Chapter LXIV: Letter 179: To Allsop

Highgate, April 10th, 1820.

My dear Friend,

May I venture to obtrude on you what I cannot intrust to a messenger, much less to the post. Sackville-street is not I hope more than fifteen or twenty minutes' walk from your house. It is to inquire if Mr. Caldwell is _in town_; if he be, then to leave the letter, and that is all; but if not, to learn whether he is at his living, and if so, then to transfer his present address to the letter, and put it into the nearest General Post Office box. It is of serious importance to Derwent that the inclosed should reach Mr. Caldwell with as little delay as possible, or I need not say that I should not have taxed your time and kindness merely to make a letter-carrier of you.

On Saturday evening I received a note from Mathews, which I have inclosed. I took it very kind of him; but to obtrude myself on Walter Scott, _nolentem volentem_, and within a furlong of my own abode, as he knows (for Mr. Frere told him my address), was a liberty I had no right to take; and though it would have highly gratified me to have conversed with a brother bard, and to have renewed on the mental retina the image of, perhaps, the most extraordinary man, assuredly the most _extraordinary_ writer, of his age, yet I dared not purchase the gratification at so high a price as that of risking the respect which I trust has not hitherto been forfeited by,

My dear friend,
Your obliged and very affectionate friend,
S. T. COLERIDGE.
T. Allsop, Esq.

P.S. I had not the least expectation, yet I could not suppress a sort of fluttering hope, that my letter might have reached you on Saturday night, and that you might be disengaged and turn your walk Highgate-ward. You will be delighted with the affectionate attachment of the two brothers to each other, the boyish high spirits with manly independence of intellect, and, in one word, with the simplicity which is their nature, and the common _ground_ on which the differences of their mind and characters (for no two can be more distinct) shoot and play. When I say that nothing can exceed their fondness for their father, I need not add that they are impatient to be introduced to you. And I can offer no better testimony of the rank you hold in my bosom, my dear Allsop, than the gladness with which I anticipate their becoming your _friends_, in the noblest sense of the word. Would to Heaven their dear sister were with us, the cup of paternal joy would be full to the brim! The rapture with which both Hartley and Derwent talk of her, quite affects Mrs. Gillman, who has always felt with a sort of lofty yet refined enthusiasm respecting the relations of an only sister to her brothers. Of all women I ever knew, Mrs. G. is the woman who seems to have been framed by Nature for a heroine in that rare species of love which subsists in a tri-unity of the heart, the moral sense, and the faculty, corresponding to what Spurzheim calls the organ of _ideality_. What in other women is _refinement_ exists in her as by implication, and, _à fortiori_, in a native _fineness_ of character. She often represents to my mind the best parts of the Spanish Santa Teresa, ladyhood of nature.

_Vexation!_ and Mrs. Gillman has this moment burnt Mathews' note. The purport, however, was as follows:--"I have just received a note from Terry, informing me that Sir Walter Scott will call upon me to-morrow morning (_i.e._ Sunday) at half-past eleven. Will you contrive to be here at the same time? Perhaps the promise of your company may induce Sir Walter to appoint a day on which he will dine with me before he returns to the north."

Now as Scott had asked Terry for my address on his first arrival in town, it is not _impossible_, though not very probable, that Terry may have said--"You will meet Coleridge at Mathews's," though I was not entitled to presume this. The bottom of all this, my dear friend, is neither more nor less than as follows:--I seem to feel that I _ought_ to feel more desire to see an extraordinary man than I really do feel; and I do not wish to appear to two or three persons (as the Mr. Freres, William Rose, etc.), as if I cherished any dislike to Scott respecting the _Christabel_, and generally an increasing dislike to appear out of the common and natural mode of thinking and acting. All this is, I own, sad weakness, but I am weary of _dyspathy_.

* * * * *

It will be seen from the postscript of the last letter that Hartley and Derwent, Coleridge's sons, were on a visit to Highgate.]

FOOTNOTES:

[98] [Letters CCXIX-CCXXI follow 170.]

[99] [Letter CCXXII follows 172.]

[100] [Wordsworth.]

[101] [CCXXIII is our 173, CCXXIV follows.]

[102] [Letter CCXXV follows 175.]

[103] [_Biographia Literaria_.]

[104] [Letter CCXXVI follows 176.]

[105] [Letter CCXXVII follows 177.]

[106] [Bohn Library edition of the _Friend_, p. 344.]