Chapter VII: A Long Absence (1)

1804-1806

CXLIV. TO RICHARD SHARP.[1]

KING’S ARMS, KENDAL,
Sunday morning, January 15, 1804.

MY DEAR SIR,--I give you thanks--and, that I may make the best of so poor and unsubstantial a return, permit me to say, that they are such thanks as can only come from a nature unworldly by constitution and by habit, and now rendered more than ever impressible by sudden restoration--resurrection I might say--from a long, long sick-bed. I had gone to Grasmere to take my farewell of William Wordsworth, his wife, and his sister, and thither your letters followed me. I was at Grasmere a whole month, so ill, as that till the last week I was unable to read your letters. Not that my inner being was disturbed; on the contrary, it seemed more than usually serene and self-sufficing; but the exceeding pain, of which I suffered every now and then, and the fearful distresses of my sleep, had taken away from me the connecting link of voluntary power, which continually combines that part of us by which we know ourselves to be, with that outward picture or hieroglyphic, by which we hold communion with our like--between the vital and the organic--or what Berkeley, I suppose, would call mind and its sensuous language. I had only just strength enough to smile gratefully on my kind nurses, who tended me with sister’s and mother’s love, and often, I well know, wept for me in their sleep, and watched for me even in their dreams. Oh, dear sir! it does a man’s heart good, I will not say, to know such a family, but even to know that there _is_ such a family. In spite of Wordsworth’s occasional fits of hypochondriacal uncomfortableness,--from which, more or less, and at longer or shorter intervals, he has never been wholly free from his very childhood,--in spite of this hypochondriacal graft in his nature, as dear Wedgwood calls it, his is the happiest family I ever saw, and were it not in too great sympathy with my ill health--were I in good health, and their neighbour--I verily believe that the cottage in Grasmere Vale would be a proud sight for Philosophy. It is with no idle feeling of vanity that I speak of my importance to them; that it is _I_, rather than another, is almost an accident; but being so very happy within themselves they are too good, not the more, for that very reason, to want a friend and common object of love out of their household. I have met with several genuine Philologists, Philonoists, Physiophilists, keen hunters after knowledge and science; but truth and wisdom are higher names than these--and _revering_ Davy, I am half angry with him for doing that which would make me laugh in another man--I mean, for prostituting and profaning the name of “Philosopher,” “great Philosopher,” “eminent Philosopher,” etc., etc., etc., to every fellow who has made a lucky experiment, though the man should be Frenchified to the heart, and though the whole Seine, with all its filth and poison, flows in his veins and arteries.

Of our common friends, my dear sir, I flatter myself that you and I should agree in fixing on T. Wedgwood and on Wordsworth as genuine Philosophers--for I have often said (and no wonder, since not a day passes but the conviction of the truth of it is renewed in me, and with the conviction, the accompanying esteem and love), often have I said that T. Wedgwood’s faults impress me with veneration for his moral and intellectual character more than almost any other man’s virtues; for under circumstances like his, to have a fault only in that degree is, I doubt not, in the eye of God, to possess a high virtue. Who does not prize the Retreat of Moreau[2] more than all the straw-blaze of Bonaparte’s victories? And then to make it (as Wedgwood really does) a sort of crime even to think of his faults by so many virtues retained, cultivated, and preserved in growth and blossom, in a climate--where now the gusts so rise and eddy, that deeply rooted must _that_ be which is not snatched up and made a plaything of by them,--and, now, “the parching air burns frore.”

W. Wordsworth does not excite that almost painfully profound moral admiration which the sense of the exceeding difficulty of a given virtue can alone call forth, and which therefore I feel exclusively towards T. Wedgwood; but, on the other hand, he is an object to be contemplated with greater complacency, because he both deserves to be, and _is_, a happy man; and a happy man, not from natural temperament, for therein lies his main obstacle, not by enjoyment of the good things of this world--for even to this day, from the first dawn of his manhood, he has purchased independence and leisure for great and good pursuits by austere frugality and daily self-denials; nor yet by an accidental confluence of amiable and happy-making friends and relatives, for every one near to his heart has been placed there by choice and after knowledge and deliberation; but he is a happy man, because he is a Philosopher, because he knows the intrinsic value of the different objects of human pursuit, and regulates his wishes in strict subordination to that knowledge; because he feels, and with a _practical_ faith, the truth of that which you, more than once, my dear sir, have with equal good sense and kindness pressed upon me, that we can do but one thing well, and that therefore we must make a choice. He has made that choice from his early youth, has pursued and is pursuing it; and certainly no small part of his happiness is owing to this unity of interest and that homogeneity of character which is the natural consequence of it, and which that excellent man, the poet Sotheby, noticed to me as the characteristic of Wordsworth.

Wordsworth is a poet, a most original poet. He no more resembles Milton than Milton resembles Shakespeare--no more resembles Shakespeare than Shakespeare resembles Milton. He is himself and, I dare affirm that, he will hereafter be admitted as the first and greatest philosophical poet, the only man who has effected a complete and constant synthesis of thought and feeling and combined them with poetic forms, with the music of pleasurable passion, and with Imagination or the _modifying_ power in that highest sense of the word, in which I have ventured to oppose it to Fancy, or the _aggregating_ power--in that sense in which it is a dim analogue of creation--not all that we can _believe_, but all that we can _conceive_ of creation.--Wordsworth is a poet, and I feel myself a better poet, in knowing how to honour _him_ than in all my own poetic compositions, all I have done or hope to do; and I prophesy immortality to his “Recluse,” as the first and finest philosophical poem, if only it be (as it undoubtedly will be) a faithful transcript of his own most august and innocent life, of his own habitual feelings and modes of seeing and hearing.--My dear sir! I began a letter with a heart, Heaven knows! how full of gratitude toward you--and I have flown off into a whole letter-full respecting Wedgwood and Wordsworth. Was it that my heart demanded an outlet for grateful feelings--for a long stream of them--and that I felt it would be oppressive to you if I wrote to you of yourself half of what I wished to write? Or was it that I knew I should be in sympathy with you, and that few subjects are more pleasing to you than a detail of the merits of two men, whom, I am sure, you esteem equally with myself--though accidents have thrown me, or rather Providence has placed me, in a closer connection with them, both as confidential friends and the one as my benefactor, and to whom I owe that my bed of sickness has not been in a house of want, unless I had bought the contrary at the price of my conscience by becoming a priest.

I leave this place this afternoon, having walked from Grasmere yesterday. I walked the nineteen miles through mud and drizzle, fog and stifling air, in four hours and thirty-five minutes, and was not in the least fatigued, so that you may see that my sickness has not much weakened me. Indeed, the suddenness and seeming perfectness of my recovery is really astonishing. In a single hour I have changed from a state that seemed next to death, swollen limbs, racking teeth, etc., to a state of elastic health, so that I have said, “If I have been dreaming, yet you, Wordsworth, have been awake.” And Wordsworth has answered, “I could not expect any one to believe it who had not seen it.” These changes have always been produced by sudden changes of the weather. Dry hot weather or dry frosty weather seem alike friendly to me, and my persuasion is strong as the life within me, that a year’s residence in Madeira would renovate me. I shall spend two days in Liverpool, and hope to be in London, coach and coachman permitting, on Friday afternoon or Saturday at the furthest. And on this day week I look forward to the pleasure of thanking you personally, for I still hope to avail myself of your kind introductions. I mean to wait in London till a good vessel sails for Madeira; but of this when I see you.

Believe me, my dear sir, with grateful and affectionate thanks, your sincere friend,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CXLV. TO THOMAS POOLE.

KENDAL, Sunday, January 15, 1804.

MY DEAR POOLE,--My health is as the weather. That, for the last month, has been unusually bad, and so has my health. I go by the heavy coach this afternoon. I shall be at Liverpool tomorrow night. Tuesday, Wednesday, I shall stay there; not more _certainly_, for I have taken my place all the way to London, and this stay of two days is an indulgence and entered in the road-bill, so I expect to be in London on Friday evening about six o’clock, at the Saracen’s Head, Snow Hill. Now my dearest friend! will you send a twopenny post letter directed, “Mr. Coleridge (Passenger in the Heavy Coach from Kendal and Liverpool), to be left at the bar, Saracen’s Head, Snow Hill,” informing me whether I can have a bed at your lodgings, or whether Mr. Rickman could let me have a bed for one or two nights,--for I have such a dread of sleeping at an Inn or Coffee house in London, that it quite unmans me to think of it. To love and to be beloved makes hothouse plants of us, dear Poole!

Though wretchedly ill, I have not yet been deserted by hope--less dejected than in any former illness--and my mind has been active, and not vaguely, but to that determinate purpose which has employed me the last three months, and I want only one fortnight steady reading to have got _all_ my materials before me, and then I neither stir to the right nor to the left, so help me God! till the work is finished. Of its contents, the title will, in part, inform you, “Consolations and Comforts from the exercise and right application of the Reason, the Imagination, the Moral Feelings, Addressed especially to those in sickness, adversity, or distress of mind, _from speculative gloom_,[3] etc.”

I put that last phrase, though barbarous, for your information. I have puzzled for hours together, and could never hit off a phrase to express that idea, that is, at once neat and terse, and yet good English. The whole plan of my literary life I have now laid down, and the exact order in which I shall execute it, if God vouchsafe me life and adequate health; and I have sober though confident expectations that I shall render a good account of what may have appeared to you and others, a distracting manifoldness in my objects and attainments. You are nobly employed,--most worthily of you. _You_ are made to endear yourself to mankind as an immediate benefactor: I must throw my bread on the waters. You sow corn and I plant the olive. Different evils beset us. You shall give me advice, and I will advise you, to look steadily at everything, and to see it as it is--to be willing to see a thing to be evil, even though you see, at the same time, that it is for the present an irremediable evil; and not to overrate, either in the convictions of your intellect, or in the feelings of your heart, the Good, because it is present to you, and in your power--and, above all, not to be too hasty an admirer of the Rich, who seem disposed to do good with their wealth and influence, but to make your esteem strictly and severely proportionate to the worth of the Agent, not to the _value_ of the Action, and to refer the latter wholly to the Eternal Wisdom and Goodness, to God, upon whom it wholly depends, and in whom alone it has a moral worth.

I love and honour you, Poole, for many things--scarcely for anything more than that, trusting firmly in the rectitude and simplicity of your own heart, and listening with faith to its revealing voice, you never suffered either my subtlety, or my eloquence, to proselytize you to the pernicious doctrine of Necessity.[4] All praise to the Great Being who has graciously enabled me to find my way out of that labyrinth-den of sophistry, and, I would fain believe, to bring with me a better clue than has hitherto been known, to enable others to do the same. I have convinced Southey and Wordsworth; and W., as you know, was, even to extravagance, a Necessitarian. Southey never believed and abhorred the Doctrine, yet thought the argument for it unanswerable by human reason. I have convinced both of them of the sophistry of the argument, and wherein the sophism consists, viz., that all have hitherto--both the Necessitarians and their antagonists--confounded two essentially different things under one name, and in consequence of _this_ mistake, the victory has been always hollow, in favor of the Necessitarians.

God bless you, and

S. T. COLERIDGE.

P. S. If any letter come to your lodgings for me, of course you will take care of it.

CXLVI. TO THE SAME.

[January 26, 1804.]

MY DEAREST POOLE,--I have called on Sir James Mackintosh,[5] who offered me his endeavours to procure me a place under him in India, of which endeavour he would not for a moment doubt the success; and assured me _on his Honour, on his Soul_!! (N. B. _his_ Honour!!) (N. B. _his_ Soul!!) that he was sincere. Lillibullero ahoo! ahoo! ahoo! Good morning, Sir James!

I next called on Davy, who seems more and more determined to mould himself upon the Age, in order to make the Age mould itself upon him. Into this language at least I could have translated his conversation. Oh, it is a dangerous business this bowing of the head in the Temple of Rimmon; and such men I aptly christen _Theo-mammonists_, that is, those who at once worship God and Mammon. However, God grant better things of so noble a work of His! And, as I once before said, may that Serpent, the World, climb around the club which supports him, and be the symbol of healing; even as in Tooke’s “Pantheon,”[6] you may see the thing _done_ to your eyes in the picture of Esculapius. Well! now for business. I shall leave the note among the schedules. They will wonder, plain, sober people! what damn’d madcap has got among them; or rather I will put it under the letter just arrived for you, that at least it may perhaps be _under_ the _Rose_.[7]

Well, once again. I will try to get at it, but I am landing on a surfy shore, and am always driven back upon the open sea of various thoughts.

I dine with Davy at five o’clock this evening at the Prince of Wales’s Coffee House, Leicester Square, an he can give us three hours of his company; and I beseech you _do_ make a point and come. God bless you, and may _His_ Grace be as a pair of brimstone gloves to guard against dirty diseases from such bad company as you are keeping--Rose[8] and Thomas Poole!--!!!

S. T. COLERIDGE.

T. POOLE, ESQ., Parliament Office.

[Note in Poole’s handwriting: “Very interesting _jeu d’esprit_, but not sent.”]

CXLVII. TO THE WORDSWORTHS.

DUNMOW, ESSEX, Wednesday night, ½ past 11,
February 8, 1804.

MY DEAREST FRIENDS,--I must write, or I shall have delayed it till delay has made the thought painful as of a duty neglected. I had meant to have kept a sort of journal for you, but I have not been calm enough; and if I had kept it, I should not have time to transcribe, for nothing can exceed the bustle I have been in from the day of my arrival in town. The only incident of any extraordinary interest was a direful quarrel between Godwin and me,[9] in which, to use his own phrase (unless Lamb suggested it to him), I “thundered and lightened with frenzied eloquence” at him for near an hour and a half. It ended in a reconciliation next day; but the affair itself, and the ferocious spirit into which a _plusquam sufficit_ of punch had betrayed me, has sunk deep into my heart. Few events in my life have grieved me more, though the fool’s conduct richly merited a flogging, but not with a scourge of scorpions. I wrote to Mrs. Coleridge the next day, when my mind was full of it, and, when you go into Keswick, she will detail the matter, if you have nothing better to talk of. My health has greatly improved, and rich and precious wines (of several of which I had never before heard the names) agree admirably with me, and I fully believe, most dear William! they would with you. But still I am as faithful a barometer, and previously to, and during all falling weather, am as asthmatic and stomach-twitched as when with you. I am a perfect conjuror as to the state of the weather, and it is such that I detected myself in being somewhat flattered at finding the infallibility of my uncomfortable feelings, as to falling weather, either coming or come. What Sicily may do for me I cannot tell, but Dalton,[10] the Lecturer on Natural Philosophy at the R. Institution, a man devoted to Keswick, convinced me that there was five times the duration of falling weather at Keswick compared with the flat of midland counties, and more than twice the gross quantity of water fallen. I have as yet been able to do nothing for myself. My plans are to try to get such an introduction to the Captain of the war-ship that shall next sail for Malta, as to be taken as his friend (from Malta to Syracuse is but six hours passage in a spallanza). At Syracuse I shall meet with a hearty welcome from Mr. Lecky, the Consul, and I hope to be able to have a letter from Lord Nelson to the Convent of Benedictines at Catania to receive and lodge me for such time as I may choose to stay. Catania is a pleasant town, with pleasant, hospitable inhabitants, at the foot of Etna, though fifteen miles, alas! from the woody region. Greenough[11] has read me an admirable, because most minute, journal of his Sights, Doings, and Done-untos in Sicily.

As to money, I shall avail myself of £105, to be repaid to you on the first of January, 1805, and another £100, to be employed in paying the Life Assurance, the bills at Keswick, Mrs. Fricker, next half year; and if any remain, to buy me comforts for my voyage, etc., Dante and a dictionary. I shall borrow part from my brothers, and part from Stuart. I can live a year at Catania (for I have no plan or desire of travelling except up and down Etna) for £100, and the getting back I shall trust to chance.

O my dear, dear friends! if Sicily should become a British island,--as all the inhabitants intensely desire it to be,--and if the climate agreed with you as well as I doubt not it will with me,--and if it be as much cheaper than even Westmoreland, as Greenough reports, and if I could get a Vice-Consulship, of which I have little doubt, oh, what a dream of happiness could we not realize! But mortal life seems destined for no continuous happiness, save that which results from the exact performance of duty; and blessed are you, dear William! whose path of duty lies through vine-trellised elm-groves, through Love and Joy and Grandeur. “O for one hour of Dundee!”[12] How often shall I sigh, “Oh! for one hour of ‘The Recluse’!”

I arrived at Dunmow on Tuesday, and shall stay till Tuesday morning. You will direct No. 116 Abingdon St., Westminster. I was not received here with mere kindness; I was welcomed _almost_ as you welcomed me when first I visited you at Racedown. And their solicitude and attention is enough to effeminate one. Indeed, indeed, they _are_ kind and good people; and old Lady Beaumont, now eighty-six, is a sort of miracle for beauty and clear understanding and cheerfulness. The house is an old house by a tan-yard, with nothing remarkable but its awkward passages. We talk by the long hours about you and Hartley, Derwent, Sara, and Johnnie; and few things, I am persuaded, would delight them more than to live near you. I wish you would write out a sheet of verses for them, and I almost promised for you that you should send that delicious poem on the Highland Girl at Inversnade. But of more importance, incomparably, is it, that Mary and Dorothy should begin to transcribe _all_ William’s MS. poems _for me_. Think what they will be to me in Sicily! They should be written in pages and lettered up in parcels not exceeding two ounces and a quarter each, including the seal, and _three_ envelopes, one to the Speaker, under that, one to John Rickman, Esqre, and under that, one to _me_. (Terrible mischief has happened from foolish people of R.’s acquaintance _neglecting_ the middle envelope, so that the Speaker, opening his letter, finds himself made a letter smuggler to Nicholas Noddy or some other unknown gentleman.) But I will send you the exact form. The weight is not of much importance, but better not exceed two ounces and a quarter. I will write again as soon as I hear from you. In the mean time, God bless you, dearest William, Dorothy, Mary, S., and my godchild.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CXLVIII. TO HIS WIFE.

February 19, 1804.

“J. Tobin, Esqre.,[13] No. 17 Barnard’s Inn, Holborn. For Mr. Coleridge.” _So_, if you wish me to answer it by return of post: but if it be of no consequence, whether I receive it four hours sooner or four hours later, then direct “Mr. Lambe,[14] East India House, London.”

I did not receive your last letter written on the “very, very windy and very cold Sunday night,” till yesterday afternoon, owing to Poole’s neglect and forgetfulness. But Poole is one of those men who have one good quality, namely, that they always _do_ one thing at a time; but who likewise have one defect, that they can seldom _think_ but of one thing at a time. For instance, if Poole is intent on his matter while he is speaking, he cannot give the least attention to his language or pronunciation, in consequence of which there is no one error in his dialect which he has ever got rid of. My mind is in general of the contrary make. I too often _do_ nothing, in consequence of being impressed all at once (or so rapidly consecutively as to appear all at once) by a variety of impressions. If there are a dozen people at table I hear, and cannot help giving some attention to what each one says, even though there should be three or four talking at once. The detail of the Good and the Bad, of the two different _makes_ of mind, would form a not uninteresting brace of essays in a _Spectator_ or _Guardian_.

You will of course repay Southey instantly all the money you may have borrowed either for yourself or for Mr. Jackson,[15] and do not forget to remember that a share of the _wine-bill_ belonged to me. Likewise when you pay Mr. Jackson, you will pay him just as if he had not had any money from you. Is it half a year? or a year and a half’s rent that we owe him? Did we pay him up to July last? If we did, _then_, were I you, I would now pay him the whole year’s rent up to July next, and tell him that you shall not want the twenty pounds which you have lent him till the beginning of May. Remember me to him in the most affectionate manner, and say how sincerely I condole with him on his sprain. Likewise, and as affectionately, remember me to Mrs. Wilson.

It gave me pain and a feeling of anxious concern on our own account, as well as Mr. Jackson’s, to find him so distressed for money. I fear that he will be soon induced to sell the house.

Now for our darling Hartley. I am myself not at all anxious or uneasy respecting his _habits_ of idleness; but I should be very unhappy if he were to go to the town school, unless there were any steady lad that Mr. Jackson knew and could rely on, who went to the same school regularly, and who would be easily induced by half-a-crown once in two or three months to take care of him, let him always sit by him, and to whom you should instruct the child to yield a certain degree of obedience. If this can be done (and you will read what I say to Mr. Jackson), I have no great objection to his going to school and making a fair trial of it. Oh, may God vouchsafe me health that he may go to school to his own father! I exceedingly wish that there were any one in Keswick who would give him a little instruction in the elements of drawing. I will go to-morrow and enquire for some very elementary book, if there be any, that proposes to teach it without the assistance of a drawing master, and which you might make him _read_ to you instead of his other books. Sir G. Beaumont was very much pleased and interested by Hartley’s promise of attachment to his darling Art. If I can find the book I will send it off instantly, together with the Spillĕkins (Spielchen, or Gamelet, I suppose), a German refinement of our Jack Straw. You or some one of your sisters will be so good as to play with Hartley, at first, that Derwent may learn it. Little Albert at Dr. Crompton’s, and indeed all the children, are quite spillekin mad. It is certainly an excellent game to teach children steadiness of hand and quickness of eye, and a good opportunity to impress upon them the beauty of strict truth, when it is against their own interest, and to give them a pride in it, and habits of it,--for the slightest perceptible motion produced in any of the spillekins, except the one attempted to be _crooked_ off the heap, destroys that turn, and there is a good deal of foresight executed in knowing when to give it a lusty pull, so as to move the spillekins under, if only you see that your adversary who will take advantage of this pull, will himself not succeed, and yet by _his_ or the second pull put the spillekin easily in the power of the third pull.... I am now writing in No. 44 Upper Titchfield Street, where I have for the first time been breakfasting with A. Welles, who seems a kind, friendly man, and instead of recommending any more of his medicine to me, advises me to persevere in and expedite my voyage to a better climate, and has been very pressing with me to take up my home at his house. To-morrow I dine with Mr. Rickman at his own house; Wednesday I dine with him at Tobin’s. I shall dine with Mr. Welles to-day, and thence by eight o’clock to the Royal Institution to the lecture.[16] On Thursday afternoon, two o’clock to the lecture, and Saturday night, eight o’clock to the lecture. On Friday, I spend the day with Davy certainly, and I hope with Mr. Sotheby likewise. To-morrow or Wednesday I expect to know certainly what my plans are to be, whither to go and when, and whether the intervening space will make it worth my while to go to Ottery, or whether I shall go back to Dunmow, and return with Sir George and Lady B. when they come to their house in Grosvenor Square. I cannot express to you how very, very affectionate the behaviour of these good people has been to me; and how they seem to love by anticipation those very few whom I love. If Southey would but permit me to copy that divine passage of his “Madoc,”[17] respecting the Harp of the Welsh Bard, and its imagined divinity, with the Two Savages, or any other detachable passage, or to transcribe his “Kehama,” I will pledge myself that Sir George Beaumont and Lady B. will never suffer a single individual to hear or see a single line, you _saying_ that it is to be kept sacred to them, and not to be seen by any one else.

[No signature.]

CXLIX. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

Rickman’s Office, H. of Commons,
February 20, 1804, Monday noon.

DEAR SOUTHEY,--The affair with Godwin began thus. We were talking of reviews, and bewailing their ill effects. I detailed my plan for a review, to occupy regularly the fourth side of an evening paper, etc., etc., adding that it had been a favourite scheme with me for two years past. Godwin very coolly observed that it was a plan which “no man who had a spark of honest pride” could join with. “No man, not the slave of the grossest egotism, could unite in,” etc. Cool and civil! I asked whether he and most others did not already do what I proposed in prefaces. “Aye! in _prefaces_; that is quite a different thing.” I then adverted to the extreme rudeness of the speech with regard to myself, and added that it was not only a very rough, but likewise a very mistaken opinion, for I was nearly if not quite sure that it had received the approbation both of you and of Wordsworth. “Yes, sir! just so! of Mr. Southey--just what I said,” and so on _mōrĕ Godwiniāno_ in language so ridiculously and exclusively appropriate to himself, that it would have made you merry. It was even as if he was looking into a sort of moral looking-glass, without knowing what it was, and, seeing his own very, very Godwinship, had by a merry conceit christened it in your name, not without some annexment of me and Wordsworth. I replied by laughing in the first place at the capricious nature of his nicety, that what was gross in folio should become double-refined in octavo foolscap or _pickpocket_ quartos, blind slavish egotism in small pica, manly discriminating self-respect in double primer, modest as maiden’s blushes between boards, or in calf-skin, and only not obscene in naked sheets. And then in a deep and somewhat sarcastic tone, tried to teach him to speak more reverentially of his betters, by stating what and who they were, by whom honoured, by whom depreciated. Well! this gust died away. I was going home to look over his Duncity; he begged me to stay till his return in half an hour. I, meaning to take nothing more the whole evening, took a crust of bread, and Mary Lamb made me a glass of punch of most deceitful strength. Instead of half an hour, Godwin stayed an hour and a half. In came his wife, Mrs. Fenwick,[18] and four young ladies, and just as Godwin returned, supper came in, and it was now useless to go (at supper I was rather a mirth-maker than merry). I was disgusted at heart with the grossness and vulgar insanocecity of this dim-headed prig of a philosophocide, when, after supper, his ill stars impelled him to renew the contest. I begged him not to goad me, for that I feared my feelings would not long remain in my power. He (to my wonder and indignation) persisted (I had not deciphered the cause), and then, as he well said, I did “thunder and lighten at him” with a vengeance for more than an hour and a half. Every effort of self-defence only made him more ridiculous. If I had been Truth in person, I could not have spoken more accurately; but it was Truth in a war-chariot, drawn by the three Furies, and the reins had slipped out of the goddess’s hands!... Yet he did not absolutely give way till that stinging _contrast_ which I drew between him as a man, as a writer, and a benefactor of society, and those of whom he had spoken so irreverently. In short, I suspect that I seldom, at any time and for so great a length of time, so continuously displayed so much power, and do hope and trust that never did I display one half the scorn and ferocity. The next morning, the moment when I awoke, O mercy! I did feel like a very wretch. I got up and immediately wrote and sent off by a porter, a letter, I dare affirm an affecting and eloquent letter to him, and since then have been working for him, for I was heart-smitten with the recollection that I had said all, all in the presence of his _wife_. But if I had known all I now know, I will not say that I should not have apologised, but most certainly I should not have made such an apology, for he confessed to Lamb that he should not have persisted in irritating me, but that Mrs. Godwin had twitted him for his prostration before me, as if he was afraid to say his life was his own in my presence. He admitted, too, that although he never to the very last suspected that I was tipsy, yet he saw clearly that something unusual ailed me, and that I had not been my natural self the whole evening. What a poor creature! To attack a man who had been so kind to him at the instigation of such a woman![19] And what a woman to instigate him to quarrel with _me_, who with as much power as any, and more than most of his acquaintances, had been perhaps the only one who had never made a butt of him--who had uniformly spoken respectfully to him. But it is past! And I trust will teach me wisdom in future.

I have undoubtedly suffered a great deal from a cowardice in not daring to repel unassimilating acquaintances who press forward upon my friendship; but I dare aver, that if the circumstances of each particular case were examined, they would prove on the whole honourable to me rather than otherwise. But I have had enough and done enough. Hereafter I shall show a different face, and calmly inform those who press upon me that my health, spirits, and occupation alike make it necessary for me to confine myself to the society of those with whom I have the nearest and highest connection. So help me God! I will hereafter be quite sure that I do really and in the whole of my heart esteem and like a man before I permit him to call me friend.

I am very anxious that you should go on with your “Madoc.” If the thought had happened to suggest itself to you originally and with all these modifications and polypus tendrils with which it would have caught hold of your subject, I am afraid that you would not have made the first voyage _as_ interesting at least as it ought to be, so as to preserve entire the fit proportion of interest. But go on!

I shall call on Longman as soon as I receive an answer from him to a note which I sent....

God bless you and

S. T. COLERIDGE.

P. S. I have just received Sara’s four lines added to my brother George’s letter, and cannot explain her not having received my letters. If I am not mistaken I have written three or four times: upon an average I have written to Greta Hall once every five days since I left Liverpool--if you will divide the letters, one to each five days. I will write to my brother immediately. I wrote to Sara from Dunmow; to you instantly on my return, and now again. I do not deserve to be scolded at present. I met G. Burnett the day before yesterday in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, so nervous, so helpless with such opium-stupidly-wild eyes.

Oh, it made the place one calls the heart feel as it was going to ache.

CL. TO HIS WIFE.

Mr. J. C. Motley’s, Thomas Street, Portsmouth,
Sunday, April 1, 1804.

MY DEAR SARA,--I am waiting here with great anxiety for the arrival of the Speedwell. The Leviathan, Man of War, our convoy, has orders to sail with the first fair wind, and whatever wind can bring in the Speedwell will carry out the Leviathan, unless she have other orders than those generally known. I have left the Inn, and its _crumena-mulga natio_, and am only at the expense of a lodging at half a guinea a week, for I have all my meals at Mr. Motley’s, to whom a letter from Stuart introduced me, and who has done most especial honour to the introduction. Indeed he could not well help, for Stuart in his letter called me his very, very particular friend, and that every attention would sink more into his heart than one offered to himself or his brother. Besides, you know it is no new thing for people to take sudden and hot likings to me. How different Sir G. B.! He disliked me at first. When I am in better spirits and less flurried I will transcribe his last letter. It breathed the very soul of calm and manly yet deep affection.

Hartley will receive his and Derwent’s Spillekins with a letter from me by the first waggon that leaves London after Wednesday next.

My dear Sara! the mother, the attentive and excellent mother of my children must needs be always more than the word friend can express when applied to a woman. I pray you, use no word that you use with reluctance. Yet what we have been to each other, our understandings will not permit our hearts to forget! God knows, I weep tears of blood, but so it is! For I greatly esteem and honour you. Heaven knows if I can leave you really comfortable in your circumstances I shall meet Death with a face, which I feel at the moment I say it, it would rather shock than comfort you to imagine.

My health is indifferent. I am rather endurably unwell than tolerably well. I will write Southey to-morrow or next day, though Motley rides and drives me about sightseeing so as to leave me but little time. I am not sure that I shall see the Isle of Wight.

Write to Wordsworth. Inform him that I have received all and everything and will write him very soon, as soon as I can command spirits and time.... Motley can send off all letters to Malta under Government covers. You direct, therefore, at all times merely to me at Mr. J. C. Motley’s, Portsmouth.

My very dear Sara, may God Almighty bless you and your affectionate

S. T. COLERIDGE.

I mourn for poor Mary.

CLI. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

Off Oporto and the coast of Portugal,
Monday noon, April 16, 1804.

MY DEAR SOUTHEY,--I was thinking long before daylight this morning, that I ought, spite of toss and tumble and cruel rocking, to write a few letters in the course of this and the three following days; at the end of which, if the northwest wind still blows behind, we may hope to be at Gibraltar. I have two or three very unpleasant letters to write, and I was planning whether I should not begin with these, have them off my hands and thoughts, in short, whistle them down into the sea, and then take up the paper, etc., a _whole_ man. When, lo! I heard the Captain above deck talking of Oporto, slipped on my greatcoat and went shoeless up to have a look. And a beautiful scene verily it was and is! The high land of Portugal, and the mountain land behind it, and behind that fair mountains with blue pyramids and cones. By the glass I could distinguish the larger buildings in Oporto, a scrambling city, part of it, seemingly, walls washed by the sea, part of it upon hills. At first view, it looked much like a vast brick kiln in a sandy, clayey country on a hot summer afternoon; seen more distinctly, it gave the nobler idea of a ruined city in a wilderness, its houses and streets lying low in ruins under its ruined walls, and a few temples and palaces standing untouched. But over all the sea between us and the land, short of a stone’s throw on the left of the vessel, there is such a delicious warm olive green, almost yellow, on the water, and now it has taken in the vessel, and its boundary is a gunshot to my right, and one fine vessel exactly on its edge. This, though occasioned by the impurity of the nigh shore and the disemboguing rivers, forms a home scene; it is warm and landlike. The air is balmy and genial, and all that the fresh breeze can do can scarcely keep under its vernal warmth. The country round about Oporto seems darkly wooded; and in the distant gap far behind and below it on the _curve_ of that high ridge forming a gap, I count seventeen conical and pyramidal summits; below that the high hills are saddlebacked. (In picturesque cant I ought to have said BUT below that, etc.) To me the saddleback is a pleasant form which it never would have occurred to me to christen by that name. Tents and marquees with little points and summits made by the tent-poles suggest a more striking likeness. Well! I need not say that the sight of the coast of Portugal made it impossible for me to write to any one before I had written to you--I now seeing for the first time a country you love so dearly. But you, perhaps, are not among my mountains! God Almighty grant that you may not. Yes! you are in London: all is well, and Hartley has a younger sister than tiny Sally. If it be so, call her Edith--Edith by itself--Edith. But somehow or other I would rather it were a boy, _then_ let nothing, I conjure you, no false compliment to another, no false feeling indulged in yourself, deprive your eldest son of his father’s name. Such was ever the manner of our forefathers, and there is a dignity, a self-respect, or an awful, preëminently self-referring event in the custom, that makes it well worthy of our imitation. I would have done [so], but that from my earliest years I have had a feeling of dislike and disgust connected with my own Christian name--such a vile short plumpness, such a dull abortive smartness in the first syllable, and this so harshly contrasted by the obscurity and indefiniteness of the syllabic vowel, and the feebleness of the uncovered liquid with which it ends, the wobble it makes, and struggling between a dis- and a tri-syllable, and the whole name sounding as if you were abeeceeing S. M. U. L. Altogether, it is, perhaps, the worst combination of which vowels and consonants are susceptible. While I am writing we are in 41° 10m. latitude, and are almost three leagues from land; at one time we were scarcely one league from it, and about a quarter of an hour ago, the whole country looked so very like the country from Hutton Moor to Saddleback and the adjoining part of Skiddaw.

I cannot help some anxious feelings respecting you, nor some superstitious twitches within, as if it were wrong at this distance to write so prospectively and with such particularization of that which is contingent, which may be all otherwise. But--God forbid! and, surely, hope is less ominous than fear. We set sail from St. Helier’s, April 9th, Monday morning, having dropped down thither from Spithead on Sunday evening. We lost twenty-six hours of fair wind before our commodore gave the signal--our brig, a most excellent and first-rate sailor, but laden deep with heavy goods (eighty-four large cannon for Trieste in the hold), which makes it rock most cruelly. I can only--

Wed. April 18. I was going to say I can only compare it to a wench kept at home on some gay day to nurse a fretful infant and who, having long rocked it in vain, at length rocks it in spite.... But though the rough weather and the incessant rocking does not disease me, yet the damn’d rocking depresses one inconceivably, like hiccups or itching; it is troublesome and impertinent and forces you away from your thoughts like the presence and gossip of an old aunt, or long-staying visitor, to two lovers. Oh with what envy have I gazed at our commodore, the Leviathan of seventy-four guns, the majestic and beautiful creature sailing right before us, sometimes half a mile, oftener a furlong (for we are always first), with two or at most three topsails that just bisect the naked masts--as much naked mast above as below, upright, motionless as a church with its steeple, as though it moved by its will, as though its speed were spiritual, the being and essence without the body of motion, or as though the distance passed away by it and the objects of its pursuit hurried onward to it! In all other respects I cannot be better off, except perhaps the two passengers; the one a gay, worldly-minded fellow, not deficient in sense or judgment, but inert to everything except gain and eating; the other, a woman once housekeeper in General Fox’s family, a creature with a horrible superfluity of envelope, a monopolist and patentee of flabby flesh, or rather _fish_. Indeed, she is at once fish, flesh, and _fowl_, though no chicken. But, ... to see the man eat and this Mrs. Carnosity talk about it! “I must have that little potato” (baked in grease under the meat), “it looks so smilingly at me.” “Do cut me, if you please” (for she is so fat she cannot help herself), “that small bit, just there, sir! a leetle, tiny bit below if you please.” “Well, I have brought plenty of pickles, I always think,” etc. “I have always three or four jars of brandy cherries with me: for with boil’d rice now,” etc., “for I always think,” etc. And true enough, if it can be called thinking, she does always think upon some little damned article of eating that belongs to the housekeeper’s cupboard’s locker. And then her plaintive yawns, such a mixture of moan and petted child’s dry _cry_, or _try_ at a cry in them. And then she said to me this morning, “How unhappy, I always think, one always is, when there is nothing and nobody as one may say, about _one_ to amuse _one_. It makes me so _nervous_.” She eats, drinks, snores, and simply the being stupid, and silly, and vacant the learned body calls nervous. Shame on me for talking about her! The sun is setting so exactly behind my back that a ball from it would strike the stem of the vessel against which my back rests. But sunsets are not so beautiful, I think, at sea as on land. I am sitting at _my_ desk, namely the rudder-case, on the duck coop, the ducks quacking at my legs. The chicken and duck coops run thus and so inclose on three sides the rudder-case. But now immediately that the sun has sunk, the sea runs high, and the vessel begins its old trick of rocking, which it had intermitted the whole day--the second intermission only since our voyage. Oh, how glad I was to see Cape Mondego, and then yesterday the Rock of Lisbon and the fine mountains at its interior extremity, which I conceived to be Cintra! Its outline from the sea is something like this

and just at A. where the fine stony M. begins, with a C. lying on its back, is a village or villages, and before we came abreast of this, we saw far inland, seemingly close by, several breasted peaks, two towers, and, by the glass, three, of a very large building, be it convent or palace. However, I knew you had seen all these places over and over again. The dome-shaped mountain or Cape Esperichel, between Lisbon and Cape St. Vincent, is one of the finest I ever saw; indeed all the mountains have a noble outline. We sail on at a wonderful rate, and considering that we are in convoy, shall have made a most lucky voyage to Gibraltar, if we are not becalmed and taken in the Gut; for we shall be there to-morrow afternoon if the wind hold, and have gone it in ten days. It is unlucky to prophesy good things, but if we have as good fortune in the Mediterranean, instead of nine or eleven weeks, we may reach Malta in a month or five weeks, including the week which we shall most probably stay at Gibraltar. I shall keep the letters open till we arrive there, simply put two strokes under the word “=Gibraltar=,” and close up the letter, as I may gain thereby a fortnight’s post. You will not expect to hear from me again till we get to Malta. I had hoped to have done something during my voyage; at all events, to have written some letters, etc. But what with the rains, the incessant rocking, and my consequent ill health or stupefaction, I have done little else than read through the Italian Grammar. I took out with me some of the finest wine and the oldest in the kingdom, some marvellous brandy, and rum twenty years old, and excepting a pint of wine, which I had mulled at two different times, and instantly ejected again, I have touched nothing but lemonade from the day we set sail to the present time. So very little does anything grow into a habit with me! This I should say to poor Tobin, who continued _advising_ and _advising_ to the last moment. O God, he is a good fellow, but this rage of _advising_ and _discussing character_, and (as almost all men of strong habitual health have the trick of doing) of finding out the cause of everybody’s ill health in some one malpractice or other. This, and the self-conceit and presumption necessarily generated by it, added to his own marvellous genius at utterly misunderstanding what he hears, and transposing words often in a manner that would be ludicrous if one did not suspect that his blindness had a share in producing it--all this renders him a sad mischief-maker, and with the best intentions, a manufacturer and propagator of calumnies. I had no notion of the extent of the mischief till I was last in town. I was low, even to sinking, when I was at the Inn. Stuart, best, kindest man to me! was with me, and Lamb, and Sir G. B.’s valet. But Tobin fastened upon me, and advised and reproved, and just before I stepped into the coach, reminded me of a debt of ten pounds which I had borrowed of him for another person, an intimate friend of his, on the condition that I was not to repay him till I could do it out of my own purse, not borrowing of another, and not embarrassing myself--in his very words, “till he wanted it more than I.” I was calling to Stuart in order to pay the sum, but he stopped me with fervour, and, fully convinced that he did it only in the _rage_ of admonition, I was vexed that it had angered me. Therefore say nothing of it, for really he is at bottom a good man.

I dare say nothing of home. I will write to Sara from Malta, the moment of my arrival, if I have not time to write from Gibraltar. One of you write to me by the regular post, “S. T. Coleridge, Esqre. Dr. Stoddart’s, Malta:” the other to me at Mr. J. C. Motley’s, Portsmouth, that I may see whether Motley was right or no, and which comes first.

God bless you all and

S. T. COLERIDGE.

Remember me kindly to Mr. Jackson, Mrs. Wilson, to the Calverts and Mrs. Wilkinson, to Mary Stamper, etc.

CLII. TO DANIEL STUART.