with a letter from me by the first waggon that leaves London after Wednesday next.
My dear Sara! the mother, the attentive and excellent mother of my children must needs be always more than the word friend can express when applied to a woman. I pray you, use no word that you use with reluctance. Yet what we have been to each other, our understandings will not permit our hearts to forget! God knows, I weep tears of blood, but so it is! For I greatly esteem and honour you. ”

“ Leighton had by nature a quick and pregnant fancy, and the august objects of his habitual contemplation, and their remoteness from the outward senses, his constant endeavour to see or to bring all things under some point of unity, but, above all, the rare and vital union of head and heart, of light and love, in his own character,—all these working conjointly could not fail to form and nourish in him the higher power, and more akin to reason, the power, I mean, of imagination. ”

“ If the duty of living were not far more awful to my conscience than life itself is agreeable to my feelings, I should sink under it. But, getting nothing by my publications, which I have not the power of making estimable by the public without loss of self-estimation, what can I do? The few who have won the present age, while they have secured the praise of posterity, as Sir Walter Scott, Mr. Southey, Lord Byron, etc., have been in happier circumstances. ”

“ I was writing a brief essay on the prospects of a country where it has become the mind of the nation to appreciate the evil of public acts and measures by their next consequences or immediate occasions, while the principle violated, or that a principle is thereby violated, is either wholly dropped out of the consideration, or is introduced but as a garnish or ornamental commonplace in the peroration of a speech! ”

“ My dear godchild, you received from Christ’s minister at the baptismal font, as your Christian name, the name of a most dear friend of your father’s, and who was to me even as a son,—the late Adam Steinmetz, whose fervent aspirations and paramount aim, even from early youth, was to be a Christian in thought, word, and deed; in will, mind, and affections. I, too, your godfather, have known what the enjoyment and advantages of this life are, and what the more refined pleasures which learning and intellectual power can give ”

“ And yet since on Friday evening, my lecture having made an impression far beyond its worth or my expectation, I have been in such a state of wretchedness, confined to my bed, in such almost continued pain ... that I have been content to see no one but the unlovable old woman, as feeling that I should only receive a momently succession of pangs from the presence of those who, giving no pleasure, would make my wretchedness appear almost unnatural, even as if the fire should cease to be warm. ”

“ God bless you, my dear sir! I have yet cheerful hopes that Heaven will not suffer me to die degraded by any other debts than those which it ever has been, and ever will be, my joy and pride still to pay and still to owe; those of a truly grateful heart, and to you among the first of those to whom they are due.
S. T. Coleridge. ”

“ My letters and the duplicates of them, written with so much care and minuteness to Sir George Beaumont—those to Wedgwood, to the Wordsworths, to Southey, Major Adye’s sudden death, and then the loss of the two frigates, the capture of a merchant’s privateer, all have seemed to spite. No one not absent on a dreary island, so many leagues of sea from England, can conceive the effect of these accidents on the spirit and inmost soul. ”

“ It is more than seldom that I am left in doubt and query on any judgement of yours of a practical nature, for on the good ground of some sixteen or more years’ experience I feel a take-for-granted faith in the dips and pointings of the needle in every decision of your total mind. ”

“ CCXL. TO THE REV. EDWARD COLERIDGE. May 19, 1825.
My very dear Nephew,—You have left me under a painful and yet genial feeling of regret, that my lot in life has hitherto so much estranged me from the children of the sons of my father, that venerable countenance and [Pg 739] name which form my earliest recollections and make them religious. It is not in my power to express adequately so as to convey it to others what a revolution has taken place in my mind since I have seen your sister, and John, and Henry, and lastly yourself. Yet revolution is not the word I want. ”

“ Much less would I hazard the appearance of an equivocal conduct at present when I feel that I am sinking into the grave, with fainter and fainter hopes of achieving that which, God knows my inmost heart! is the sole motive for the wish to live—namely, that of preparing for the press the results of twenty-five years hard study and almost constant meditation. Reputation has no charm for me, except as a preventive of starving. ”

“ I had only just strength enough to smile gratefully on my kind nurses, who tended me with sister’s and mother’s love, and often, I well know, wept for me in their sleep, and watched for me even in their dreams. Oh, dear sir! it does a man’s heart good, I will not say, to know such a family, but even to know that there is such a family. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Mr. S. T. Coleridge, F. R. S. L., R. A., H. M., P. S. B., etc., etc., has the honour of avowing the high gratification he will receive should any answer from him be thought “to oblige Lincoln’s Inn Fields.” When he reflects indeed on their many and cogent claims on his admiration and gratitude, what a Fund of Literature they contain, what a Royal Society, what Royal Associates—not to speak of those as yet in the egg of futurity, the unhatched Decemvirate and Spes Altera Phœbi! What a royal College, where philosophy and eloquence unite to display their fresh and vernal green! ”

“ Yet so capricious is our, at least my, nature, that I feel I do not receive the fifth part of the delight from this miscellany of Flora, flowers at every step, as from the economized glasses and flower-pots at Highgate so tended and worshipped by me, and each the gift of some kind friend or courteous neighbour. I actually make up a flower-pot every night, in order to imitate my Highgate pleasures. The country road is very beautiful. ”

“ Though wretchedly ill, I have not yet been deserted by hope—less dejected than in any former illness—and my mind has been active, and not vaguely, but to that determinate purpose which has employed me the last three months, and I want only one fortnight steady reading to have got all my materials before me, and then I neither stir to the right nor to the left, so help me God! ”

“ I am anxious to hear about poor George and shall write about him to Portsmouth in the course of a week, for by that time a convoy will be going to England as we expect. I hope that in the course of three weeks or a month I may be able to give a more promising account of my health. As it is, I have reason to be satisfied. The effect of years cannot be done away in a few weeks. I am tranquil and resigned, and, even if I should not bring back health, I shall at least bring back experience, and suffer with patience and in silence. Again and again God bless you, my dear Sara! ”

“ But other eyes saw another Coleridge who held them entranced. To them he was the seer of the vision beautiful, the “priest of invisible rites behind the veil of the senses,” and to their ears his voice was of one who brought good tidings of reconciliation and assurance. Many, too, who cared for none of these things, were attracted to the man. Like the wedding-guest in the Ancient Mariner, they stood still. No other, they felt, was so wise, so loveable. They, too, were eye-witnesses, and their portraiture has not been outpainted by Carlyle. ”

“ Death and Thunder sleep; the gardens in deep moats between lofty and massive walls; a town of all nations and all languages—close below me, on my left, fields and gardens and neat small mansions—poplars, cypresses, and willow-leaved aspens, with fences of prickly aloe—strange plant that does not seem to be alive, but to have been so, a thing fantastically carved in wood, and coloured—some hieroglyphic or temple ornament of undiscovered meaning. ”

“ Good heavens! the very essence of the Constitution is unmoulded, and the venerable motto of our liberty, “The king can do no wrong,” becomes nonsense and blasphemy. As soon as ever my mind is a little at ease, I will put together the fragments I have written on this subject, and if Wordsworth have not anticipated me, add to it some thoughts on the effect of the military principle. ”

“ I pray fervently, and I feel a cheerful trust that I do not pray in vain, that on my own mind and spring of action it will be proved not to have been wasted. I do inwardly believe that I shall yet do something to thank you, my dear Gillman, in the way in which you would wish to be thanked, by doing myself honour. ”

“ You are by nature very kind and forgiving, and wholly free from revenge and sullenness; you are likewise gifted with a very active and self-gratifying fancy, and such a high tide and flood of pleasurable feelings, that all unpleasant and painful thoughts and events are hurried away upon it, and neither remain in the surface of your memory nor sink to the bottom of your heart. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ From this state of mind, in which I was comparing Wordsworth with himself, I was roused by the infamous “Edinburgh” review of the poem. If ever guilt lay on a writer’s head, and if malignity, slander, hypocrisy, and self-contradictory baseness can constitute guilt, I dare openly, and openly (please God!) I will, impeach the writer of that article of it. These are awful times—a dream of dreams! To be a prophet is, and ever has been, an unthankful office. ”