Biographia Epistolaris Part 32

I heard from Tobin the day before yesterday--nay, it was Friday. From him I learn that you are giving lectures on galvanism. Would to G.o.d I were one of your auditors! My motive muscles tingled and contracted at the news, as if you had bared them, and were 'zincifying' their life-mocking fibres.

When you have leisure and impulse--perfect leisure and a complete impulse--write to me, but only then. For though there does not exist a man on earth who yields me greater pleasure by writing to me, yet I have neither pain nor disquietude from your silence. I have a deep faith in the guardians.h.i.+p of Nature over you--of the Great Being whom you are manifesting. Heaven bless you, my dear Davy!

I have been rendered uneasy by an account of the Lisbon packet's non-arrival, lest Southey should have been on board it. Have you heard from him lately?

It would seem affectation to write to you and say nothing of my health; but in truth I am weary of giving useless pain. Yesterday I should have been incapable of writing you this scrawl, and to-morrow I may be as bad. "'Sinking, sinking, sinking!' I feel that I am 'sinking'." My medical attendant says that it is irregular gout, with nephritic symptoms. 'Gout', in a young man of twenty-nine!! Swollen knees, and knotty fingers, a loathing stomach, and a dizzy head. Trust me, friend, I am at times an object of moral disgust to my own mind! But that this long illness has impoverished me, I should immediately go to St.

Miguels, one of the Azores--the baths and the delicious climate might restore me--and if it were possible, I would afterwards send over for my wife and children, and settle there for a few years; it is exceedingly cheap. On this supposition Wordsworth and his sister have with generous friends.h.i.+p offered to settle there with me--and happily our dear Southey would come too. But of this I pray you, my dear fellow, do not say a syllable to any human being, for the scheme, from the present state of my circ.u.mstances, is rather the thing of a "wish" than of a "hope".

If you write to me, pray in a couple of sentences tell me whether Hersch.e.l.l's thermometric "spectrum" (in the "Philos. Trans.") will lead to any revolution in the chemical philosophy. As far as "words" go, I have become a formidable chemist--having got by heart a prodigious quant.i.ty of terms, etc., to which I attach "some" ideas, very scanty in number, I a.s.sure you, and right meagre in their individual persons. That which must discourage me in it is, that I find all "power" of vital attributes to depend on modes of "arrangement", and that chemistry throws not even a distant rushlight glimmer upon this subject. The "reasoning", likewise, is always unsatisfactory to me. I am perpetually saying, probably there are many agents. .h.i.therto undiscovered. This cannot be reasoning: we must have a deep conviction that all the "terms"

have been exhausted. This is saying no more than that (with Dr.

Beddoes's leave) chemistry can never possess the same kind of certainty with the mathematics--in truth, it is saying nothing. I grow, however, exceedingly interested in the subject.

G.o.d love you, my dear friend! From Tobin's account, I fear that I must give up a very sweet vision--that of seeing you this summer. The summer after, my ghost perhaps may be a gas.

Yours affectionately,

S. T. COLERIDGE. [1]

[Footnote 1: Letter CXVIII follows No. 107.]

LETTER 108. TO DAVY

Greta Hall, Keswick, May 20, 1801.

My dear Davy,

Though we of the north must forego you, yet I shall rejoice when I receive a letter from you from Cornwall. I must believe that you have made some important discoveries in galvanism, and connected the facts with other more interesting ones, or I should be puzzled to conceive how that subject could furnish matter for more than one lecture. If I recollect aright, you have identified it with electricity, and that indeed is a wide field. I shall dismiss my 'British Critic' and take in 'Nicholson's Journal', and then I shall know something about you. I am sometimes apprehensive that my pa.s.sion for science is scarcely true and genuine--it is but 'Davyism'! that is, I fear that I am more delighted at 'your' having discovered facts than at the facts having been discovered.

My health is better. I am indeed eager to believe that I am really beginning to recover, though I have had so many short recoveries followed by severe relapses, that I am at times almost afraid to hope.

But cheerful thoughts come with genial sensations; and hope is itself no mean medicine.

I am anxious respecting Robert Southey. Why is he not in England?

Remember me kindly to Tobin. As soon as I have anything to communicate I will write to him. But, alas! sickness turns large districts of time into dreary uniformity of sandy desolation. Alas, for Egypt--and Menou!

However, I trust the 'English' will keep it, if they take it, and something will be gained to the cause of human nature.

Heaven bless you!

S. T. COLERIDGE.

The next letter to G.o.dwin renews his complaints about health.

LETTER 109. To G.o.dWIN

Greta Hall, Keswick.

Dear G.o.dwin,

I have had, during the last three weeks, such numerous interruptions of my "uninterrupted rural retirement," such a succession of visitors, both indigenous and exotic, that verily I wanted both the time and composure necessary to answer your letter of the first of June--at present I am writing to you from my bed. For, in consequence of a very sudden change in the weather from intense heat to a raw and scathing chillness, my bodily health has suffered a relapse as severe as it was unexpected....

I have not yet received either "Antonio", or your pamphlet, in answer to Dr. Parr and the Scotch gentleman [1] (who is to be professor of morals to the young nabobs at Calcutta, with an establishment of 3,000 a year!). Stuart was so kind as to send me Fenwick's review of it in a paper called the "Albion", and Mr. Longman has informed me that, by your orders, the pamphlet itself has been left for me at his house. The extracts which I saw pleased me much, with the exception of the introduction, which is incorrectly and clumsily worded. But, indeed, I have often observed that, whatever you write, the first page is always the worst in the book. I wish that instead of six days you had employed six months, and instead of a half-crown pamphlet, had given us a good half-guinea octavo. But you may yet do this. It strikes me, that both in this work, and in the second edition of the "Political Justice", your retractations have been more injudicious than the a.s.sertions or dogmas retracted. But this is no fit subject for a mere letter. If I had time, which I have not, I would write two or three sheets for your sole inspection, ent.i.tled "History of the Errors and Blunders of the Literary Life of William G.o.dwin". To the world it would appear a paradox to say that you are at all too persuadable, but you yourself know it to be the truth.

I shall send back your ma.n.u.script on Friday, with my criticisms. You say in your last, "How I wish you were here!" When I see how little I have written of what I could have talked, I feel with you that a letter is but "a mockery" to a full and ardent mind. In truth I feel this so forcibly that, if I could be certain that I should remain in this country, I should press you to come down, and finish the whole in my house. But, if I can by any means raise the moneys, I shall go in the first vessel that leaves Liverpool for the Azores (St. Michael's, to wit), and these sail at the end of July. Unless I can escape one English winter and spring I have not any rational prospect of recovery. You "cannot help regarding uninterrupted rural retirement as a princ.i.p.al cause" of my ill health. My ill health commenced at Liverpool, in the shape of blood-shot eyes and swollen eyelids, while I was in the daily habit of visiting the Liverpool literati--these, on my settling at Keswick, were followed by large boils in my neck and shoulders; these, by a violent rheumatic fever; this, by a distressing and tedious hydrocele; and, since then, by irregular gout, which promises at this moment to ripen into a legitimate fit. What uninterrupted rural retirement can have had to do in the production of these outward and visible evils, I cannot guess; what share it has had in consoling me under them, I know with a tranquil mind and feel with a grateful heart.

O that you had now before your eyes the delicious picture of lake, and river, and bridge, and cottage, and s.p.a.cious field with its pathway, and woody hill with its spring verdure, and mountain with the snow yet lingering in fantastic patches upon it, even the same which I had from my sick bed, even without raising my head from the pillow! O G.o.d! all but dear and lovely things seemed to be known to my imagination only as words; even the forms which struck terror into me in my fever-dreams were still forms of beauty. Before my last seizure I bent down to pick something from the ground, and when I raised my head, I said to Miss Wordsworth, "I am sure, Rotha, that I am going to be ill;" for as I bent my head there came a distinct, vivid spectrum upon my eyes; it was one little picture--a rock, with birches and ferns on it, a cottage backed by it, and a small stream. Were I a painter I would give an outward existence to this, but it will always live in my memory.

By-the-bye, our rural retirement has been honoured by the company of Mr.

Sharp, and the poet Rogers; the latter, though not a man of very vigorous intellect, won a good deal both on myself and Wordsworth, for what he said evidently came from his own feelings, and was the result of his own observation.

My love to your dear little one. I begin to feel my knee preparing to make ready for the reception of the Lady Arthritis. G.o.d bless you and

S. T. COLERIDGE.

Tuesday Evening, June 23, 1801. [2]

[Footnote 1: Mackintosh]

[Footnote 2: Letters CXIX-CXXII follow No. 109.]

Coleridge, for want of funds, was unable for the present to carry out his project of going abroad, and the next letter to Davy tells us that he had resolved to go to London instead, and write for the daily papers again.

LETTER 110. To DAVY

Greta Hall, Keswick, c.u.mberland, October 31, 1801.

My dear Davy,

I do not know by what fatality it has happened, but so it is; that I have thought more often of you, and I may say, "yearned" after your society more for the last three months than I ever before did, and yet I have not written to you. But you know that I honour you, and that I love whom I honour. Love and esteem with me have no dividual being; and wherever this is not the case, I suspect there must be some lurking moral superst.i.tion which nature gets the better of; and that the real meaning of the phrase "I love him though I cannot esteem him," is--I esteem him, but not according to my system of esteem. But you, my dear fellow, 'all' men love and esteem--which is the only suspicious part of your character--at least according to the 5th chapter of St.

Matthew.--G.o.d bless you.

And now for the business of this letter. 'If I can', I leave this place so as to be in London on Wednesday, the 11th of next month; in London I shall stay a fortnight; but as I am in feeble health, and have a perfect 'phobia' of inns and coffee-houses, I should rejoice if you or Southey should be able to offer me a bed-room for the fortnight aforesaid. From London I move southward. Now for the italicized words 'if I can'. The cryptical and implicit import of which is--I have a d.a.m.ned thorn in my leg, which the surgeon has not been yet able to extract--and but that I have metaphysicized most successfully on 'Pain', in consequence of the accident, by the Great Scatterer of Thoughts, I should have been half mad. But as it is I have borne it 'like a woman', which, I believe, to be two or three degrees at least beyond a 'stoic'. A suppuration is going on, and I endure in hope.

I have redirected some of Southey's letters to you, taking it for granted that you will see him immediately on his arrival in town; he left us yesterday afternoon. Let me hear from you, if it be only to say what I know already, that you will be glad to see me. O, dear friend, thou one of the two human beings of whom I dare hope with a hope, that elevates my own heart. O bless you!

S.T. COLERIDGE. [1]

[Footnote 1: Letters CXXIII-Cx.x.xI follow No. 110.]