Chapter XCIII: Letter 204: To Allsop

June 29th, 1822.

My dear Friend,

As fervent a prayer, as glow-trembling a joy, thanksgiving that seeks to steady itself by prayer, and prayer that dissolves itself into thanks and gladness, as ever eddied in or streamed onward from love and friendship, for pain and dread, for travail of body and spirit passed over, and a mother smiling over the firstborn at her bosom, have sped toward you from the moment I opened your Letter. For as if there had been a light suffused along the paper at that part, "birth of a Daughter after a very short illness," were the first words I saw. "Well pleased!" To be sure you are. It was scarcely a week ago that--during the only hour free from visits, visitors, and visitations that we have had to ourselves for I do not know how long--Mrs. Gillman and I had settled the point; and, after a strict, patient, and impartial poll of the _pro's_ and _con's_ on both sides, a Girl it was to be, and a Girl was returned by a very large majority of wishes. But as wishes, like strawberries, do not bear carriage well, or at least require to be poised on the _head_, I will send a scanty specimen of the Reasons by way of _Hansel_. _Imprimis_, A Girl takes five times as much spoiling to spoil her. _Item._--It is a great advantage both in respect of Temper, Manners, and the Quickening of the Faculties, for a Boy to have a Sister or Sisters a year or two older than himself.--But I devote this brief scroll to Feeling: so no more of disquisition, except it be to declare the entire coincidence of my experience with yours as to the very rare occurrence of strong and deep Feeling in conjunction with free power and vivacity in the expression of it. The most eminent Tragedians, Garrick for instance, are known to have had their emotions as much at command, and almost as much on the surface, as the muscles of their countenances; and the French, who are all Actors, are proverbially heartless. Is it that it is a false and feverous state for the Centre to live in the Circumference? The vital warmth seldom rises to the surface in the form of sensible Heat, without becoming hectic and inimical to the Life within, the only source of real sensibility. Eloquence itself--I speak of it as habitual and at call--too often is, and is always like to engender, a species of histrionism.

In one of my juvenile poems (on a Friend who died in a Frenzy Fever), you will find[128] that I was jealous of this in myself; and that it is (as I trust it is), otherwise, I attribute mainly to the following causes:--A naturally, at once searching and communicative disposition, the necessity of reconciling the restlessness of an ever-working Fancy with an intense craving after a resting-place for my Thoughts in some _principle_ that was derived from experience, but of which all other knowledge should be but so many repetitions under various limitations, even as circles, squares, triangles, etc., etc., are but so many positions of space. And, lastly, that my eloquence was most commonly excited by the desire of running away and hiding myself from my personal and inward feelings, _and not for the expression of them_, while doubtless this very effort of feeling gave a passion and glow to my thoughts and language on subjects of a general nature, that they otherwise would not have had. I fled in a Circle, still overtaken by the Feelings, from which I was ever more fleeing, with my back turned towards them; but above all, my growing deepening conviction of the _transcendancy of the moral to the intellectual_, and the inexpressible comfort and inward strength which I experience myself to derive as often as I contemplate truth realised into Being by a human Will; so that, _as I cannot love without esteem, neither can I esteem without loving_. Hence I _love_ but few, but those I love as my own Soul; for I feel that without them I should--not indeed cease to be kind and effluent, but by little and little become a soul-less fixed Star, receiving no rays nor influences into my Being, _a Solitude which I so tremble at, that I cannot attribute it even to the Divine Nature_.

_God_father or not (have not Girls Godfathers?), the little lady shall be to me a dear Daughter, and I will make her love me by loving her own Papa and Mamma. God bless you.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

T. Allsop, Esq.

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The last letter refers to the birth of "Titania Puckinella," as Coleridge loved to call Allsop's girl. The next letter refers to Coleridge's four "griping and grasping sorrows." The third sorrow was the break with Sarah Hutchinson, who, as we have seen, had been one of Coleridge's good angels, the "Lady" of _Dejection; an Ode_.