Letters, conversations, and recollections of S. T. Coleridge ..

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Preface

Having for more than sixteen years enjoyed a large share of the affectionate regards, sympathy, and inmost confidence of the most variously gifted and extraordinary man that has appeared in these latter days, it has been to me a most melancholy, though not unpleasing, task, to arrange these materials, so as to give to you, my dearest children, some idea — alas, how poor ! — how inadequate it must be, of that friend for whose sake you are, if possible, more dear to me.

To you, my dearest Elizabeth, the fairy Prattler of the Letters, and to you, Robin, the still meek Boy, I am especially desirous to convey, through these fragments, some better, some more entirely

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individualised, notion of the earliest friend, best, and first lost.

Of the no less loving, not less to be loved Charles Lamb, having been house-mates, your recollections need not this aid. I stood beside the Grave, and saw when it received their loved forms, and, since then, I seem to have lived on their memories.

Lamentation and regrets for the loss of such men, would be felt by all who knew — and were worthy to be known by — them, as a grievous wrong done to their memories. If we have not learned from, and for, these men, that boisterous grief, grief of which the signs are external and visible, is an inadequate and unfitting tribute ; then, as relates to the manner in which they would be remembered, they have failed to make themselves understood.

Thoughts that are indeed too deep for tears, mingle with all our recollections of that greyhaired Old Man, that mightiest Master of Poetry

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and of Philosophy in its truest and only valuable sense.

To have known such a man, to have shared his many sorrows and sufferings, and to have partaken of the few and far between gleams of glad and joyous sunshine which fell to his lot, are recollections to be cherished in the inner sanctuary of our hearts. Few indeed as were the gleams of genial and warm and cordial uprising of that noble and pure-minded Spirit in later years, still to him it was an ever new delight to impart, all he had learnt, all he had experienced, and much in which he could only have been his own teacher, to those who sought him in sincerity and simplicity of heart.

I seek most earnestly to make you know the minds of these, to you, Ancient of Days ; and I think I shall best effect this by allowing them to speak for themselves. " Of the Dead," says the old adage, " nothing but what is good." I say to you " nothing — or what is true.''''

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Of the first of these friends, both lost in the past year, I shall chiefly speak to you; more full and sufficient records of the last I earnestly hope to see from the Pen of one every way fitted, both by love and fine appreciation of his Character, to the task.

I have given with the Letters such brief Notices and Recollections as seemed likely to enable you to appreciate that great and extraordinary mind, that greatest and truest philosopher, in the highest and only true sense of that term, in its combination with Love.

Upon the Letters and Conversations, however, I chiefly rely for conveying to you some slight image, though vastly inadequate, of the mind of this wonderful, this myriad-minded man, whose loss is however far too recent to admit of just or adequate Estimation.

Cherished and sustained by his extraordinary Intellect, and still more by the Love and Sympathy

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in which, like a vast reservoir, he always superabounded, and the fulness of which seemed to arise from its overflowing, I have been able to arrive at settled and definite conclusions upon all matters to which I have heretofore attached value or interest. When I say that I have arrived at settled conclusions, you will not for a moment believe that my opinions can or ought to be received by others of a totally different experience, as truths for their minds ; still less that matters which depend upon individual experience and temperament can be permanent truths for all time. You will find, and this it is which I wish to impress upon your minds, that a spirit of pure and intense humanity, a spirit of love and kindness, to which nothing is too large, for which nothing is too small, will be to you, as it

has ever been to me, its own il exceeding great reward."

This, my dear Children, and I do not now

address you only, nor your younger brothers and

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sisters, but I would fain speak to, and, on this point at least, could wish to be heard by, all young and confiding minds, — has been to me a solace in sorrow, an unspeakable reliance and support when all outward has been lowering and overcast. This indeed it is, in the language of an early letter, "Which, like an ample Palace, contains many mansions for every other kind of Knowledge (or renders it unnecessary); which deepens and extends the interest of every other . (knowledge or faculty), gives it new charms and additional purpose : the study of which, rightly pursued, is beyond any other entertaining, beyond all others tends at once to tranquillise and enliven, to keep the mind elevated and stedfast, the Heart humble and tender." In this is the purest source of mental self-reliance, of self-dependence, and thence Independence, under all circumstances.

LETTERS, CONVERSATIONS,

RECOLLECTIONS.

LETTER I.U Wednesday Morning, Jan. 28th, 1818

Dear Sir,

Your friendly letter was first delivered to me at the lecture-room door on yesterday evening, ten minutes before the lecture, and my spirits were so sadly depressed by the circumstance of my hoarseness, that I was literally incapable of reading it. I now express my acknowledgments, and with them the regret that I had not received the letter in time to have availed myself of it.

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When I was young I used to laugh at flattery, as, on account of its absurdity, I now abhor it, from my repeated observations of its mischievous effects. Amongst these, not the least is, that it renders honourable natures more slow and reluctant in expressing their real feelings in praise of the deserving, than, for the interests of truth and virtue, might be desired. For the weakness of our moral and intellectual being, of which the comparatively strongest are often the most, and the most painfully, conscious, needs the confirmation derived from the coincidence and sympathy of the friend, as much as the voice of honour within us denounces the pretences of the flatterer. Be assured, then, that 1 write as I think, when I tell you that, from the style and thoughts of your letter, I should have drawn a very different conclusion from that which you appear to have done, concerning both your talents and the cultivation which they have received. Both the matter and manner are manly, simple, and correct.

Had I the time in my own power, compatibly with the performance of duties of immediate

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urgency, I would endeavour to give you, by letter, the most satisfactory answer to your questions that my reflections and the experience of my own fortunes could supply. But, at all events, I will not omit to avail myself of your judicious suggestion in my last lecture, in which it will form a consistent part of the subject and purpose of the discourse. Meantime, believe me, with great respect,

Your obliged fellow-student

of the true and the beseeming,

S. T. Coleridge.

The suggestion here alluded to was, if I remember rightly, as to the best mode of re-exciting that interest in and for mental cultivation and refinement, which, from lapse of time, had in most men actively employed, become dormant. This was fully treated in the last lecture.

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LETTERS, ETC.

LETTER II. Dear Sir

Those who have hitherto chosen to take notice of me, as known to them only by my public character, have for the greater part taken out, not, indeed, a poetical, but a critical, license to make game of me, instead of sending game to me. Thank heaven! I am in this respect more tough than tender. But, to be serious, I heartily thank you for your polite remembrance ; and, though my feeble health and valetudinarian stomach force me to attach no little value to the present itself, I feel still more obliged by the kindness that prompted it.

I trust that you will not come within the purlieus

of Highgate without giving me the opportunity of

assuring you personally that I am, with sincere

respect,

Your obliged,

S. T. Coleridge.

LETTERS, ETC.

LETTER III. Dec. 2nd, 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 judgments 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 had 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 successively toiling like a second Ali

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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 excellencies and the trifling proportion which the defects bore to the excellencies. 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 1 neither am nor ever have been of any party. What wonder, then, if I am left to decide which has been my worse 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

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materials of which it has been the employment of the best and most genial hours of the last twenty

4 years to mature and collect.

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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 T 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 interests 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 tvords 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. Trusting that I shall shortly . % have the pleasure of seeing you here, Y\ / I remain, my dear Sir,

Yours, most sincerely,

S. T. Coleridge.

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This letter, as well as some more specific allusions and charges in after letters, I have thought it "a sacred duty to publish ; no admiration or reve- ' rence for the Great Living being for a moment to be placed against the higher duty to the greater, or, perhaps, I should say, the more greatly various, Dead. The conclusion to which I have come, from an intimate and thorough knowledge of the circumstances is, that, judged by all received rules, my much-loved friend had not generous usage. Far from me, however, be it to attribute blame ; I am rather inclined to ascribe this seeming want of generous feeling, of sympathy, to an incompatibility of adaptation. How expressive is this passage : — " In sympathy alone I found at once nourishment and stimulus ; and for sympathy alone did my heart crave," coupled as it is in my knowledge with the mention of his labour for fourteen years to build up the fame of his friend; and how affecting the allusion to the mistake of having supposed " those to love him who were well pleased to be loved by him."

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LETTER IV. Highgate, Sept. 30th, 1819

My dear Sir,

Returned from Ramsgate, I hasten to assure you that, next to seeing you, I have pleasure in hearing from you: and wish the former in preference, not merely from the greater mutual enjoyment, but likewise because one can convey more, and with greater assurance of being understood, in an hour, than one could write in a day. On the other hand, letters are more permanent, and an epistolary correspondence more endearing, like all marks of remembrance in absence.

My sentiments concerning the expediency, and both moral and intellectual advantages of a trade or profession, for such as fix their ultimate end on objects nobler than trades or professions can bestow on the most favoured of their followers, may be learnt from the eleventh chapter of my Literary

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Life, which, though addressed to a small and particular class, yet permits a more general application. To you, my dear young friend, I should say, temptations and preventives — the poisons and the antidotes — are pretty evenly dispersed through all the different accredited paths of life. Nay, those temptations which are foreknown and foreseen as most appertinent to our particular calling, are commonly least dangerous, or even cease to be temptations to a mind forearmed by principles and aspirations like yours. The false step is more likely to take place in the recoil than the advance ; in the neglect rather than in the too eager pursuit of the means ; in under, rather than over, valuing the advantages of wealth and worldly respectability. The true plan on which you should regulate your conduct and feelings, (that, at least, which to me appears such) is the following. Propose to yourself from the present hour such views of action and enjoyment, as will make the leisure attached to independence, and honourably earned by previous industry, the fair object of a wise man's efforts and a good man's desires. Meantime, let the chosen employments of the years in hope be the relaxations of the time present, of the years devoted to present duties, and, among these, to the means of realising that hope ; thus you will answer two great ends at once. Your inward trains of thought, your faculties, and your feelings, will be preserved in a fitness and, as it were, contempered to a life of ease, and capable of enjoying leisure, because both able and disposed to employ it.

Secondly, while you thus render future affluence more and more desirable, you will at the same time prevent all undue impatience, and disarm the temptation of poisoning the allotted interval by anxieties, and anxious schemes and efforts to get rich in haste. There is yet one other inducement to look on your existing appointment with complacency. Every improvement in knowledge, and the moral power of wielding and directing it, will tell for more, — have a wider and more benignant influence, — than the same accomplishment would in a man who belonged to one of the learned professions. Both your information and your example will fall where they are most wanted, like the noiseless dews in Malta, where rain comes seldom and no regular streams are to be met with. As to your present studies, for such portions of your time as you can prudently appropriate to reading, without wrong to the claims of health and social relaxation, there is one department of knowledge, which, like an ample palace, contains within itself mansions for every other knowledge; which deepens and extends the interest of every other, gives it new charms and additional purpose ; the study of which, rightly and liberally pursued, is beyond any other entertaining, beyond all others tends at once to tranquillize and enliven, to keep the mind elevated and steadfast, the heart humble and tender: it is biblical theology —the philosophy of religion, the religion of philosophy, I would that I could refer you to any book in which such a plan of reading had been sketched out, in detail or even but generally.

Alas ! I know of none. But most gladly will I

make the attempt to supply this desideratum by

conversation, and then by letter. But of this

' when I have next the pleasure of seeing you at

Highgate.

You have perhaps heard that my publisher is a bankrupt.

All the profits from the sale of my writings, which I should have had, and which, in spite of the accumulated disadvantages under which the works were published, would have been considerable, I have lost; and not only so, but have been obliged, at a sum larger than all the profits made by my lectures, to purchase myself my own books and the half copyrights. Well, I am now sole proprietor, and representing my works by cyphers, and the author by I, my emblem might be 00001. I have withdrawn them from sale. This is rather hard, but perhaps my comet may some time or other have its perihelion of popularity, and then the tail, you know, whisks round to the other end ; and for 00001, lo! and behold, 10,000. Meantime, enough for me to thank God that, relatively to my fellow men at least, I have been " sinned against, not sinning ;" and relatively to my Maker, these afflictions are but penances of mercy, less than the least of my forfeitures. — I hope you will soon take pot-luck with us.

Believe me, with esteem and regard, Yours,

S. T. Coleridge.

Leaving out the particular expression of biblical theology, liable to be interpreted, or, rather, misinterpreted by every believer in belief according to his own particular faith or delusion, and keeping constantly in mind what the writer intended to convey, viz. the philosophy of humanity, the humanity of philosophy, I am not aware that I can recommend to your perusal, or press earnestly and affectionately upon your attention, any letter, essay, or advice, so beautifully expressed, or, when applied to practice, so well adapted to secure that happiness which surpasseth understanding; far, very far, surpasseth adequate expression. Often do I dwell upon the recommendation, to " let the chosen employments of the years in hope be the relaxations of the time present, of the years devoted to present duties, and, among these, to the means of realising that hope : thus you will answer two great ends at once. Your inward trains of thought, your faculties, and your feelings, will be preserved in a fitness, and, as it were, contempered to a life of ease, and capable of enjoying leisure, because both able and disposed to employ it. Secondly; while you thus render affluence more desirable, you will prevent all undue impatience, and disarm the temptation of poisoning the allotted interval by anxieties, and anxious schemes and efforts to get rich in haste"

I wrould fain hope that, not only for you but for all others, riches, as such, will be better appreciated ere your career commences ; this is my anxious hope for others — for all. For you, it shall be my care to place before you irresistible examples and illustrations of the frightful evils of contemplating riches, power, fame, as ends to be sought and valued for their own sake, not as means to greater and higher ends, — the high aim and purpose of destroying these fruitful sources of crime and misery, or of subjecting them to general not individual advancement. Alas ! could I but recal

" The time when, though my path was rough, The joy within me dallied with distress, And all misfortunes were but as the stuff Whence Fancy made me dreams cf happiness ; When hope grew round me like the twining vine, And fruits and foliage, not my own, seemed mine : "

I might then have some hope of conveying to you with good effect the results of my experience.

" But seared thoughts now bow me down to earth, Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth. But, oh I each visitation Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, My shaping spirit of imagination.

For not to think of what I needs must feel, But to be still and patient all I can, And haply by abstruse research to steal From my own nature all the natural man, — This is my sole resource, my only plan ; Till that which suits a part infects the whole, And now is almost grown the habit of my soul,"

LETTERS, ETC.

LETTER V. Dec. 13th, 1819

My dear Sir,

Accept my affectionate thanks ; and, in mine, conceive those of my housemates included. Would to heaven I had more than barren thanks to offer you. If you, or rather your residence, were nearer to me, and I could have more of your society, I should feel this the less. It was, for me at least, unfortunate, that, almost every time you have been here, I should have been engaged in the only way that I should have suffered to be a pre-engagement, viz. the duties of friendship. These are now discharged; and whenever you can give me a day, henceforward, I shall have nothing to do but to enjoy it. I could not help " winning an hour from the hard season," as Milton says, the day before yesterday, by surrendering my reason to the detail of a day-dream, as I was going over, and after I had gone over, a very pretty house, with beautiful garden and grounds, and a still more lovely prospect, at the moderate rent of 601. and taxes proportionally low, discussing the question with myself, as seriously as if it were actually to be decided, how far the rising at eight, breakfasting, and riding, driving, or staging to London, and returning by the stage or otherwise, would be advantageous to your health ; and then the ways and means of improving and enjoying our Sundays, &c. All I can say in excuse of these air-built castles is, that they bring with them no bills for brick and mortar, no quarrels with the masons, no indignation at the deceits and lures of the architects, surveyor, &c. when the final expense is found to treble the amount of the well-paid and costly calculation : in short, that if they do no honour to the head, they leave no harm in the heart. And then, poeta fuimus : and the philosopher, though pressing with the weight of an Etna, cannot prevent the poet from occasionally changing sides, and manifesting his existence by smoke traversed by electrical flashes from the crater.

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Have you seen Cobbetfs last number? It is the most plausible and the best written of any thing I have seen from his pen, and apparently written in a less fiendish spirit than the average of his weekly effusions. The self-complacency with which he assumes to himself exclusively, truths which he can call his own only as a horse-stealer can appropriate a stolen horse, by adding mutilation and deformities to robbery, is as artful as it is amusing. Still, however, he has given great additional publicity to weighty truths, as ex. gr. the hollowness of commercial wealth ; and, from whatever dirty corner or straw moppet the ventriloquist Truth causes her words to proceed, I not only listen, but must bear witness that it is Truth talking. His conclusions, however, are palpably absurd — give to an overpeopled island the countless back settlements of America, and countless balloons to carry thither man and maid, wife and brat, beast and baggage — and then we might rationally expect that a general crash of trade, manufactures, and credit, might be as mere a summer thunderstorm in Great Britain as he represents it to be in America.

One deep, most deep, impression of melancholy, did Cobbett's letter to Lord Liverpool leave on my mind, — the conviction that, wretch as he is, he is an overmatch in intellect for those, in whose hands Providence, in its retributive justice, seems to place the destinies of our country ; and who yet rise into respectability, when we compare them with their parliamentary opponents.

I am commanded to add an especial request, that it may not be long before you make yourself visible on the banks of Lake Superior.

Ever, my dear sir, Yours faithfully and affectionately,

S. T. Coleridge.

The tendency of the age is now decidedly practical, and the advocates of abstractions will do well to admit the superiority of practical knowledge ; and to lay claim to it as springing directly from their speculations, from their generalizations. The very opinions here said to be heretical and damnable, are now held (such is the rapid advance of public opinion) to be stale and common-place, and

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have already given way to a far more searching inquiry into the nature and uses of all property. When we see a man so highly gifted, so far differing from the common sense of his contemporaries and immediate successors, stigmatize as a wretch, one of the most extraordinary writers of the day, for holding opinions which those contemporaries have for the greatest part adopted, and many gone far beyond, we are forcibly struck with the absurdity of all ille-isms or affirmations. If we confine ourselves to the expression of an opinion, or, if more honest, we confess our ignorance of the matter at issue, we shall be more likely to approach true conclusions.

Neither is it the fact, that Cobbett claimed himself to be the discoverer of any or all of the principles he advanced or advocated ; he combined the scattered truths of Paine and the preceding writers into a practical shape ; and in that form he has brought them forward so clearly, so often, and in so many ways, that he has forced the attention of his countrymen to the causes of the evils by which they are environed ; so impressed with the importance of those principles, that he will take no denial; but, at the sacrifice of ease, and that loved countrylife, and those rural pursuits, in the midst of which he is so happy, and so fond of creating happiness, he prostrates opposition, and is determined that what he has devoted his whole life to make easy to the meanest capacity, shall not perish for want of a fair trial. That Cobbett himself commits the same injustice towards others, I well know ; but this proceeds in his case from an impatience of any remedies but his own, until his own has been tried. To you, to whom personal controversies will, as I hope, be pitiable, if not painful, I would say, that speculation upon the cause of an evil, is, like the punishment of a crime, useless in remedying that crime, and is only useful, if useful at all, in preventing future crimes or evils. The direction of existing powers and combinations, and the formation of new combinations, upon scientific and practical principles, are the matters of most importance at this time ; and the knowledge necessary to the attainment and application of these principles, does , not to me appear likely to be attained whilst men are in a state of social warfare ; whilst the immediate or apparent interests of one man are constantly opposed to those of another, and both, impediments to the well-being of the whole.

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LETTER VI. 20th March, 1820

My dear Sir,

You must have thought it strange that I had

taken no notice of so kind a letter from you ; but