Chapter XV: Letter 10: To Southey

18 Sept. 1794.

Since I quitted this room what and how important events have been evolved! America! Southey! Miss Fricker!... Pantisocracy! Oh! I shall have such a scheme of it! My head, my heart, are all alive. I have drawn up my arguments in battle array: they shall have the "tactician" excellence of the mathematician, with the enthusiasm of the poet. The head shall be the mass; the heart, the fiery spirit that fills, informs and agitates the whole. SHAD GOES WITH US: HE IS MY BROTHER!! I am longing to be with you: make Edith my sister. Surely, Southey, we shall be frendotatoi meta frendous--most friendly where all are friends. She must, therefore, be more emphatically my sister.... C----, the most excellent, the most Pantisocratic of aristocrats, has been laughing at me. Up I arose, terrible is reasoning. He fled from me, because "he would not answer for his own sanity, sitting so near a madman of genius." He told me that the strength of my imagination had intoxicated my reason, and that the acuteness of my reason had given a directing influ-* *ence to my imagination. Four months ago the remark would not have been more elegant than just: now it is nothing. [1]

[Footnote 1: This letter is given in full in "Letters", No. XXXIV.]

These letters show that Pantisocracy was now the all absorbing topic.

The following letter written at this time by Coleridge to Mr. Charles Heath, of Monmouth, is a curious evidence of his earnestness upon this subject: