Chapter LXXXVIII: Letter 200: To Allsop

March 4th, 1822. My dearest Friend,

I have been much more than ordinarily unwell for more than a week past--my sleeps worse than my vigils, my nights than my days;

----The night's dismay
Sadden'd and stunned the intervening day;

but last night I had not only a calmer night, without roaming in my dreams through any of Swedenborg's Hells _modéré_; but arose this morning lighter and with a sense of _relief_.

I scarce know whether the enclosed Detenu[125] is worth enclosing or reading. I fancy that I send it because I cannot write at any length that which is even tolerably adequate to what I wish to say. Mrs. Gillman returned from town--very much pleased with her reception by Mrs. Allsop, and with the impression that it would be her husband's fault if she did not make him a happy home.

I shall make you smile, as I did dear Mary Lamb, when I say that you sometimes mistake my position. As individual to individual, from my childhood, I do not remember feeling myself either superior or inferior to any human being; except by an act of my own will in cases of real or imagined moral or intellectual superiority. In regard to worldly rank, from eight years old to nineteen, I was habituated, nay, naturalized, to look up to men circumstanced as you are, as my superiors--a large number of our governors, and almost _all_ of those whom we regarded as greater men still, and whom we saw most of, viz. our committee governors, were such--and as neither awake nor asleep have I any other feelings than what I had at Christ's Hospital, I distinctly remember that I felt a little flush of pride and consequence--just like what we used to feel at school when the boys came running to us--"Coleridge! here's your friends want you--they are quite _grand_," or "It is quite a _lady_"--when I first heard who you were, and laughed at myself for it with that pleasurable sensation that, spite of my sufferings at that school, still accompanies any sudden re-awakening of our school-boy feelings and notions. And oh, from sixteen to nineteen what hours of Paradise had Allen and I in escorting the Miss Evanses home on a Saturday, who were then at a milliner's whom we used to think, and who I believe really was, such a nice lady;--and we used to carry thither, of a summer morning, the pillage of the flower gardens within six miles of town, with Sonnet or Love Rhyme wrapped round the nose-gay. To be feminine, kind, and genteelly (what I should now call neatly) dressed, these were the only things to which my head, heart, or imagination had any polarity, and what I was then, I still am.

God bless you and yours,
S. T. COLERIDGE.

T. Allsop, Esq.