Chapter XIV: The Philosopher and Divine (2)

MY DEAR NEPHEW,--An interview with your cousin Henry on Saturday and a note received from him last night had enabled me in some measure to prepare my mind for the awful and _humanly_ afflicting contents of your letter, and I rose to the receiving of it from earnest suplication to “the Father of Mercies and God of all Comfort”--that He would be strong in the weakness of His faithful servant, and his effectual helper in the last conflict. My first impulse on reading your letter was to set off immediately, but on a re-perusal, I doubt whether I shall not better comply with your suggestion by waiting for your next. Assuredly, if God permit I will not forego the claim, which my heart and conscience justify me in making, to be one among the mourners who ever truly loved and honoured your father. Allow me, my dear nephew, in the swelling grief of my heart to say, that if ever man morning and evening and in the watches of the night had earnestly intreated through his Lord and Mediator, that God would shew him his sins and their sinfulness, I, for the last ten years at least of my life, have done so! But, in vain, have I tried to recall any one moment since my quitting the University, or any one occasion, in which I have either thought, felt, spoken, or intentionally acted of or in relation to my brother, otherwise than as one who loved in him father and brother in one, and who independent of the fraternal relation and the remembrance of his manifold goodness and kindness to me from boyhood to early manhood should have chosen him above all I had known as the friend of my inmost soul. Never have man’s feeling and character been more cruelly misrepresented than mine. Before God have I sinned, and I have not hidden my offences before him; but He too knows that the belief of my brother’s alienation and the grief that I was a stranger in the house of my second father has been the secret wound that to this hour never closed or healed up. Yes, my dear nephew! I do grieve, and at this moment I have to struggle hard in order to keep my spirit in tranquillity, as one who has long since referred his cause to God, through the grief at my little communication with my family. Had it been otherwise, I might have been able to shew myself, my _whole_ self, for evil and for good to my brother, and often have said to myself, “How fearful an attribute to sinful man is Omniscience!” and yet have I earnestly wished, oh, how many times! that my brother could have seen my inmost heart, with every thought and every frailty. But his reward is nigh: in the light and love of his Lord and Saviour he will soon be all light and love, and I too shall have his prayers before the throne. May the Almighty and the Spirit the Comforter dwell in your and your mother’s spirit. I must conclude. Only, if I come and it should please God that your dear father shall be still awaiting his Redeemer’s final call, I shall be perfectly satisfied in all things to be directed by you and your mother, who will judge best whether the knowledge of my arrival though without seeing him would or would not be a satisfaction, would or would not be a disturbance to him.

Your affectionate uncle,
S. T. COLERIDGE.

Grove, Highgate.
Rev. GEORGE MAY COLERIDGE,
Warden House, Ottery St. Mary, Devon.

CCXLVI. TO GEORGE DYER.[204]

June 6, 1828.

My dear long known, and long loved friend,--Be assured that neither Mr. Irving nor any other person, high or low, gentle or simple, stands higher in my esteem or bears a name endeared to me by more interesting recollections and associations than yourself; and if gentle man or gentle woman, taking too literally the partial portraiture of a friend, has a mind to see the old lion in his sealed cavern, no more potent “Open, Sesame, Open” will be found than an introduction from George Dyer, my elder brother under many titles--brother Blue, brother Grecian, brother Cantab, brother Poet, and last best form of fraternity, a man who has never in his long life, by tongue or pen, uttered what he did not believe to be the truth (from any motive) or concealed what he did conceive to be such from other motives than those of tenderness for the feelings of others, and a conscientious fear lest what was truly said might be falsely interpreted,--in all these points I dare claim brotherhood with my old friend (not omitting grey hairs, which are venerable), but in one point, the long toilsome life of inexhaustible, unsleeping benevolence and beneficence, that slept only when there was no form or semblance of sentient life to awaken it, George Dyer must stand alone! He may have a few second cousins, but no full brother.

Now, with regard to your friends, I shall be happy to see them on any day they may find to suit their or your convenience, from twelve (I am not ordinarily visible before, or if the outward man were forced to make his appearance, yet from sundry bodily infirmities, my soul would present herself with unwashed face) till four, that is, after Monday next,--we having at present a servant ill in bed, you must perforce be content with a sandwich lunch or a glass of wine.

But if you could make it suit you to take your tea, an early tea, at or before six o’clock, and spend the evening, a long evening, with us on Thursday next, Mr. and Mrs. Gillman will be most happy to see you and Mrs. Dyer, with your friends, and you will probably meet some old friend of yours. On Thursday evening, indeed, at any time, between half-past five and eleven, you may be sure of finding us at home, and with a very fair chance of Basil Montagu taking you and Mrs. Dyer back in his coach.

I have long owed you a letter, and should have long since honestly paid my debt; but we have had a house of sickness. My own health, too, has been very crazy and out of repair, and I have had so much work accumulated on me that I have been like an overtired man roused from insufficient sleep, who sits on his bedside with one stocking on and the other in his hand, doing nothing, and thinking what a deal he has to do.

But I am ever, sick or well, weary or lively, my dear Dyer, your sincere and affectionate friend,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CCXLVII. TO GEORGE CATTERMOLE.[205]

GROVE, HIGHGATE, Thursday, August 14, 1828.

MY DEAR SIR,--I have but this moment received yours of the 13th, and though there are but ten minutes in my power, if I am to avail myself of this day’s post, I will rather send you a very brief than not an immediate answer. I shall be much gratified by standing beside the baptismal font as one of the sponsors of the little pilgrim at his inauguration into the rights and duties of Immortality, and he shall not want my prayers, nor aught else that shall be within my power, to assist him in _becoming_ that of which the Great Sponsor who brought light and immortality into the world has declared him an emblem.

There are one or two points of character belonging to me, so, at least, I believe and trust, which I would gladly communicate with the name,--earnest love of Truth for its own sake, and steadfast convictions grounded on faith, not fear, that the religion into which I was baptised is the Truth, without which all other knowledge ceases to merit the appellation. As to other things, which yet I most sincerely wish for him, a more promising augury might be derived from other individuals of the Coleridge race.

_Any_ day, that you and your dear wife (to whom present my kindest remembrances and congratulations) shall find convenient, will suit me, if only you will be so good as to give me two or three days’ knowledge of it.

Believe me, my dear sir, with sincere respect and regard,

Your obliged
S. T. COLERIDGE.

P. S. I returned from my seven weeks’ Continental tour with Mr. Wordsworth and his daughter this day last week. We saw the Rhine as high up as Bingen, Holland, and the Netherlands.

CCXLVIII. TO J. H. GREEN.

GROVE, HIGHGATE, June 1, 1830.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--Do you happen among your acquaintances and connections to know any one who knows any one who knows Sir Francis Freeling of the Post Office sufficiently to be authorised to speak a recommendatory word to him? Our Harriet,[206] whose love and willing-mindedness to _me_-ward during my long chain of bodily miserablenesses render it my duty no less than my inclination to shew to her that I am not insensible of her humbly affectionate attentions, has applied to me in behalf of her brother, a young man who can have an excellent character, from Lord Wynford and others, for sobriety, integrity, and discretion, and who is exceedingly ambitious to get the situation of a postman or deliverer of letters to the General Post Office. Perhaps, before I see you next, you will be so good as to tumble over the names of your acquaintances, and if any connection of Sir Francis’ should turn up, to tell me, and if it be right and proper, to make my request and its motive.

Dr. Chalmers with his daughter and his very pleasing wife honoured me with a call this morning, and spent an hour with me, which the good doctor declared on parting to have been “_a refreshment_” such as he had not enjoyed for a long season.[207] N. B.--There were no sandwiches; only Mrs. Aders was present, who is most certainly a _bonne bouche_ for both eye and ear, and who looks as bright and sunshine-showery as if nothing had ever ailed her. The main topic of our discourse was Mr. Irving and his unlucky phantasms and phantis(ms). I was on the point of telling Dr. Chalmers, but fortunately recollected there were ladies and _Scotch_ ladies present, that, while other Scotchmen were content with brimstone for the itch, Irving had a rank itch for brimstone, new-sublimated by addition of fire. God bless you and your

Ever obliged and affectionate friend,
S. T. COLERIDGE.

30 May? or 1 June? at all events.
Monday night, 11 o’clock.

P. S.--Kind remembrances to Mrs. Green. I continue pretty well, on the whole, _considering_, save the soreness across the base of my chest.

CCXLIX. TO THOMAS POOLE.

1830.

MY DEAR POOLE,--Mr. Stutfield Junr.[208] has been so kind as to inform me of his father’s purposed journey to Stowey, and to give me this opportunity of writing; though in fact I have little _pleasant_ to say, except that I am advancing regularly and steadily towards the completion of my Opus Magnum on Revelation and Christianity, the Reservoir of my reflections and reading for twenty-five years past, and in health not painfully worse. I do not know, however, that I should have troubled you with a letter merely to convey this piece of information, but I have a great favour to request of you; that is, that, supposing you to have still in your possession the two letters of the biography of my own childhood which I wrote at Stowey for you, and a copy of the letter from Germany containing the account of my journey to the Harz and my ascent of Mount Brocken, you would have them transcribed, and send me the transcript addressed to me, James Gillman’s Esq., Highgate, London.

O that riches would but make wings for me instead of for itself, and I would fly to the seashore at Porlock and Lynmouth, making a good halt at dear, ever fondly remembered Stowey, of which, believe me, your image and the feelings and associations connected therewith constitute four fifths, to, my dear Poole,

Your obliged and affectionate friend,
S. T. COLERIDGE.

CCL. TO MRS. GILLMAN.

1830.

DEAR MRS. GILLMAN,--Wife of the friend who has been more than a brother to me, and who have month after month, yea, hour after hour, for how many successive years, united in yourself the affections and offices of an anxious friend and tender sister to me-ward!

May the Father of Mercies, the God of Health and all Salvation, be your reward for your great and constant love and loving-kindness to me, abiding with you and within you, as the Spirit of guidance, support, and consolation! And may his Grace and gracious Providence bless James and Henry for your sake, and make them a blessing to you and their father! And though weighed down by a heavy presentiment respecting my own sojourn here, I not only hope but have a steadfast faith that God will be your reward, because your love to me from first to last has begun in, and been caused by, what appeared to _you_ a translucence of the love of the good, the true, and the beautiful from within me,--as a relic of glory gleaming through the turbid shrine of my mortal imperfections and infirmities, as a Light of Life seen within “the body of this Death,”--because in loving me you loved our Heavenly Father reflected in the gifts and influences of His Holy Spirit!

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CCLI. TO J. H. GREEN.

December 15, 1831.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--It is at least a fair moiety of the gratification I feel, that it will give _you_ so much pleasure to hear from me, that I _tacked_ about on Monday, continued in smooth water during the whole day, and with exceptions of about an hour’s _muttering_, as if a storm was coming, had a comfortable night. I was still better on Tuesday, and had no relapse yesterday. I have so repeatedly given and suffered disappointment, that I cannot even communicate this gleam of convalescence without a little fluttering distinctly felt at my heart, and a sort of cloud-shadow of dejection flitting over me. God knows with what aims, motives, and aspirations I pray for an interval of ease and competent strength! One of my present wishes is to form a better nomenclature or terminology. I have long felt the exceeding inconvenience of the many different meanings of the term _objective_,--sometimes equivalent to apparent or sensible, sometimes in opposition to it,--_ex. gr._ “The objectivity is the rain drops and the reflected light, the iris, is but an appearance.” Thus, sometimes it means real and sometimes unreal, and the worst is, that it forms an obstacle to the fixation of the great truth, that the perfect reality is predicable only where actual and real are terms of identity, that is, where there is no _potential_ being, and that this alone is absolute reality; and further, of that most fundamental truth, that the _ground_ of _all_ reality, the objective no less than of the subjective, is the _Absolute Subject_. How to get out of the difficulty I do not know, save that some other term must be used as the antithet to phenomenal, perhaps noumenal.

James Gillman has passed an unusually strict and long examination for ordination with great credit, and was selected by the bishop to read the lessons in the service. The parents are, of course, delighted, and now, my dear friend, with affectionate remembrances to Mrs. Green, may God bless you and

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CCLII. TO HENRY NELSON COLERIDGE.[209]

THE GROVE, February 24, 1832.

My dear Nephew, and by a higher tie, Son, I thank God I have this day been favoured with such a mitigation of the disease as amounts to a reprieve, and have had ease enough of sensation to be able to think of what you said to me from Lockhart, and the result is a wish that you should--that is, if it appears right to you, and you have no objection of feeling--write for me to Professor Wilson, offering the Essays, and the motives for the wish to have them republished, with the authority (if there be no breach of confidence) of Mr. Lockhart. I cannot with propriety offer them to _Fraser_, having for a series of years received “Blackwood’s Magazine” as a free gift to me, _until_ I have made the offer to Blackwood. Of course, my whole and only object is the desire to see them put into the possibility of becoming useful. But, oh! this is a faint desire, my dear Henry, compared with that of seeing a fair abstract of the principles I have advanced respecting the National Church and its revenue, and the National Clerisy as a coördinate of the State, in the minor and antithetic sense of the term State!

I almost despair of the Conservative Party, too truly, I fear, and most ominously, self-designated _Tories_, and of course half-truthmen! One main omission both of senators and writers has been, ὡς ἔμοιγε δοκεῖ, that they have forgotten to level the axe of their argument at the root, the true root, yea, trunk of the delusion, by pointing out the true nature and operation and _modus operandi_ of the taxes in the first instance, and _then_ and not till then the utter groundlessness, the absurdity of the presumption that any House of Commons formed otherwise, and consisting of other men of other ranks, other views or with other interests, than the present has been for the last twenty years at least, would or could (from any imaginable cause) have a deeper interest or a stronger desire to diminish the taxes, as far as the abolition of this or that tax would increase the ability to pay the remainder. For what are taxes but one of the forms of circulation? Some a nation must have, or it is no nation. But he that takes ninepence from me instead of a shilling, but at the same time and by this very act prevents sixpence from coming into my pocket,--am I to thank him? Yet such are the only thanks that Mr. Hume and the Country Squires, his cowardly back-clapping flatterers, can fairly claim. In my opinion, Hume is an incomparably more mischievous being than O’Connell and the gang of agitators. They are mere symptomatic and significative effects, the roars of the inwardly agitated mass of the popular sea. But Hume is a fermenting virus. But I must end my scrawl. God bless my dear Sara. Give my love to Mrs. C. and kiss the baby for

S. T. COLERIDGE.

H. N. COLERIDGE, Esq., 1, New Court, Lincoln’s Inn.

CCLIII. TO MISS LAWRENCE.[210]

March 22, 1832.

MY DEAR MISS LAWRENCE,--You and _dear, dear_ Mrs. Crompton are among the few sunshiny images that endear my past life to me, and I never think of you without heartfelt esteem, without affection, and a _yearning_ of my better being toward you. I have for more than eighteen months been on the brink of the grave, the object of my wishes, and only not of my prayers, because I commit myself, poor dark creature, to an Omniscient and All-merciful, in whom are the issues of life and death,--content, yea, most thankful, if only His Grace will preserve within me the blessed faith that He _is_ and is a God that heareth prayers, abundant in forgiveness, and _therefore_ to be feared, no _fate_, no God as imagined by the Unitarians, a sort of, I know not what _law-giving_ Law of Gravitation, to whom prayer would be as idle as to the law of gravity, if an undermined wall were falling upon me; but “a God that made the eye, and therefore shall _He_ not see? who made the ear, and shall He not hear?” who made the heart of man to love Him, and shall He not love the creature whose ultimate end is to love Him?--a God who _seeketh_ that which was lost, who calleth back that which had gone astray; who calleth through His own Name; Word, Son, from everlasting the Way and the _Truth_; and who became man that for poor fallen mankind he might _be_ (not merely announced but _be_) the _Resurrection_ and the _Life_,--“Come unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy-laden, and _I_ will give you rest!” Oh, my dear Miss Lawrence! prize above all earthly things the faith. I trust that no sophistry of shallow infra-socinians has quenched it within you,--that God is a God that heareth prayers. If varied learning, if the assiduous cultivation of the reasoning powers, if an accurate and minute acquaintance with all the arguments of controversial writers; if an intimacy with the doctrines of the Unitarians, which can only be obtained by one who for a year or two in his early life had been a convert to them, yea, a zealous and by themselves deemed powerful supporter of their opinions; lastly, if the utter absence of any imaginable worldly interest that could sway or warp the mind and affections,--if all these combined can give any weight or authority to the opinion of a fellow-creature, they will give weight to my adjuration, sent from my sickbed to you in kind love. O trust, O trust, in your Redeemer! in the coeternal _Word_, the Only-begotten, the living _Name_ of the Eternal I AM, Jehovah, Jesus!

I shall endeavour to see Mr. Hamilton.[211] I doubt not his scientific attainments. I have had proofs of his taste and feeling as a poet, but believe me, my dear Miss Lawrence! that, should the cloud of distemper pass from over me, there needs no other passport to a cordial welcome from me than a line from you importing that he or she possesses your esteem and regard, and that you wish I should shew attention to them. I cannot make out your address, which I read “The Grange;” but where that is I know not, and fear that the Post Office may be as ignorant as myself. I must therefore delay the direction of my letter till I see Mr. Hamilton; but in all places, and independent of place, I am, my dear Miss Lawrence, with most affectionate recollections,

Your friend,
S. T. COLERIDGE.

Miss S. LAWRENCE, The Grange, nr. Liverpool.

CCLIV. TO THE REV. H. F. CARY.

GROVE, HIGHGATE, April 22, 1832.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--For I am sure by my love for you that you love me too well to have suffered my very rude and uncourteous vehemence of contradiction and reclamation respecting your advocacy of the Catilinarian Reform Bill, when we were last together, to have cooled, much less alienated your kindness; even though the interim had not been a weary, weary time of groaning and life-loathing for me. But I hope that this fearful night-storm is subsiding, as you will have heard from Mr. Green or dear Charles Lamb. I write now to say, that if God, who in His Fatherly compassion and through His love wherewith He hath beheld and loved me in Christ, in whom alone He can love the world, hath worked almost a miracle of grace in and for me by a sudden emancipation from a thirty-three years’ fearful slavery,[212] if God’s goodness should in time and so far perfect my convalescence as that I should be capable of resuming my literary labours, I have a thought by way of a light _prelude_, a sort of unstiffening of my long dormant joints and muscles, to give a reprint as nearly as possible, except in quality of the paper, a facsimile of John Asgill’s tracts with a life and copious notes,[213] to which I would affix Pastilla et Marginalia. See my MSS. notes, blank leaf and marginal, on Southey’s “Life of Wesley,” and sundry other works. Now can you direct me to any source of information respecting John Asgill, a prince darling of mine, the most honest of all Whigs, whom at the close of Queen Anne’s reign the scoundrelly Jacobite Tories twice expelled from Parliament, under the pretext of his incomparable, or only-with-Rabelais-to-be-compared argument against the base and cowardly custom of ever dying? And this tract is a very treasure, and never more usable as a medicine for our clergy, at least all such as the Bishop of London, Archbishops of Canterbury and of Dublin, the Paleyans and Mageeites,[214] any one or all of whom I would defy to answer a single paragraph of Asgill’s tract, or unloose a single link from the chain of logic. I have no biographical dictionary, and never saw one but in a little sort of one-volume thing. If you can help me in this, do. I give my kindest love to Mrs. Cary.

Yours, with unutterable and unuttered love and regard, in all (but as to the accursed Reform Bill! that _mendacium ingens_ to its own preamble (to which no human being can be more friendly than I am), that huge tapeworm _lie_ of some threescore and ten yards) entire sympathy of heart and soul,

Your affectionate
S. T. COLERIDGE.

CCLV. TO JOHN PEIRSE KENNARD.[215]

GROVE, HIGHGATE, August 13, 1832.

MY DEAR SIR,--Your letter has announced to me a loss too great, too awful, for common grief, or any of its ordinary forms and outlets. For more than an hour after, I remained in a state which I can only describe as a state of deepest mental silence, neither prayer nor thanksgiving, but a prostration of absolute faith, as if the Omnipresent were present to me by a more special intuition, passing all sense and all understanding. Whether Death be but the cloudy Bridge to the Life beyond, and Adam Steinmetz has been wafted over it without suspension, or with an immediate resumption of self-conscious existence, or whether his Life be hidden in God, in the eternal only-begotten, the Pleroma of all Beings and the _Habitation_ both of the Retained and the Retrieved, therein in a blessed and most divine Slumber to grow and evolve into the perfected Spirit,--for sleep is the appointed season of all growth here below, and God’s ordinances in the earthly may shadow out his ways in the Heavenly,--in either case our friend is _in God_ and _with God_. Were it possible for me even to _think_ otherwise,[216] the very grass in the fields would turn black before my eyes, and nature appear as a skeleton fantastically mossed over beneath the weeping vault of a charnel house!

Deeply am I persuaded that for every man born on earth there is an appointed task, some remedial process in the soul known only to the Omniscient; and, this through divine grace fulfilled, the sole question is whether it be needful or expedient for the church that he should still remain: for the individual himself “to depart and to be with Christ” must needs be GREAT gain. And of my dear, my filial friend, we may with a strong and most consoling assurance affirm that he was eminently one

Who, being innocent, did even for _that_ cause
Bestir him in good deeds!
Wise Virgin He, and wakeful kept his Lamp
Aye trimm’d and full; and thus thro’ grace he liv’d
In this bad World as in a place of Tombs,
And touch’d not the Pollutions of the Dead.

And yet in Christ only did he build a hope. Yea, he blessed the emptiness that made him capable of his Lord’s fullness, gloried in the blindness that was a receptive of his Master’s light, and in the nakedness that asked to be cloathed with the wedding-garment of his Redeemer’s Righteousness. Therefore say I unto you, my young friend, Rejoice! and again I say, Rejoice!

The effect of the event communicated in your letter has been that of awe and sadness on our whole household. Mrs. Gillman mourns as for a son, but with that grief which is felt for a departed saint. Even the servants felt as if an especially loved and honoured member of the family had been suddenly taken away. When I announced the sad tidings to Harriet, an almost _unalphabeted_ but very sensible woman, the tears swelled in her eyes, and she exclaimed, “Ah sir! how many a Thursday night, after Mr. Steinmetz was gone, and I had opened the door for him, I have said to them below, ‘That dear young man is too amiable to live. God will soon have him back.’” These were her very words. Nor were my own anticipations of his recall less distinct or less frequent. Not once or twice only, after he had shaken hands with me on leaving us, I have turned round with the tear on my cheek, and whispered to Mrs. Gillman, “Alas! there is _Death_ in that dear hand.”[217]

My dear sir! if our society can afford any comfort to _you_, as that of so dear a friend of Adam Steinmetz cannot but be to _us_, I beseech you in my own name, and am intreated by Mr. and Mrs. Gillman to invite you, to be his representative for us, and to take his place in our circle. And I must further request that you do not confine yourself to any particular evening of the week (for which there is now no reason), but that you consult your own convenience and opportunities of leisure. At whatever hour he comes, the fraternal friend of Adam Steinmetz will ever be dear and most welcome to

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CHAPTER XV

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

1833-1834