I had
forgotten
one of his schoolfellows, who is still living--C.
Selection of English Letters
Wordsworth has been caballed against _so long and so loudly_, that
he has found it impossible to prevail on the tenant of the Allfoxden
estate to let him the house, after their first agreement is expired,
so he must quit it at midsummer; whether we shall be able to procure
him a house and furniture near Stowey, we know not, and yet we must:
for the hills, and the woods, and the streams, and the sea, and the
shores would break forth into reproaches against us, if we did not
strain every nerve to keep their poet among them. Without joking, and
in serious sadness, Poole and I cannot endure to think of losing him.
At all events, come down, Cottle, as soon as you can, but before
midsummer, and we will procure a horse easy as thy own soul, and we
will go on a roam to Lynton and Lynmouth, which, if thou comest in
May, will be in all their pride of woods and waterfalls, not to speak
of its august cliffs, and the green ocean, and the vast valley of
stones, all which live disdainful of the seasons, or accept new
honours only from the winter's snow. At all events come down, and
cease not to believe me much and affectionately your friend.
TO JOSIAH WADE
_A public example_
Bristol, 26 _June_, 1814.
DEAR SIR,
For I am unworthy to call any good man friend--much less you, whose
hospitality and love I have abused; accept, however, my entreaties for
your forgiveness, and for your prayers.
Conceive a poor miserable wretch, who for many years has been
attempting to beat off pain, by a constant recurrence to the vice that
reproduces it. Conceive a spirit in hell, employed in tracing out for
others the road to that heaven, from which his crimes exclude him! In
short, conceive whatever is most wretched, helpless, and hopeless, and
you will form as tolerable a notion of my state, as it is possible for
a good man to have.
I used to think the text in St. James that 'he who offendeth in one
point, offends in all,' very harsh; but I now feel the awful, the
tremendous truth of it. In the one crime of OPIUM, what crime have
I not made myself guilty of! Ingratitude to my Maker! and to my
benefactors--injustice! _and unnatural cruelty to my poor children!
_--self-contempt for my repeated promise-breach, nay, too often,
actual falsehood!
After my death, I earnestly entreat that a full and unqualified
narration of my wretchedness, and of its guilty cause, may be made
public, that, at least, some little good may be effected by the
direful example!
May God Almighty bless you, and have mercy on your still affectionate,
and, in his heart, grateful
S. T. C.
TO THOMAS ALLSOP
_Himself and his detractors_
2 _Dec. _ 1818.
MY DEAR SIR,
I cannot express how kind I felt your letter. Would to Heaven I had
had many with feelings like yours, 'accustomed to express themselves
warmly and (as far as the word is applicable to you), even
enthusiastically'. But alas! during the prime manhood of my intellect
I had nothing but cold water thrown on my efforts. I speak not now of
my systematic and most unprovoked maligners. On _them_ I have retorted
only by pity and by prayer. These may have, and doubtless have, joined
with the frivolity of 'the reading public' in checking and almost in
preventing the sale of my works; and so far have done injury to
my _purse_. _Me_ they have not injured. But I have loved with
enthusiastic self-oblivion those who have been so well pleased that
I should, year after year, flow with a hundred nameless rills into
_their_ main stream, that they could find nothing but cold praise and
effective discouragement of every attempt of mine to roll onward in a
distinct current of my own; who _admitted_ that the _Ancient Mariner_,
the _Christabel_, the _Remorse_, and some pages of the _Friend_
were not without merit, but were abundantly anxious to acquit their
judgements of any blindness to the very numerous defects. Yet they
_knew_ that to _praise_, as mere praise, I was characteristically,
almost constitutionally, indifferent. In sympathy alone I found at
once nourishment and stimulus; and for sympathy _alone_ did my heart
crave. They knew, too, how long and faithfully I have acted on the
maxim, never to admit the _faults_ of a work of genius to those who
denied or were incapable of feeling and understanding the _beauties_;
not from wilful partiality, but as well knowing that in _saying_ truth
I should, to such critics, convey falsehood. If, in one instance, in
my literary life I have appeared to deviate from this rule, first,
it was not till the fame of the writer (which I had been for fourteen
years successfully toiling like a second Ali to build up) had been
established; and secondly and chiefly, with the purpose and, I may
safely add, with the _effect_ of rescuing the necessary task from
Malignant Defamers, and in order to set forth the excellences and the
trifling proportion which the defects bore to the excellences. But
this, my dear sir, is a mistake to which affectionate natures are too
liable, though I do not remember to have ever seen it noticed--the
mistaking those who are desirous and well pleased to be loved _by_
you, for those who love you. Add, as a more general cause, the fact
that I neither am nor ever have been of any party. What wonder, then,
if I am left to decide which has been my worst enemy, the broad,
pre-determined abuse of the _Edinburgh Review_, &c. , or the cold and
brief compliments, with the warm _regrets_, of the _Quarterly_? After
all, however, I have now but one sorrow relative to the ill success of
my literary toils (and toils they have been, _though not undelightful
toils_), and this arises wholly from the almost insurmountable
difficulties which the anxieties of to-day oppose to my completion
of the great work, the form and materials of which it has been the
employment of the best and most genial hours of the last twenty years
to mature and collect.
If I could but have a tolerably numerous audience to my first, or
first and second Lectures on the _History of Philosophy_, I should
entertain a strong hope of success, because I know that these lectures
will be found by far the most interesting and _entertaining_ of any
that I have yet delivered, independent of the more permanent interest
of rememberable instruction. Few and unimportant would the errors of
men be, if they did but know, first, _what they themselves meant_;
and, secondly, what the _words_ mean by which they attempt to convey
their meaning, and I can conceive no subject so well fitted to
exemplify the mode and the importance of these two points as the
History of Philosophy, treated as in the scheme of these lectures.
TO THE SAME
_The Great Work described_
_Jan. _ 1821.
. . . I have already the _written_ materials and contents, requiring
only to be put together from the loose papers and commonplace or
memorandum books, and needing no other change, whether of omission,
addition, or correction, than the mere act of arranging, and the
opportunity of seeing the whole collectively bring with them of course
(1) Characteristics of Shakespeare's dramatic works, with a critical
review of each play; together with a relative and comparative critique
on the kind and degree of the merits and demerits of the dramatic
works of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger. The
History of the English Drama; the accidental advantages it afforded
to Shakespeare, without in the least detracting from the perfect
originality or proper creation of the Shakespearian Drama; the
contradistinction of the latter from the Greek Drama, and its still
remaining _uniqueness_, with the causes of this, from the combined
influences of Shakespeare himself, as man, poet, philosopher, and
finally, by conjunction of all these, dramatic poet; and of the age,
events, manners, and state of the English language. This work, with
every art of compression, amounts to three volumes of about five
hundred pages each. (2) Philosophical Analysis of the Genius and Works
of Dante, Spenser, Milton, Cervantes, and Calderon, with similar, but
more compressed criticisms on Chaucer, Ariosto, Donne, Rabelais, and
others, during the predominance of the Romantic Poetry. In one large
volume. These two works will, I flatter myself, form a complete code
of the principles of judgement and feeling applied to works of Taste;
and not of Poetry only, but of Poesy in all its forms, Painting,
Statuary, Music, &c. , &c. (3) The History of Philosophy considered
as a Tendency of the Human Mind to exhibit the Powers of the Human
Reason, to discover by its own Strength the Origin and Laws of Man and
the World, from Pythagoras to Locke and Condillac. Two volumes.
(4) Letters on the Old and New Testament, and on the Doctrine
and Principles held in common by the Fathers and Founders of the
Reformation, addressed to a candidate for Holy Orders, including
advice on the Plan and Subjects of Preaching, proper to a Minister of
the Established Church.
To the completion of these four works, I have literally nothing more
to do than to _transcribe_; but, as I before hinted, from so many
scraps and _sibylline_ leaves, including margins of books and blank
pages, that, unfortunately, I must be my own scribe, and not done by
myself, they will be all but lost; or perhaps (as has been too often
the case already) furnish feathers for the caps of others; some for
this purpose, and some to plume the arrows of detraction, to be let
fly against the luckless bird from whom they had been plucked or
moulted.
In addition to these--of my GREAT WORK, to the preparation of which
more than twenty years of my life have been devoted, and on which
my hopes of extensive and permanent utility, of fame, in the noblest
sense of the word, mainly rest--that, by which I might,
As now by thee, by all the good be known,
When this weak frame lies moulder'd in the grave,
Which self-surviving I might call my own,
Which folly cannot mar, nor hate deprave--
The incense of those powers, which, risen in flame,
Might make me dear to Him from whom they came.
Of this work, to which all my other writings (unless I except my
Poems, and these I can exclude in part only) are introductory and
preparative; and the result of which (if the premises be, as I, with
the most tranquil assurance, am convinced they are--insubvertible,
the deductions legitimate, and the conclusions commensurate, and only
commensurate, with both) must finally be a revolution of all that has
been called _philosophy_ or metaphysics in England and France, since
the era of the commencing predominance of the mechanical system at
the restoration of our second Charles, and with this the present
fashionable views, not only of religion, morals, and politics but
even of the modern physics and physiology. You will not blame the
earnestness of my expressions, nor the high importance which I attach
to this work: for how, with less noble objects, and less faith in
their attainment, could I stand acquitted of folly, and abuse of time,
talents, and learning in a labour of three-fourths of my intellectual
life? Of this work, something more than a volume has been dictated
by me, so as to exist fit for the press, to my friend and enlightened
pupil, Mr. Green; and more than as much again would have been evolved
and delivered to paper, but that, for the last six or eight months,
I have been compelled to break off our weekly meeting, from the
necessity of writing (alas! alas! of attempting to write) for
purposes, and on the subjects, of the passing day. Of my poetic works
I would fain finish the _Christabel_! Alas! for the proud time when I
planned, when I had present to my mind, the materials, as well as
the scheme, of the Hymns entitled _Spirit_, _Sun_, _Earth_, _Air_,
_Water_, _Fire_ and _Man_; and the Epic Poem on what still appears
to me the one only fit subject remaining for an epic poem--Jerusalem
besieged and destroyed by Titus.
TO THE SAME
_Reminiscences_
4 March, 1822.
My Dearest Friend,
I have been much more than ordinarily unwell for more than a week
past--my sleeps worse than my vigils, my nights than my days;
--The night's dismay
Sadden'd and stunned the intervening day;
but last night I had not only a calmer night, without roaming in my
dreams through any of Swedenborg's Hells _modérés_; but arose this
morning lighter and with a sense of _relief_. . . .
I shall make you smile, as I did dear Mary Lamb, when I say that you
sometimes mistake my position. As individual to individual, from
my childhood, I do not remember feeling myself either superior or
inferior to any human being; except by an act of my own will in cases
of real or imagined moral or intellectual superiority. In regard to
worldly rank, from eight years old to nineteen, I was habituated,
nay, naturalised, to look up to men circumstanced as you are, as my
superiors--a large number of our governors, and almost _all_ of those
whom we regarded as greater men still, and whom we saw most of, _viz. _
our committee governors, were such--and as neither awake nor asleep
have I any other feelings than what I had at Christ's Hospital,
I distinctly remember that I felt a little flush of pride and
consequence--just like what we used to feel at school when the boys
came running to us--'Coleridge! here's your friends want you--they are
quite _grand_,' or 'It is quite a _lady_'--when I first heard who you
were, and laughed at myself for it with that pleasurable sensation
that, spite of my sufferings at that school, still accompanies any
sudden reawakening of our school-boy feelings and notions. And oh,
from sixteen to nineteen what hours of Paradise had Allen and I in
escorting the Miss Evanses home on a Saturday, who were then at a
milliner's whom we used to think, and who I believe really was, such
a nice lady;--and we used to carry thither, of a summer morning, the
pillage of the flower gardens within six miles of town, with Sonnet
or Love Rhyme wrapped round the nose-gay. To be feminine, kind, and
genteelly (what I should now call neatly) dressed, these were the only
things to which my head, heart, or imagination had any polarity, and
what I was then, I still am.
God bless you and yours.
ROBERT SOUTHEY
1774-1843
TO JOSEPH COTTLE
_Question of copyrights_
Greta Hall, 20 _April_, 1808.
My dear Cottle,. . .
What you say of my copyrights affected me very much. Dear Cottle, set
your heart at rest on that subject. It ought to be at rest. These were
yours, fairly bought, and fairly sold. You bought them on the chance
of their success, which no London bookseller would have done; and had
they not been bought, they could not have been published at all. Nay,
if you had not purchased _Joan of Arc_, the poem never would have
existed, nor should I, in all probability, ever have obtained that
reputation which is the capital on which I subsist, nor that power
which enables me to support it.
But this is not all. Do you suppose, Cottle, that I have forgotten
those true and most essential acts of friendship which you showed me
when I stood most in need of them? Your house was my house when I had
no other. The very money with which I bought my wedding-ring, and paid
my marriage fees, was supplied by you. It was with your sisters I left
Edith during my six months' absence, and for the six months after my
return it was from you that I received, week by week, the little on
which we lived, till I was enabled to live by other means. It is not
the settling of a cash account that can cancel obligations like these.
You are in the habit of preserving your letters, and if you were
not, I would entreat you to preserve _this_, that it might be seen
hereafter. Sure I am, there never was a more generous or a kinder
heart than yours; and you will believe me when I add, that there does
not live that man upon earth, whom I remember with more gratitude
and more affection. My heart throbs and my eyes burn with these
recollections. Good night! my dear old friend and benefactor.
TO JOHN MAY
_Waterloo_
Liège, 6 _Oct. _ 1815. Six p. m.
My dear friend,
I have a happy habit of making the best of all things; and being just
at this time as uncomfortable as the dust and bustle, and all the
disagreeables of an inn in a large filthy manufacturing city can make
me, I have called for pen, ink, and paper, and am actually writing in
the bar, the door open to the yard opposite to this unwiped table, the
doors open to the public room, where two men are dining, and talking
French, and a woman servant at my elbow is lighting a fire for our
party. Presently the folding-doors are to be shut, the ladies are to
descend from their chambers, the bar will be kept appropriated to our
house, the male part of the company will get into good humour, dinner
will be ready, and then I must lay aside the grey goose-quill. As a
preliminary to these promised comforts, the servant is mopping the
hearth, which is composed (like a tesselated pavement) of little
bricks about two inches long by half an inch wide, set within a broad
black stone frame. The fuel is of fire-balls, a mixture of pulverized
coal and clay. I have seen a great deal and heard a great deal,--more,
indeed, than I can keep pace with in my journal, though I strive hard
to do it; but I minute down short notes in my pencil-book with all
possible care, and hope, in the end, to lose nothing. . . .
Flanders is a most interesting country. Bruges, the most striking city
I have ever seen, an old city in perfect preservation. It seems as if
not a house had been built during the last two centuries, and not a
house suffered to pass to decay. The poorest people seem to be well
lodged, and there is a general air of sufficiency, cleanliness,
industry, and comfort, which I have never seen in any other place. The
cities have grown worse as we advanced. At Namur we reached a dirty
city, situated in a romantic country; the Meuse there reminded me of
the Thames from your delightful house, an island in size and shape
resembling that upon which I have often wished for a grove of poplars,
coming just in the same position. From thence along the river to this
abominable place, the country is, for the greater part, as lovely as
can be imagined. . . .
Our weather hitherto has been delightful. This was especially
fortunate at Waterloo and at Ligny, where we had much ground to walk
over. It would surprise you to see how soon nature has recovered from
the injuries of war. The ground is ploughed and sown, and grain and
flowers and seeds already growing over the field of battle, which is
still strewn with vestiges of the slaughter, caps, cartridges, boxes,
hats, &c. We picked up some French cards and some bullets, and we
purchased a French pistol and two of the eagles which the infantry
wear upon their caps. What I felt upon this ground, it would be
difficult to say; what I saw, and still more what I heard, there is no
time at present for saying. In prose and in verse you shall some day
hear the whole. At Les Quatre Bras, I saw two graves, which probably
the dogs or the swine had opened. In the one were the ribs of a human
body, projecting through the mould; in the other, the whole skeleton
exposed. Some of our party told me of a third, in which the worms were
at work, but I shrunk from the sight. You will rejoice to hear that
the English are as well spoken of for their deportment in peace as in
war. It is far otherwise with the Prussians. Concerning them there is
but one opinion; their brutality is said to exceed that of the French,
and of their intolerable insolence I have heard but too many proofs.
That abominable old Frederic made them a military nation, and this is
the inevitable consequence. This very day we passed a party on their
way towards France--some hundred or two. Two gentlemen and two ladies
of the country, in a carriage, had come up with them; and these
ruffians would not allow them to pass, but compelled them to wait and
follow the slow pace of foot soldiers! This we ourselves saw. Next to
the English, the Belgians have the best character for discipline. . . .
I bought at Bruges a French History of Brazil, just published by M.
Alphonse de Beauchamp, in 3 vols. 8vo. He says, in his Preface, that
having finished the first two volumes, he thought it advisable to see
if any new light had been thrown upon the subject by modern authors.
Meantime, a compilation upon this history had appeared in England,
but the English author, Mr. Southey, had brought no new lights; he had
promised much for his second volume, but the hope of literary Europe
had been again deceived, for this second volume, so emphatically
promised, had not appeared. I dare say no person regrets this delay
so much as M. Beauchamp, he having stolen the whole of his two first
volumes, and about the third part of the other, from the very Mr.
Southey whom he abuses. He has copied my references as the list of his
own authorities (MSS. and all), and he has committed blunders which
prove, beyond all doubt, that he does not understand Portuguese. I
have been much diverted by this fellow's impudence.
The table is laid, and the knives and forks rattling a pleasant note
of preparation, as the woman waiter arranges them.
God bless you! I have hurried through the sheet, and thus pleasantly
beguiled what would have been a very unpleasant hour. We are all well,
and your god-daughter has seen a live emperor at Brussels. I feel the
disadvantage of speaking French ill, and understanding it by the ear
worse. Nevertheless, I speak it without remorse, make myself somehow
or other understood, and get at what I want to know. Once more, God
bless you, my dear friend.
To HENRY TAYLOR
_Anastasius Hope_
Keswick, 15 _July_, 1831.
. . . Have you seen the strange book which Anastasius Hope left
for publication, and which his representatives, in spite of all
dissuasion, have published? His notion of immortality and heaven is,
that at the consummation of all things he, and you, and I, and John
Murray, and Nebuchadnezzar, and Lambert the fat man, and the living
skeleton, and Queen Elizabeth, and the Hottentot Venus, and Thurtell,
and Probert, and the twelve Apostles, and the noble army of martyrs,
and Genghis Khan, and all his armies, and Noah with all his ancestors
and all his posterity--yea, all men and all women, and all children
that have ever been or ever shall be, saints and sinners alike--are
all to be put together, and made into one great celestial eternal
human being. He does not seem to have known how nearly this approaches
to Swedenborg's fancy. I do not like the scheme. I don't like the
notion of being mixed up with Hume, and Hunt, and Whittle Harvey, and
Philpotts, and Lord Althorpe, and the Huns, and the Hottentots, and
the Jews, and the Philistines, and the Scotch, and the Irish. God
forbid! I hope to be I myself; I, in an English heaven, with you
yourself--you, and some others, without whom heaven would be no heaven
to me. God bless you!
TO EDWARD MOXON
_Recollections of the Lambs_
Keswick, 2 _Feb. _ 1836.
My dear sir,
I have been too closely engaged in clearing off the second volume of
Cowper to reply to your inquiries concerning poor Lamb sooner. His
acquaintance with Coleridge began at Christ's Hospital; Lamb was
some two years, I think, his junior. Whether he was ever one of the
_Grecians_ there, might be ascertained, I suppose, by inquiring. My
own impression is, that he was not. Coleridge introduced me to him
in the winter of 1794-5, and to George Dyer also, from whom, if his
memory has not failed, you might probably learn more of Lamb's early
history than from any other person. Lloyd, Wordsworth, and Hazlitt
became known to him through their connexion with Coleridge.
When I saw the family (one evening only, and at that time), they were
lodging somewhere near Lincoln's Inn, on the western side (I forget
the street), and were evidently in uncomfortable circumstances. The
father and mother were both living; and I have some dim recollection
of the latter's invalid appearance. The father's senses had failed him
before that time. He published some poems in quarto. Lamb showed me
once an imperfect copy: the _Sparrow's Wedding_ was the title of the
longest piece, and this was the author's favourite; he liked, in his
dotage, to hear Charles read it.
His most familiar friend, when I first saw him, was White, who held
some office at Christ's Hospital, and continued intimate with him as
long as he lived. You know what Elia says of him. He and Lamb were
joint authors of the _Original Letters of Falstaff_. Lamb, I believe,
first appeared as an author in the second edition of Coleridge's
_Poems_ (Bristol, 1797), and, secondly, in the little volume of blank
verse with Lloyd (1798). Lamb, Lloyd, and White were inseparable in
1798; the two latter at one time lodged together, though no two men
could be imagined more unlike each other. Lloyd had no drollery in his
nature; White seemed to have nothing else. You will easily understand
how Lamb could sympathize with both.
Lloyd, who used to form sudden friendships, was all but a stranger
to me, when unexpectedly he brought Lamb down to visit me at a little
village (Burton) near Christchurch, in Hampshire, where I was lodging
in a very humble cottage. This was in the summer of 1797, and then, or
in the following year, my correspondence with Lamb began. I saw more
of him in 1802 than at any other time, for I was then six months
resident in London. His visit to this county was before I came to it;
it must have been either in that or in the following year: it was to
Lloyd and to Coleridge.
I had forgotten one of his schoolfellows, who is still living--C. V.
Le Grice, a clergyman at or near Penzance. From him you might learn
something of his boyhood.
Cottle has a good likeness of Lamb, in chalk, taken by an artist named
Robert Hancock, about the year 1798. It looks older than Lamb was at
that time; but he was old-looking.
Coleridge introduced him to Godwin, shortly after the first number
of the _Anti-Jacobin Magazine and Review_ was published, with a
caricature of Gillray's, in which Coleridge and I were introduced with
asses' heads, and Lloyd and Lamb as toad and frog. Lamb got warmed
with whatever was on the table, became disputatious, and said things
to Godwin which made him quietly say, 'Pray, Mr. Lamb, are you toad
or frog? ' Mrs. Coleridge will remember the scene, which was to her
sufficiently uncomfortable. But the next morning S. T. C. called on
Lamb, and found Godwin breakfasting with him, from which time their
intimacy began.
His angry letter to me in the _Magazine_ arose out of a notion that
an expression of mine in the _Quarterly Review_ would hurt the sale of
_Elia_; some one, no doubt, had said that it would. I meant to serve
the book, and very well remember how the offence happened. I had
written that it wanted nothing to render it altogether delightful but
a _saner_ religious feeling. _This_ would have been the proper word if
any other person had written the book. Feeling its extreme unfitness
as soon as it was written, I altered it immediately for the first word
which came into my head, intending to remodel the sentence when it
should come to me in the proof; and that proof never came. There can
be no objection to your printing all that passed upon the occasion,
beginning with the passage in the _Quarterly Review_, and giving his
letter.
I have heard Coleridge say that, in a fit of derangement, Lamb fancied
himself to be young Norval. He told me this in relation to one of his
poems.
If you will print my lines to him upon his _Album Verses_, I will
send you a corrected copy. You received his letters, I trust, which
Cuthbert took with him to town in October. I wish they had been more,
and wish, also, that I had more to tell you concerning him, and what
I have told were of more value. But it is from such fragments of
recollection, and such imperfect notices, that the materials for
biography must, for the most part, be collected.
=CHARLES LAMB=
1775-1834
TO SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
_Temporary frenzy_
27 _May_, 1796.
. . . Coleridge! I know not what suffering scenes you have gone through
at Bristol. My life has been somewhat diversified of late. The six
weeks that finished last year and began this, your very humble servant
spent very agreeably in a madhouse, at Hoxton. I am got somewhat
rational now, and don't bite anyone. But mad I was! And many a vagary
my imagination played with me, enough to make a volume, if all were
told. My sonnets I have extended to the number of nine since I saw
you, and will some day communicate to you. I am beginning a poem
in blank verse, which, if I finish, I publish. . . . Coleridge! it may
convince you of my regards for you when I tell you my head ran on you
in my madness, as much almost as on another person, who I am inclined
to think was the more immediate cause of my temporary frenzy.
TO THE SAME
_A friend in need_
_Thursday, 11 June_, 1796.
. . . After all, you cannot, nor ever will, write anything with which I
shall be so delighted as what I have heard yourself repeat. You came
to town, and I saw you at a time when your heart was yet bleeding
with recent wounds. Like yourself, I was sore galled with disappointed
hope. You had
--many an holy lay
That, mourning, soothed the mourner on his way;
I had ears of sympathy to drink them in, and they yet vibrate pleasant
on the sense. When I read in your little volume your nineteenth
effusion, or the twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth, or what you call the
_Sigh_, I think I hear _you_ again. I image to myself the little smoky
room at the _Salutation and Cat_, where we have sat together through
the winter nights, beguiling the cares of life with Poesy. When you
left London, I felt a dismal void in my heart. I found myself cut off,
at one and the same time, from two most dear to me. 'How blest with
ye the path could I have trod of quiet life! ' In your conversation you
had blended so many pleasant fancies that they cheated me of my grief.
But in your absence the tide of melancholy rushed in again, and did
its worst mischief by overwhelming my reason. I have recovered, but
feel a stupor that makes me indifferent to the hopes and fears of
this life. I sometimes wish to introduce a religious turn of mind,
but habits are strong things, and my religious fervours are confined,
alas! to some fleeting moments of occasional solitary devotion. A
correspondence, opening with you, has roused me a little from my
lethargy, and made me conscious of existence. Indulge me in it: I will
not be very troublesome! At some future time I will amuse you with
an account, as full as my memory will permit, of the strange turn my
frenzy took. I look back upon it at times with a gloomy kind of envy:
for, while it lasted, I had many, many hours of pure happiness. Dream
not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of
fancy till you have gone mad! All now seems to me vapid, comparatively
so.
TO THE SAME
_The tragedy_
27 _Sept_. 1796.
MY DEAREST FRIEND,
White, or some of my friends, or the public papers, by this time may
have informed you of the terrible calamities that have fallen on
our family. I will only give you the outlines: My poor dear, dearest
sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death of our own mother. I
was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. She
is at present in a madhouse, from whence I fear she must be moved to
an hospital. God has preserved to me my senses; I eat, and drink, and
sleep, and have my judgement, I believe, very sound. My poor father
was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him and my aunt.
Mr. Norris, of the Bluecoat School, has been very kind to us, and we
have no other friend; but, thank God, I am very calm and composed, and
able to do the best that remains to do. Write as religious a letter as
possible, but no mention of what is gone and done with. With me 'the
former things are passed away', and I have something more to do than
to feel.
God Almighty have us in His keeping!
Mention nothing of poetry. I have destroyed every vestige of past
vanities of that kind. Do as you please, but if you publish, publish
mine (I give free leave) without name or initial, and never send me a
book, I charge you.
Your own judgement will convince you not to take any notice of this
yet to your dear wife. You look after your family; I have reason
and strength left to take care of mine. I charge you, don't think of
coming to see me. Write. I will not see you if you come. God Almighty
love you and all of us!
TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
_The delights of London_
30 _Jan_. 1801.
I ought before this to have replied to your very kind invitation into
Cumberland. With you and your sister I could gang anywhere; but I am
afraid whether I shall ever be able to afford so desperate a journey.
Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I
never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London,
until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of
you mountaineers can have done with dead Nature. The lighted shops of
the Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and
customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness
round about Covent Garden; the very women of the Town; the watchmen,
drunken scenes, rattles;--life awake, if you awake, at all hours of
the night; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon
houses and pavements, the printshops, the old book-stalls, parsons
cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the
pantomimes--London itself a pantomime and a masquerade--all these
things work themselves into my mind, and feed me, without a power
of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me often into
night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the
motley Strand from fullness of joy at so much life. All these
emotions must be strange to you; so are your rural emotions to me. But
consider, what must I have been doing all my life, not to have lent
great portions of my heart with usury to such scenes?
My attachments are all local, purely local. I have no passion (or have
had none since I was in love, and then it was the spurious engendering
of poetry and books) to groves and valleys. The rooms where I was
born, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a
book-case which has followed me about like a faithful dog, (only
exceeding him in knowledge,) wherever I have moved, old chairs,
old tables, streets, squares, where I have sunned myself, my old
school,--these are my mistresses,--have I not enough, without your
mountains? I do not envy you. I should pity you, did I not know that
the mind will make friends of anything. Your sun, and moon, and skies,
and hills, and lakes, affect me no more, or scarcely come to me in
more venerable characters, than as a gilded room with tapestry and
tapers, where I might live with handsome visible objects. I consider
the clouds above me but as a roof beautifully painted, but unable to
satisfy the mind: and at last, like the pictures of the apartment of
a connoisseur, unable to afford him any longer a pleasure. So fading
upon me, from disuse, have been the beauties of Nature, as they have
been confinedly called; so ever fresh, and green, and warm are all the
inventions of men, and assemblies of men in this great city. I should
certainly have laughed with dear Joanna.
Give my kindest love, and my sister's, to D. and yourself; and a kiss
from me to little Barbara Lewthwaite. Thank you for liking my play!
TO THOMAS MANNING
_At the Lakes_
London, 24 _Sept_. 1802.
My dear Manning,
Since the date of my last letter I have been a traveller. A strong
desire seized me of visiting remote regions. My first impulse was to
go and see Paris. It was a trivial objection to my aspiring mind, that
I did not understand a word of the language, since I certainly intend
some time in my life to see Paris, and equally certainly intend never
to learn the language; therefore that could be no objection. However,
I am very glad I did not go, because you had left Paris (I see) before
I could have set out. I believe Stoddart promising to go with me
another year prevented that plan. My next scheme (for to my restless,
ambitious mind London was become a bed of thorns) was to visit the
far-famed peak in Derbyshire, where the Devil sits, they say, without
breeches. _This_ my purer mind rejected as indelicate. And my final
resolve was a tour to the Lakes. I set out with Mary to Keswick,
without giving Coleridge any notice, for my time, being precious, did
not admit of it. He received us with all the hospitality in the world,
and gave up his time to show us all the wonders of the country. He
dwells upon a small hill by the side of Keswick, in a comfortable
house, quite enveloped on all sides by a net of mountains: great
floundering bears and monsters they seemed, all couchant and asleep.
We got in in the evening, travelling in a post-chaise from Penrith, in
the midst of a gorgeous sunshine, which transmuted all the mountains
into colours, purple, &c. , &c. We thought we had got into fairy-land.
But that went off (as it never came again; while we stayed we had no
more fine sunsets); and we entered Coleridge's comfortable study just
in the dusk, when the mountains were all dark with clouds upon their
heads. Such an impression I never received from objects of sight
before, nor do I suppose I can ever again. Glorious creatures, fine
old fellows, Skiddaw, &c. I shall never forget ye, how ye lay about
that night, like an intrenchment; gone to bed, as it seemed for the
night, but promising that ye were to be seen in the morning. Coleridge
had got a blazing fire in his study; which is a large, antique,
ill-shaped room, with an old-fashioned organ, never played upon, big
enough for a church, shelves of scattered folios, an Aeolian harp, and
an old sofa, half bed, &c. And all looking out upon the last fading
view of Skiddaw, and his broad-breasted brethren: what a night! Here
we stayed three full weeks, in which time I visited Wordsworth's
cottage, where we stayed a day or two with the Clarksons (good people,
and most hospitable, at whose house we tarried one day and night), and
saw Lloyd. The Wordsworths were gone to Calais. They have since been
in London, and passed much time with us: he is now gone into Yorkshire
to be married. So we have seen Keswick, Grasmere, Ambleside, Ulswater
(where the Clarksons live), and a place at the other end of Ulswater;
I forget the name; to which we travelled on a very sultry day, over
the middle of Helvellyn. We have clambered up to the top of Skiddaw,
and I have waded up the bed of Lodore. In fine, I have satisfied
myself that there is such a thing as that which tourists call
_romantic_, which I very much suspected before: they make such a
spluttering about it, and toss their splendid epithets around them,
till they give as dim a light as at four o'clock next morning the
lamps do after an illumination. Mary was excessively tired when she
got about half-way up Skiddaw, but we came to a cold rill (than which
nothing can be imagined more cold, running over cold stones), and with
the reinforcement of a draught of cold water, she surmounted it most
manfully. Oh, its fine black head, and the bleak air atop of it, with
a prospect of mountains all about and about, making you giddy; and
then Scotland afar off, and the border countries so famous in song and
ballad! It was a day that will stand out, like a mountain, I am sure,
in my life. But I am returned (I have now been come home near three
weeks; I was a month out), and you cannot conceive the degradation
I felt at first, from being accustomed to wander free as air among
mountains, and bathe in rivers without being controlled by any one, to
come home and _work_. I felt very _little_. I had been dreaming I was
a very great man. But that is going off, and I find I shall conform
in time to that state of life to which it has pleased God to call me.
Besides, after all, Fleet Street and the Strand are better places to
live in for good and all than amidst Skiddaw. Still, I turn back to
those great places where I wandered about, participating in their
greatness. After all, I could not _live_ in Skiddaw. I could spend
a year, two, three years among them, but I must have a prospect of
seeing Fleet Street at the end of that time, or I should mope and pine
away, I know. Still, Skiddaw is a fine creature.
My habits are changing, I think, i. e. from drunk to sober. Whether
I shall be happier or not remains to be proved. I shall certainly be
more happy in a morning; but whether I shall not sacrifice the
fat, and the marrow, and the kidneys, i. e. the night, glorious,
care-drowning night, that heals all our wrongs, pours wine into our
mortifications, changes the scene from indifferent and flat to bright
and brilliant! --O Manning, if I should have formed a diabolical
resolution, by the time you come to England, of not admitting any
spirituous liquors into my house, will you be my guest on such
shame-worthy terms? Is life, with such limitations, worth trying? The
truth is, that my liquors bring a nest of friendly harpies about
my house, who consume me. This is a pitiful tale to be read at St.
Gothard, but it is just now nearest my heart. Fenwick is a ruined man.
He is hiding himself from his creditors, and has sent his wife and
children into the country. Fell, my other drunken companion (that has
been: _nam hic caestus artemque repono_), is turned editor of a Naval
Chronicle. Godwin continues a steady friend, though the same facility
does not remain of visiting him often. X. has detached Marshall from
his house; Marshall, the man who went to sleep when the _Ancient
Mariner_ was reading; the old, steady, unalterable friend of the
Professor. Holcraft is not yet come to town. I expect to see him, and
will deliver your message. Things come crowding in to say, and no
room for 'em. Some things are too little to be told, i. e. to have a
preference; some are too big and circumstantial. Thanks for yours,
which was most delicious. Would I had been with you, benighted, &c. !
I fear my head is turned with wandering. I shall never be the same
acquiescent being. Farewell. Write again quickly, for I shall not
like to hazard a letter, not knowing where the fates have carried you.
Farewell, my dear fellow.
TO THE SAME
_Dissuasion from Tartary_
19 _Feb_. 1803.
MY DEAR MANNING,
The general scope of your letter afforded no indications of insanity,
but some particular points raised a scruple. For God's sake don't
think any more of 'Independent Tartary'. What are you to do among such
Ethiopians? Is there no _lineal descendant_ of Prester John? Is the
chair empty? Is the sword unswayed? --depend upon it they'll never
make you their king, as long as any branch of that great stock
is remaining. I tremble for your Christianity. . . . Read Sir John
Mandeville's Travels to cure you, or come over to England. There is
a Tartar-man now exhibiting at Exeter Change.
