many a sleepless, painful hour of darkness by chasing down metaphysical game-and since then I have continued the hunt, till I found myself unaware at the root of Pure Mathematics—and up that tall, smooth tree, whose few poor branches are all at its very ummit, am I climbing by pure adhesive strength of arms and thighs, still slipping down, still renewing my ascent. You would not know me! all sounds of similitude keep at such a distance from each other in my mind that I have forgotten how to make a rhyme. I look at the mountains (that visible God Almighty that looks in at all my windows), I look at the mountains only for the curves of their outlines; the stars, as I behold them, form themselves into triangles; and my hands are scarred with scratches from a cat, whose back I was rubbing in the dark in order to see whether the sparks in it were refrangible by a prism. The Poet is dead in me. My imagination (or rather the Somewhat that had been imaginative) lies like a cold snuff on the circular rim of a brass candlestick, without even a stink of tallow to remind you that it was once clothed and mitred with flame. That is past by! I was once a volume of gold leaf, rising and riding on every breath of Fancy, but I have beaten myself back into weight and density, and now I sink in quicksilver, yea, remain squat and square on the earth, amid the hurricane that makes oaks and straws join in one dance, fifty yards high in the element.

"However I will do what I can. Taste and feeling have I none, but what I have give I unto thee. But I repeat that I am unfit to decide on any but works of severe logic. I write now to beg, that if you have not sent your tragedy, you may remember to send Antonio with it, which I have not yet seen, and likewise my Campbell's 'Pleasures of Hope,' which Wordsworth wishes to see.

"Have you seen the second volume of the 'Lyrical Ballads,' and the preface prefixed to the first? I should judge of a man's heart and intellect, precisely according to the degree and intensity of the admiration with which he read these poems. Perhaps instead of heart, I should have said Taste, but when I think of the Brother, of Ruth, and of Michael, I recur to the expression, and am enforced to say heart. If I die, and the booksellers will give

you anything for my life, be sure to say; 'Wordsworth descended on him like the гvõti σautóv from heaven, by showing to him what true poetry was, he made him know that he himself was no Poet."

“In your next letter you will perhaps give me some hints respecting your prose plans. God bless you,—S. T. Coleridge. "I have inoculated my youngest child, Derwent, with the cowpox. He passed through it without any sickness. I myself am the slave of rheumatism-indeed, though in a certain sense I am recovered from my sickness, yet I have by no means recovered it. I congratulate you on the settlement of Davy in London. I hope that his enchanting manners will not draw too many idlers round him, to harass and vex his mornings.”

The Same to the Same.

“KESWICK, July 8, 1801.

"MY DEAR GODWIN,—I have this evening sent your tragedy (directed to you) to Penrith to go from thence to London by the mail. You will probably receive it on Saturday. . . . It would be needless to recount the pains and evils that prevented me from sending it on the day I meant to do. Your letter of this morning has given me some reason to be glad that I was prevented. My criticisms were written in a style, and with a boyish freedom of censure and ridicule, that would have given you pain and perhaps offence. I will re-write them, abridge, or rather extract from them their absolute meaning, and send them in the way of a letter. In the tragedy I have frequently used the following marks: *, T, I, ‡. Of these, the first calls your attention to my suspicions that your language is false or intolerable English. The second marks the passages which struck me as flat or mean. reprobation, levelled at these sentences in which you have adopted that worst sort of vulgar language, common-place book language: such as 'Difficulties that mock narration,' 'met my view,' 'bred in the lap of luxury.' The last mark implies bad metre. I was much interested by the last three acts, indeed, I greatly admire

The third is a note of

your management of the story. vinced, you must entirely re-write.

The two first acts, I am con-
I would indeed open the play

with the conspirators in Ispahan, confident of their success. In this way you might with great dramatic animation explain to the audience all you wish, and give likewise palpable motives of despair and revenge to Bulac's after conduct. But this I will write to you--the papers in which I have detailed what I think might be substituted, I really do not dare send.

"You must have been in an odd mood when you could write to a poor fellow with a sick stomach, a giddy head, and swoln and limping limbs, to a man on whom the dews of heaven cannot fall without diseasing him, 'You want, or at least you think you want, neither accommodation nor society as ministerial to your happiness,' and strangely credulous too, when you could gravely repeat that in the island of St Michael's, the chief town of which contains 14,000 inhabitants, no other residence was procurable than ‘an unwindowed cavern scooped in the rock.' I must have been an idle fool indeed to have resolved so deeply without having made enquiries how I was to be housed and fed. Accommodations are necessary to my life, and society to my happiness, though I can find that society very interesting and good which you perhaps would find dull and uninstructive. One word more. You say I do not tolerate you in the degree of partiality you feel for Mrs I., and will not allow your admiration of Hume, and the pleasure you derive from Virgil, from Dryden, even in a certain degree from Rowe. Hume and Rowe I for myself hold very cheap, and have never feared to say so, but never had any objection to any one's differing from me. I have received, and I hope still shall, great delight from Virgil, whose versification I admire beyond measure, and very frequently his language. Of Dryden I am, and always have been, a passionate admirer. I have always placed him among our greatest men. You must have misunderstood me, and considered me as detracting when I considered myself only as discriminating. But were my opinions otherwise, I should fear that others would not tolerate me in holding opinions different from those of people in general, than feel any difficulty in tolerating

CORRESPONDENCE WITH COLERIDGE.

81

others in their conformity with the general sentiment. Of Mrs I. I once, I believe, wrote a very foolish sentence or two to you. And now for my late acquisitions of friends.' Aye, friends! Stoddart indeed, if he were nearer to us, and more among us, I should really number among such. He is a man of uncorrupted integrity, and of very very kind heart; his talents are respectable, and his information such, that while he was with me I derived much instruction from his conversation. Sharpe and Rogers had an introductory note from Mr Wedgwood; as to Mr Rogers, even if I wished it, and were in London the next week, I should never dream that any acquaintance I have with him would entitle me to call on him at his own house. S. T. COLERIDGE."

The Same to the Same.

"GRETA HALL, KESWICK, Sep. 22, 1801. “DEAR GODWIN,-When once a correspondence has intermitted, from whatever cause, it scarcely ever recommences without some impulse ab extra. After my last letter, I went rambling after health, or at least, alleviation of sickness. My Azores scheme I was obliged to give up, as well, I am afraid, as that of going abroad at all, from want of money. Latterly I have had additional source of disquietude-so that altogether I have, I confess, felt little inclination to write to you, who have not known me long enough, nor associated enough of that esteem which you entertain for the qualities you attribute to me, with me myself me, to be much interested about the carcase Coleridge. So, of Carcase Coleridge no more.

'At Middleham, near Durham, I accidentally met your pamphlet and read it—and only by accident was prevented from immediately writing to you. For I read it with unmingled delight and admiration, with the exception of that one hateful paragraph, for the insertion of which I can account only on a superstitious hypothesis, that, when all the gods and goddesses gave you each a good gift, Nemesis counterbalanced them all with the destiny, that, in whatever you published, there should be some one. outrageously imprudent suicidal passage. But you have had enough

it

of this. With the exception of this passage, I never remember to have read a pamphlet with warmer feelings of sympathy and respect. Had I read it en masse when I wrote to you, I should certes have made none of the remarks I once made in the first letter on the subject, but as certainly should have done so in my second. On the most deliberate reflection, I do think the introduction clumsily worded, and (what is of more importance) I do think your retractations always imprudent, and not always just. But it is painful to me to say this to you. I know not what effect may have on your mind, for I have found that I cannot judge of other men by myself. I am myself dead indifferent as to censures of any kind. Praise even from fools has sometimes given me a momentary pleasure, and what I could not but despise as opinion, I have taken up with some satisfaction as sympathy. But the censure or dislike of my dearest Friend, even of him whom I think the wisest man I know, does not give me the slightest pain. It is ten to one but I agree with him, and if I do, then I am glad. If I differ from him, the pleasure which I feel in developing the sources of our disagreement entirely swallows up all consideration of the disagreement itself. But then I confess that I have written nothing that I value myself at all, and that constitutes a prodigious difference between us and still more than this, that no man's opinion, merely as opinion, operates in any other way than to make me review my own side of the question. All this looks very much like self-panegyric. I cannot help it. It is the truth, and I find it to hold good of no other person; i.e. to the extent of the indifference which I feel. And therefore I am without any criterion, by which I can determine what I can say, and how much without wounding or irritating. I will never therefore willingly criticise any manuscript composition, unless the author and I are together, for then I know that, say what I will, he cannot be wounded, because my voice, my looks, my whole manners must convince any good man that all I said was accompanied with sincere good-will and genuine kindness. Besides, I seldom fear to say anything when I can develope my reasons, but this is seldom possible in a letter. It is not improbable, that is, not very

im