Chapter II: Early Public Life (1)

1795-1796

XLVII. TO JOSEPH COTTLE.

Spring, 1795.

MY DEAR SIR,--Can you conveniently lend me five pounds, as we want a little more than four pounds to make up our lodging bill, which is indeed much higher than we expected; seven weeks and Burnett’s lodging for twelve weeks, amounting to eleven pounds?

Yours affectionately,
S. T. COLERIDGE.

XLVIII. TO THE SAME.

July 31, 1795.

DEAR COTTLE,--By the thick smokes that precede the volcanic eruptions of Etna, Vesuvius, and Hecla, I feel an impulse to fumigate, at 25 College Street, one pair of stairs’ room; yea, with our Oronoco, and, if thou wilt send me by the bearer four pipes, I will write a panegyrical epic poem upon thee, with as many books as there are letters in thy name. Moreover, if thou wilt send me “the copy-book,” I hereby bind myself, by to-morrow morning, to write out enough copy for a sheet and a half.

God bless you.

S. T. C.

XLIX. TO THE SAME.

1795.

DEAR COTTLE,--Shall I trouble you (I being over the mouth and nose, in doing something of importance, at ----’s) to send your servant into the market and buy a pound of bacon, and two quarts of broad beans; and when he carries it down to College Street, to desire the maid to dress it for dinner, and tell her I shall be home by three o’clock? Will you come and drink tea with me? and I will endeavour to get the etc. ready for you.

Yours affectionately,
S. T. C.

L. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

October, 1795.

MY DEAR SOUTHEY,--It would argue imbecility and a latent wickedness in myself, if for a moment I doubted concerning your purposes and final determination. I write, because it is possible that I may suggest some idea to you which should find a place in your answer to your uncle, and I _write_, because in a letter I can express myself more connectedly than in conversation.

The former part of Mr. Hill’s reasonings is reducible to this. It may not be vicious to entertain pure and virtuous sentiments; their criminality is confined to the promulgation (if we believe democracy to be pure and virtuous, to us it is so). Southey! Pantisocracy is not the question: its realization is distant--perhaps a miraculous millennium. What you have seen, or think that you have seen of the human heart, may render the formation even of a pantisocratic _seminary_ improbable to you, but this is not the question. Were £300 a year offered to you as a man of the world, as one indifferent to absolute equality, but still on the supposition that you were commonly honest, I suppose it possible that doubts might arise; your mother, your brother, your Edith, would all crowd upon you, and certain misery might be weighed against distant, and perhaps unattainable happiness. But the point is, whether or no you can _perjure_ yourself. There are men who hold the necessity and moral optimism of our religious establishment. Its peculiar dogmas they may disapprove, but of innovation they see dreadful and unhealable consequence; and they will not quit the Church for a few follies and absurdities, any more than for the same reason they would desert a valued friend. Such men I do not condemn. Whatever I may deem of their reasoning, their hearts and consciences I include not in the anathema. But you disapprove of an establishment altogether; you believe it iniquitous, a mother of crimes. It is impossible that _you_ could uphold it by assuming the badge of affiliation.

My prospects are not bright, but to the eye of reason as bright as when we first formed our plan; nor is there any opposite inducement offered, of which you were not then apprized, or had cause to expect. Domestic happiness is the greatest of things sublunary, and of things celestial it is impossible, perhaps, for unassisted man to believe anything greater; but it is not strange that those things, which, in a pure form of society, will constitute our first blessings, should in its present morbid state be our most perilous temptations. “He that doth not love mother or wife less than me, is not worthy of me!”

This have I written, Southey, altogether disinterestedly. Your desertion or adhesion will in no wise affect my feelings, opinions, or conduct, and in a very inconsiderable degree my fortunes! That Being who is “in will, in deed, Impulse of all to all,” whichever be your determination, will make it ultimately the best.

God love you, my dear Southey!

S. T. COLERIDGE.

LI. TO THOMAS POOLE.

Wednesday evening, October 7, 1795.

MY DEAR SIR,--God bless you; or rather, God be praised for that he _has_ blessed you!

On Sunday morning I was _married_ at St. Mary’s Redcliff, poor Chatterton’s church! The thought gave a tinge of melancholy to the solemn joy which I felt, united to the woman whom I love best of all created beings. We are settled, nay, quite domesticated, at Clevedon, our comfortable cot!

_Mrs. Coleridge!_ I like to write the name. Well, as I was saying, Mrs. Coleridge desires her affectionate regards to you. I talked of you on my wedding night. God bless you! I hope that some ten years hence you will believe and know of my affection towards you what I will not now profess.

The prospect around is perhaps more _various_ than any in the kingdom. Mine eye gluttonizes the sea, the distant islands, the opposite coast! I shall assuredly write rhymes, let the nine Muses prevent it if they can. Cruikshank, I find, is married to Miss Buclé. I am happy to hear it. He will surely, I hope, make a good husband to a woman, to whom he would be a villain who should make a bad one.

I have given up all thoughts of the magazine, for various reasons. _Imprimis_, I must be connected with R. Southey in it, which I could not be with comfort to my feelings. _Secundo_, It is a thing of monthly _anxiety_ and quotidian bustle. _Tertio_, It would cost Cottle an hundred pounds in buying paper, etc.--all on an uncertainty. _Quarto_, To publish a magazine for _one_ year would be nonsense, and if I pursue what I mean to pursue, my school plan, I could not publish it for more than a year. _Quinto_, Cottle has entered into an engagement to give me a guinea and a half for every hundred lines of poetry I write, which will be perfectly sufficient for my maintenance, I only amusing myself on mornings; and all my prose works he is eager to purchase. _Sexto_, In the course of half a year I mean to return to Cambridge (having previously taken my name off from the University control) and taking lodgings there for myself and wife, finish my great work of “Imitations,” in two volumes. My former works may, I hope, prove somewhat of genius and of erudition. This will be better; it will show great industry and manly consistency; at the end of it I shall publish proposals for school, etc. Cottle has spent a day with me, and takes this letter to Bristol. My next will be long, and full of _something_. This is inanity and egotism. Pray let me hear from you, directing the letter to Mr. Cottle, who will forward it. My respectful and grateful remembrance to your mother, and believe me, dear Poole, your affectionate and mindful _friend_, shall I so soon dare to say? Believe me, my heart prompts it.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

LII. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.[99]

Friday morning, November 13, 1795.

Southey, I _have_ lost friends--friends who still cherish for me sentiments of high esteem and unextinguished tenderness. For the sum total of my misbehaviour, the Alpha and Omega of their accusations, is epistolary neglect. I never speak of them without affection, I never think of them without reverence. Not “to this catalogue,” Southey, have I “added _your_ name.” You are _lost_ to _me_, because you are lost to Virtue. As this will probably be the last time I shall have occasion to address you, I will begin at the beginning and regularly retrace your conduct and my own. In the month of June, 1794, I first became acquainted with your person and character. Before I quitted Oxford, we had struck out the leading features of a pantisocracy. While on my journey through Wales you invited me to Bristol with the full hopes of realising it. During my abode at Bristol the plan was matured, and I returned to Cambridge hot in the anticipation of that happy season when we should remove the _selfish_ principle from ourselves, and prevent it in our children, by an abolition of property; or, in whatever respects this might be impracticable, by such similarity of property as would amount to a _moral_ sameness, and answer all the purposes of _abolition_. Nor were you less zealous, and thought and expressed your opinion, that if any man embraced our system he must comparatively disregard “his father and mother and wife and children and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life also, or he could not be our disciple.” In one of your letters, alluding to your mother’s low spirits and situation, you tell me that “I cannot suppose any _individual_ feelings will have an undue weight with you,” and in the same letter you observe (alas! your recent conduct has made it a prophecy!), “God forbid that the _ebullience_ of _schematism_ should be over. It is the Promethean fire that animates my soul, and when _that_ is gone _all will be darkness_. I have _devoted_ myself!”

Previously to my departure from Jesus College, and during my melancholy detention in London, what convulsive struggles of feeling I underwent, and what sacrifices I made, you know. The liberal proposal from my family affected me no further than as it pained me to wound a revered brother by the positive and immediate refusal which duty compelled me to return. But there was a--I need not be particular; you remember what a fetter I burst, and that it snapt as if it had been a sinew of my heart. However, I returned to Bristol, and my addresses to Sara, which I at first paid from principle, not feeling, from feeling and from principle I renewed; and I met a reward more than proportionate to the greatness of the effort. I love and I am beloved, and I am happy!

Your letter to Lovell (two or three days after my arrival at Bristol), in answer to some objections of mine to the Welsh scheme, was the first thing that alarmed me. Instead of “It is our duty,” “Such and such are the reasons,” it was “I and I” and “will and will,”--sentences of gloomy and self-centering resolve. I wrote you a friendly reproof, and in my own mind attributed this unwonted style to your earnest desires of realising our plan, and the angry pain which you felt when any appeared to oppose or defer its execution. However, I came over to your opinions of the utility, and, in course, the duty of rehearsing our scheme in Wales, and, so, rejected the offer of being established in the Earl of Buchan’s family. To this period of our connection I call your more particular attention and remembrance, as I shall revert to it at the close of my letter.

We commenced lecturing. Shortly after, you began to recede in your conversation from those broad principles in which pantisocracy originated. I opposed you with vehemence, for I well knew that no notion of morality or its motives could be without consequences. And once (it was just before we went to bed) you confessed to me that you had acted wrong. But you relapsed; your manner became cold and gloomy, and pleaded with increased pertinacity for the wisdom of making Self an undiverging Center. At Mr. Jardine’s[100] your language was _strong indeed_. Recollect it. You had left the table, and we were standing at the window. Then darted into my mind the dread that you were meditating a separation. At _Chepstow_[101] your conduct renewed my suspicion, and I was greatly agitated, even to many tears. But in Peircefield Walks[102] you assured me that my suspicions were altogether unfounded, that our differences were merely speculative, and that you would certainly go into Wales. I was glad and satisfied. For my heart was never bent from you but by violent strength, and heaven knows how it leapt back to esteem and love you. But alas! a short time passed ere your departure from our first principles became too flagrant. Remember when we went to Ashton[103] on the strawberry party. Your conversation with George Burnett on the day following he detailed to me. It scorched my throat. Your private resources were to remain your individual property, and everything to be separate except a farm of five or six acres. In short, we were to commence partners in a petty farming trade. This was the mouse of which the mountain Pantisocracy was at last safely delivered. I received the account with indignation and loathings of unutterable contempt. Such opinions were indeed unassailable,--the javelin of argument and the arrows of ridicule would have been equally misapplied; a straw would have wounded them mortally. I did not condescend to waste my intellect upon them; but in the most express terms I declared to George Burnett my opinion (and, Southey, next to my own existence, there is scarce any fact of which at this moment I entertain less doubt), to Burnett I declared it to be my opinion “_that you had long laid a plot_ of separation, and were now developing it by proposing such a vile mutilation of our scheme as you must have been conscious I should reject decisively and with scorn.” George Burnett was your most affectionate friend; I knew his unbounded veneration for you, his personal attachment; I knew likewise his gentle dislike of _me_. Yet him I bade be the judge. I bade him choose his associate. I would adopt the full system or depart. George, I presume, detailed of this my conversation what part he chose; from him, however, I received your sentiments, viz.: that you would go into Wales, or what place I liked. Thus your system of prudentials and your apostasy were not sudden; these constant nibblings had sloped your descent from virtue. “You received your uncle’s letter,” I said--“what answer have you returned?” For to think with almost superstitious veneration of you had been such a deep-rooted habit of my soul that even then I did not dream you could hesitate concerning so infamous a proposal. “None,” you replied, “nor do I know what answer I shall return.” You went to bed. George sat half-petrified, gaping at the pigmy virtue of his supposed giant. I performed the office of still-struggling friendship by writing you my free sentiments concerning the enormous guilt of that which your uncle’s doughty sophistry recommended.

On the next morning I walked with you towards Bath; again I insisted on its criminality. You told me that you had “little notion of guilt,” and that “you had a pretty sort of lullaby faith of your own.” Finding you invulnerable in conscience, for the sake of mankind I did not, however, quit the field, but pressed you on the difficulties of your system. Your uncle’s intimacy with the bishop, and the hush in which you would lie for the two years previous to your ordination, were the arguments (variously urged in a long and desultory conversation) by which you solved those difficulties. “But your ‘Joan of Arc’--the sentiments in it are of the boldest order. What if the suspicions of the Bishop be raised, and he particularly questions you concerning your opinions of the Trinity and the Redemption?” “Oh,” you replied, “I am pretty well up to their jargon, and shall answer them accordingly.” In fine, you left me fully persuaded that you would enter into Holy Orders. And, after a week’s interval or more, you desired George Burnett to act independently of you, and _gave him an invitation to Oxford_. Of course, we both concluded that the matter was absolutely determined. Southey! I am not besotted that I should not know, nor hypocrite enough not to tell you, that you were diverted from being a Priest only by the weight of infamy which you perceived coming towards you like a rush of waters.

Then with good reason I considered you as one _fallen back into the ranks_; as a man admirable for his abilities only, strict, indeed, in the lesser honesties, but, like the majority of men, unable to resist a strong temptation. _Friend_ is a very sacred appellation. You were become an _acquaintance_, yet one for whom I felt no common tenderness. I could not forget what you had been. Your sun was set; your sky was clouded; but those clouds and that sky were yet tinged with the recent sun. As I considered you, so I treated you. I studiously avoided all particular subjects. I acquainted you with nothing relative to myself. Literary topics engrossed our conversation. You were too quick-sighted not to perceive it. I received a letter from you. “You have withdrawn your confidence from me, Coleridge. Preserving still the face of friendship when we meet, you yet avoid me and carry on your plans in secrecy.” If by “the face of friendship” you meant that kindliness which I show to all because I feel it for all, your statement was perfectly accurate. If you meant more, you contradict yourself; for you evidently perceived from my manners that you were a “weight upon me” in company--an intruder, unwished and unwelcome. I pained you by “cold civility, the shadow which friendship leaves behind him.” Since that letter I altered my conduct no otherwise than by avoiding you more. I still generalised, and spoke not of myself, except my proposed literary works. In short, I spoke to you as I should have done to any other man of genius who had happened to be my _acquaintance_. Without the farce and tumult of a rupture I wished you to sink into that class. “Face to face you never changed your manners to me.” And yet I pained you by “cold civility.” Egregious contradiction! Doubtless I always treated you with urbanity, and meant to do so; but I _locked up_ my heart from you, and you perceived it, and I intended you to perceive it. “I planned works in conjunction with you.” Most certainly; the _magazine_ which, long before this, you had planned equally with me, and, if it had been carried into execution, would of course have returned you a third share of the profits. What had you done that should make you an unfit literary associate to me? Nothing. My opinion of you as a _man_ was altered, not as a writer. Our Muses had not quarrelled. I should have read your poetry with equal delight, and corrected it with equal zeal if correction it needed. “I received you on my return from Shurton with my usual shake of the hand.” You gave me your hand, and dreadful must have been my feelings if I had refused to take it. Indeed, so long had I known you, so highly venerated, so dearly loved you, that my hand would have taken yours _mechanically_. But is shaking the hand a mark of _friendship_? Heaven forbid! I should then be a hypocrite many days in the week. It is assuredly the pledge of acquaintance, and nothing more. But after this did I not with most scrupulous care avoid you? You know I did.

In your former letters you say that I made use of these words to you: “You will be retrograde that you may spring the farther forward.” You have misquoted, Southey! You had talked of rejoining pantisocracy in about fourteen years. I exploded this probability, but as I saw you determined to leave it, hoped and wished it might be so--_hoped_ that we might run backwards only to leap forward. Not to mention that during that conversation I had taken the weight and pressing urgency of your motives as truths granted; but when, on examination, I found them a show and mockery of unreal things, doubtless, my opinion of you _must_ have become far less respectful. You quoted likewise the last sentence of my letter to you, as a proof that I approved of your design; you _knew_ that sentence to imply no more than the pious confidence of optimism--however wickedly you might act, God would make it _ultimately_ the best. You _knew_ this was the meaning of it--I could find twenty parallel passages in the lectures. Indeed, such expressions applied to bad actions had become a habit of my conversation. You had named, not unwittingly, Dr. Pangloss. And Heaven forbid that I should not now have faith that however foul your stream may run here, yet that it will filtrate and become pure in its subterraneous passage to the Ocean of Universal Redemption.

Thus far had I written when the necessities of literary occupation crowded upon me, and I met you in Redcliff, and, unsaluted and unsaluting, passed by the man to whom for almost a year I had told my last thoughts when I closed my eyes, and the first when I awoke. But “ere this I have felt sorrow!”

I shall proceed to answer your letters, and first excriminate myself, and then examine your conduct. You charge me with having industriously trumpeted your uncle’s letter. When I mentioned my intended journey to Clevedon with Burnett, and was asked by my immediate friends why _you_ were not with us, should I have been silent and implied something mysterious, or have told an open untruth and made myself your accomplice? I could do neither; I answered that you were quite undetermined, but had some thoughts of returning to Oxford. To Danvers, indeed, and to Cottle I spoke more particularly, for I knew their prudence and their love for you--and my heart was very full. But to Mrs. Morgan I did not mention it. She met me in the streets, and said: “So! Southey is going into the Church! ’Tis all concluded, ’tis in vain to deny it!” I answered: “You are mistaken; you must contradict; Southey has received a splendid offer, but he has not determined.” This, I have some faint recollection, was my answer, but of this particular conversation my recollection is very faint. By what means she received the intelligence I know not; probably from Mrs. Richardson, who might have been told it by Mr. Wade. A considerable time after, the subject was renewed at Mrs. Morgan’s, Burnett and my Sara being present. Mrs. M. told me that you had asserted to her, that with regard to the Church you had barely hesitated, that you might consider your uncle’s arguments, that you had given up no one principle--and that _I_ was more your friend than ever. I own I was roused to an agony of passion; nor was George Burnett undisturbed. Whatever I said that afternoon (and since that time I have but often repeated what I said, in gentler language) George Burnett did give his _decided Amen_ to. And I said, Southey, that you had given up every principle--that confessedly you were going into the law, more opposite to your avowed principles, if possible, than even the Church--and that I had in my pocket a letter in which you charged me with having withdrawn my friendship; and as to your barely hesitating about your uncle’s proposal, I was obliged in my own defence to relate all that passed between us, all on which I had founded a conviction so directly opposite.

I have, you say, distorted your conversation by “gross misrepresentation and wicked and calumnious falsehoods. It has been told me by Mrs. Morgan that I said: ‘I have seen my error! I have been drunk with principle!’” Just over the bridge, at the bottom of the High Street, returning one night from Redcliff Hill, in answer to my pressing contrast of your then opinions of the selfish kind with what you had formerly professed, you said: “I was intoxicated with the novelty of a system!” That you said, “I have seen my error,” I never asserted. It is doubtless implied in the sentence which you did say, but I never charged it to you as your expression. As to your reserving bank bills, etc., to yourself, the charge would have been so palpable a lie that I must have been madman as well as villain to have been guilty of it. If I had, George Burnett and Sara would have contradicted it. I said that your conduct in little things had appeared to me tinged with selfishness, and George Burnett attributed, and still does attribute, your defection to your unwillingness to share your expected annuity with us. As to the long catalogue of other lies, they not being particularised, I, of course, can say nothing about them. Tales may have been fetched and carried with embellishments calculated to improve them in everything but the truth. I spoke “the plain and simple truth” alone.

And now for your conduct and motives. My hand trembles when I think what a series of falsehood and duplicity I am about to bring before the conscience of a man who has dared to write me that “his conduct has been uniformly open.” I must revert to your first letter, and here you say:--

“The plan you are going upon is not of sufficient importance to justify me to myself in abandoning a family, who have none to support them but me.” The plan _you_ are going upon! What plan was I meditating, save to retire into the country with George Burnett and yourself, and taking by degrees a small farm, there be _learning_ to get my own bread by my bodily labour--and then to have all things in common--thus disciplining my body and mind for the successful practice of the same thing in America with more numerous associates? And even if this should never be the case, ourselves and our children would form a society sufficiently large. And was not this your own plan--the plan for the realising of which you invited me to Bristol; the plan for which I abandoned my friends, and every prospect, and every certainty, and the woman whom I loved to an excess which you in your warmest dream of fancy could never shadow out? When I returned from London, when you deemed pantisocracy a _duty_--duty unaltered by numbers--when you said, that, if others left it, you and George Burnett and your brother would stand firm to the post of virtue--what then were our circumstances? Saving Lovell, our number was the same, yourself and Burnett and I. Our _prospects_ were only an uncertain hope of getting thirty shillings a week between us by writing for some London paper--for the remainder we were to rely on our agricultural exertions. And as to your family you stood precisely in the same situation as you now stand. You meant to take your mother with you, and your brother. And where, indeed, would have been the difficulty? She would have earned her maintenance by her management and savings--considering the matter even in this cold-hearted way. But when you broke from us our prospects were brightening; by the magazine or by poetry we might and should have got ten guineas a month.

But if you are acting right, I should be acting right in imitating you. What, then, would George Burnett do--he “whom you seduced

“With other promises and other vaunts
Than to repent, boasting _you_ could subdue
Temptation!”

He cannot go into the Church, for you did “give him principles”! and I wish that you had indeed “learnt from him how infinitely more to be valued is integrity of heart than effulgence of intellect.” Nor can he go into the law, for the same _principles_ declare against it, and he is not calculated for it. And his father will not support any expense of consequence relative to his further education--for Law or Physic he could not take his degree in, or be called to, without sinking of many hundred pounds. What, Southey, was George Burnett to do?

Then, even if you had persisted in your design of taking Orders, your motives would have been weak and shadowy and vile; but when you changed your ground for the Law they were annihilated. No man dreams of getting bread in the Law, till six or eight years after his first entrance at the Temple. And how very few even then? Before this time your brothers would have been put out, and the money which you must of necessity have sunk in a wicked profession would have given your brother an education, and provided a premium fit for the first compting-house in the world. But I hear that you have again changed your ground. You do not now mean to study the Law, but to maintain yourself by your writings and on your promised annuity, which, you told Mrs. Morgan, would be more than a hundred a year. Could you not have done the same with _us_? I neither have nor could deign to have a hundred a year. Yet by my own exertions I will struggle hard to maintain myself, and my wife, and my wife’s mother and my associate. Or what if you dedicated this hundred a year to your family? Would you not be precisely as I am? Is not George Burnett accurate when he undoubtedly ascribes your conduct to an unparticipating propensity--to a total want of the boasted _flocci-nauci-nihili-pilificating_ sense? O selfish, money-loving man! What principle have you not given up? Though death had been the consequence, I would have spat in that man’s face and called him liar, who should have spoken that last sentence concerning _you_ nine months ago. For blindly did I esteem you. O God! that _such a mind_ should fall in love with that low, dirty, gutter-grubbing trull, _Worldly Prudence_!

Curse on all _pride_! ’Tis a harlot that buckrams herself up in virtue only that she may fetch a higher price. ’Tis a rock where virtue may be planted, but cannot strike root.

Last of all, perceiving that your motives vanished at the first ray of examination, and that those accounts of your mother and family which had drawn easy tears down wrinkled cheeks had no effect on keener minds, your last resource has been to calumniate me. If there be in nature a situation perilous to honesty, it is this, when a man has not heart to _be_, yet lusts to _seem_ virtuous. My _indolence_ you assigned to Lovell as the reason for your quitting pantisocracy. Supposing it true, it might indeed be a reason for rejecting _me_ from the system. But how does this affect pantisocracy, that you should reject _it_? And what has Burnett done, that he should not be a worthy associate? He who leaned on you with all his head and with all his heart; he who gave his all for pantisocracy, and expected that pantisocracy would be at least bread and cheese to him. But neither is the charge a true one. My own lectures I wrote for myself, eleven in number, excepting a very few pages which most reluctantly you eked out for me. And such pages! I would not have suffered them to have stood in a lecture of yours. To _your_ lectures I dedicated my whole mind and heart, and wrote one half in _quantity_; but in quality you must be conscious that all the _tug_ of brain was mine, and that your share was little more than transcription. I wrote with vast exertion of all my intellect the parts in the “Joan of Arc,” and I corrected that and other poems with greater interest than I should have felt for my own. Then my own poems, and the recomposing of my lectures, besides a sermon, and the correction of some poems for a friend. I could have written them in half the time and with less expense of thought. I write not these things boastfully, but to excriminate myself. The truth is, you sat down and wrote; I used to saunter about and think what I should write. And we ought to appreciate our comparative industry by the quantum of mental exertion, not the particular mode of it--by the number of thoughts collected, not by the number of lines through which these thoughts are diffused. But I will suppose myself guilty of the charge. How would an honest man have reasoned in your letter and how acted? Thus: “Here is a man who has abandoned all for what I believe to be virtue. But he professed himself an imperfect being when he offered himself an associate to me. He confessed that all his valuable qualities were ‘sloth-jaundiced,’ and in his letters is a bitter self-accuser. This man did not deceive me. I accepted of him in the hopes of curing him, but I half despair of it. How shall I act? I will tell him fully and firmly, that much as I love him I love pantisocracy more, and if in a certain time I do not see this disqualifying propensity subdued, I must and will reject him.” Such would have been an honest man’s reasoning, such his conduct. Did _you_ act so? Did you even mention to me, “face to face,” my indolence as a motive for your recent conduct? Did you ever mention it in Peircefield Walks? and some time after, that night when you scattered some heart-chilling sentiments, and in great agitation I did ask you _solemnly_ whether you disapproved of anything in _my_ conduct, and you answered, “Nothing. I like you better now than at the commencement of our friendship!” an answer which so startled Sara, that she affronted you into angry silence by exclaiming, “What a story!” George Burnett, I believe, was present. This happened after all our lectures, after every one of those proofs of indolence on which you must found your charge. A charge which with what indignation did you receive when brought against me by Lovell! Yet _then_ there was some shew for it. I _had_ been criminally indolent. But since then I have exerted myself more than I could have supposed myself capable. Enough! I heard for the first time on Thursday that you were to set off for Lisbon on Saturday morning. It gives me great pain on many accounts, but principally that those moments which should be sacred to your affections may be disturbed by this long letter.

Southey, as far as happiness will be conducive to your virtue, which alone is final happiness, may you possess it! You have left a large void in my heart. I know no man big enough to fill it. Others I may love equally, and esteem equally, and some perhaps I may admire as much. But never do I expect to meet another man, who will make me unite attachment for his person with reverence for his heart and admiration of his genius. I did not only venerate you for your own virtues, I prized you as the sheet-anchor of mine; and even as a poet my vanity knew no keener gratification than your praise. But these things are passed by like as when a hungry man dreams, and lo! he feasteth, but he awakes and his soul is empty.

May God Almighty bless and preserve you! and may you live to know and feel and acknowledge that unless we accustom ourselves to meditate adoringly on Him, the source of all virtue, no virtue can be permanent.

Be assured that G. Burnett still loves you better than he can love any other man, and Sara would have you accept her love and blessing; accept it as the future husband of her best loved sister. Farewell!

S. T. COLERIDGE.

LIII. TO JOSIAH WADE.[104]

NOTTINGHAM, Wednesday morning, January 27, 1796.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--You will perceive by this letter that I have changed my route. From Birmingham, which I quitted on Friday last (four o’clock in the morning), I proceeded to Derby, stayed there till Monday morning, and am now at Nottingham. From Nottingham I go to Sheffield; from Sheffield to Manchester; from Manchester to Liverpool; from Liverpool to London; from London to Bristol. Ah, what a weary way! My poor crazy ark has been tossed to and fro on an ocean of business, and I long for the Mount Ararat on which it is to rest. At Birmingham I was extremely unwell.... Business succeeded very well there; about an hundred subscribers, I think. At Derby tolerably well. Mr. Strutt (the successor to Sir Richard Arkwright) tells me I may count on forty or fifty in Derby and round about.

Derby is full of curiosities, the cotton, the silk mills, Wright,[105] the painter, and Dr. Darwin, the everything, except the Christian![106] Dr. Darwin possesses, perhaps, a greater range of knowledge than any other man in Europe, and is the most inventive of philosophical men. He thinks in a _new_ train on all subjects except religion. He bantered me on the subject of religion. I heard all his arguments, and told him that it was infinitely consoling to me, to find that the arguments which so great a man adduced against the existence of a God and the evidences of revealed religion were such as had startled me at fifteen, but had become the objects of my smile at twenty. Not one new objection--not even an ingenious one. He boasted that he had never read one book in defence of _such stuff_, but he had read all the works of infidels! What should you think, Mr. Wade, of a man, who, having abused and ridiculed you, should openly declare that he had heard all that your _enemies_ had to say against you, but had scorned to enquire the truth from any of your own friends? Would you think him an honest man? I am sure you would not. Yet of such are all the infidels with whom I have met. They talk of a subject infinitely important, yet are proud to confess themselves profoundly ignorant of it. Dr. Darwin would have been ashamed to have rejected Hutton’s theory of the earth[107] without having minutely examined it; yet what is it to us _how_ the earth was made, a thing impossible to be known, and useless if known? This system the doctor did not reject without having severely studied it; but _all at once he makes up his mind_ on such important subjects, as whether we be the outcasts of a blind idiot called Nature, or the children of an all-wise and infinitely good God; whether we spend a few miserable years on this earth, and then sink into a clod of the valley, or only endure the anxieties of mortal life in order to fit us for the enjoyment of immortal happiness. These subjects are unworthy a philosopher’s investigation. He deems that there is a certain _self-evidence_ in infidelity, and becomes an atheist by intuition. Well did St. Paul say: “Ye have an evil _heart_ of unbelief.” I had an introductory letter from Mr. Strutt to a Mr. Fellowes of Nottingham. On Monday evening when I arrived I found there was a public dinner in honour of Mr. Fox’s birthday, and that Mr. Fellowes was present. It was a piece of famous good luck, and I seized it, waited on Mr. Fellowes, and was introduced to the company. On the right hand of the president whom should I see but an old College acquaintance? He hallooed out: “_Coleridge, by God!_” Mr. Wright, the president of the day, was his relation--a man of immense fortune. I dined at his house yesterday, and underwent the intolerable slavery of a dinner of three courses. We sat down at four o’clock, and it was six before the cloth was removed.

What lovely children Mr. Barr at Worcester has! After church, in the evening, they sat round and sang hymns so sweetly that they overwhelmed me. It was with great difficulty I abstained from weeping aloud--and the infant in Mrs. Barr’s arms leaned forwards, and stretched his little arms, and stared and smiled. It seemed a picture of Heaven, where the different orders of the blessed join different voices in one melodious allelujah; and the baby looked like a young spirit just that moment arrived in Heaven, startling at the seraphic songs, and seized at once with wonder and rapture.

My kindest remembrances to Mrs. Wade, and believe me, with gratitude and unfeigned friendship, your

S. T. COLERIDGE.

LIV. TO JOSEPH COTTLE.

REDCLIFF HILL, February 22, 1796.

MY DEAR SIR,--It is my duty and business to thank God for all his dispensations, and to believe them the best possible; but, indeed, I think I should have been more thankful, if he had made me a journeyman shoemaker, instead of an author by trade. I have left my friends; I have left plenty; I have left that ease which would have secured a literary immortality, and have enabled me to give the public works conceived in moments of inspiration, and polished with leisurely solicitude; and alas! for what have I left them? for ---- who deserted me in the hour of distress, and for a scheme of virtue impracticable and romantic! So I am forced to write for bread; write the flights of poetic enthusiasm, when every minute I am hearing a groan from my wife. Groans, and complaints, and sickness! The present hour I am in a quick-set hedge of embarrassment, and whichever way I turn a thorn runs into me! The future is cloud and thick darkness! Poverty, perhaps, and the thin faces of them that want bread, looking up to me! Nor is this all. My happiest moments for composition are broken in upon by the reflection that I must make haste. I am too late! I am already months behind! I have received my pay beforehand! Oh, wayward and desultory spirit of genius! Ill canst thou brook a taskmaster! The tenderest touch from the hand of obligation wounds thee like a scourge of scorpions.

I have been composing in the fields this morning, and came home to write down the first rude sheet of my preface, when I heard that your man had brought a note from you. I have not seen it, but I guess its contents. I am writing as fast as I can. Depend on it you shall not be out of pocket for me! I feel what I owe you, and independently of this I love you as a friend; indeed, so much, that I regret, seriously regret, that you have been my copyholder.

If I have written petulantly, forgive me. God knows I am sore all over. God bless you, and believe me that, setting gratitude aside, I love and esteem you, and have your interest at heart full as much as my own.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

LV. TO THOMAS POOLE.

March 30, 1796.

MY DEAR POOLE,--For the neglect in the transmission of “The Watchman,” you must blame George Burnett, who undertook the business. I however will myself see it sent this week with the preceding numbers. I am greatly obliged to you for your communication (on the Slave Trade in No. V.); it appears in this number, and I am anxious to receive more from you, and likewise to know what you _dislike_ in “The Watchman,” and what you like; but particularly the former. You have not given me your opinion of “The Plot Discovered.”[108]

Since last you saw me I have been well nigh distracted. The repeated and most injurious blunders of my printer out-of-doors, and Mrs. Coleridge’s increasing danger at home, added to the gloomy prospect of so many mouths to open and shut like puppets, as I move the string in the eating and drinking way--but why complain to you? Misery is an article with which every market is so glutted, that it can answer no one’s purpose to export it. _Alas! Alas! oh! ah! oh! oh!_ etc.

I have received many abusive letters, post-paid, thanks to the friendly malignants! But I am perfectly callous to disapprobation, except when it tends to lessen profit. There, indeed, I am all one tremble of sensibility, marriage having taught me the wonderful uses of that vulgar commodity, yclept _bread_. “The Watchman” succeeds so as to yield a _bread-and-cheesish_ profit. Mrs. Coleridge is recovering apace, and deeply regrets that she was deprived of seeing [you]. We are in our new house, where there is a bed at your service whenever you will please to delight us with a visit. Surely in spring you might force a few days into a sojourning with me.

Dear Poole, you have borne yourself towards me most kindly with respect to my epistolary ingratitude. But I know that you forbade yourself to feel resentment towards me because you had previously made my neglect ingratitude. A generous temper endures a great deal from one whom it has obliged deeply.

My poems are finished. I will send you two copies the moment they are published. In the third number of “The Watchman” there are a few lines entitled “The Hour when we shall meet again,” “_Dim hour that sleeps on pillowy clouds afar_,” which I think you will like. I have received two or three letters from different _anonymi_, requesting me to give more poetry. One of them writes:--

“Sir! I detest your principles; your prose I think very so-so; but your poetry is so _exquisitely_ beautiful, so _gorgeously_ sublime, that I take in your ‘Watchman’ solely on account of it. In justice therefore to me and some others of my stamp, I intreat you to give us more verse and less democratic scurrility. Your admirer,--not esteemer.”

Have you read over Dr. Lardner on the Logos? It is, I think, scarcely possible to read it and not be convinced.

I find that “The Watchman” comes more easy to me, so that I shall begin about my Christian Lectures. I will immediately order for you, unless you immediately countermand it, Count Rumford’s Essays; in No. V. of “The Watchman” you will see why. I have enclosed Dr. Beddoes’s late pamphlets, neither of them as yet published. The doctor sent them to me. I can get no one but the doctor to agree with me in my opinion that Burke’s “Letter to a Noble Lord”[109] is as contemptible in style as in matter--it is sad stuff.

My dutiful love to your excellent mother, whom, believe me, I think of frequently and with a pang of affection. God bless you. I’ll try and venture to scribble a line and a half every time the man goes with “The Watchman” to you.

N. B. The “Essay on Fasting”[110] I am ashamed of; but it is one of my misfortunes that I am obliged to publish _extempore_ as well as compose. God bless you,

and S. T. COLERIDGE.

LVI. TO THE SAME.

12th May, 1796.

Poole! The Spirit, who counts the throbbings of the solitary heart, knows that what my feelings ought to be, such they are. If it were in my power to give you anything which I have not already given, I should be oppressed by the letter now before me.[111] But no! I feel myself rich in being poor; and because I have nothing to bestow, I know how much I have bestowed. Perhaps I shall not make myself intelligible; but the strong and unmixed affection which I bear to you seems to exclude all emotions of gratitude, and renders even the principle of esteem latent and inert. Its presence is not perceptible, though its absence could not be endured.

Concerning the scheme itself, I am undetermined. Not that I am ashamed to receive--God forbid! I will make every possible exertion; my industry shall be at least commensurate with my learning and talents;--if these do not procure for me and mine the necessary comforts of life, I can receive as I would bestow, and, in either case--receiving or bestowing--be equally grateful to my Almighty Benefactor. I am undetermined, therefore--not because I receive with pain and reluctance, but--because I suspect that you attribute to others your own enthusiasm of benevolence; as if the sun should say, “With how rich a purple those opposite windows are burning!” But with God’s permission I shall talk with you on this subject. By the last page of No. X. you will perceive that I have this day dropped “The Watchman.” On Monday morning I will go _per_ caravan to Bridgewater, where, if you have a horse of tolerable meekness unemployed, you will let him meet me.

I should blame you for the exaggerated terms in which you have spoken of me in the Proposal, did I not perceive the motive. You wished to make it appear an offering--not a favour--and in excess of delicacy have, I fear, fallen into some grossness of flattery.

God bless you, my dear, very dear Friend. The widow[112] is calm, and amused with her beautiful infant. We are all become more religious than we were. God be ever praised for all things! Mrs. Coleridge begs her kind love to you. To your dear mother my filial respects.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

LVII. TO JOHN THELWALL.

May 13, 1796.