The Letters Volume 2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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of all things, but for them I would try my chance. But they pluck out the wing-feathers from the mind. I have not entirely recovered the sense of my side or hand, but have recovered the use. I am harassed by local and partial fevers. This day, at noon, we set off for Leghorn;[33] all passage through the Italian States and Germany is little other than impossible for an Englishman, and Heaven knows whether Leghorn may not be blockaded. However, we go thither, and shall go to England in an American ship. Inform Mr. Wallis of this, and urge him to make his way—assure him of my anxious thoughts and fervent wishes respecting him and of my love for T——, and his family. Tell Mr. Migliorus [?] that I should have written him long ago but for my ill health; and will not fail to do it on my arrival at Pisa—from thence, too, I will write a letter to you, for this I do not consider as a letter. Nothing can surpass Mr. Russell’s[34] kindness and tender-heartedness to me, and his understanding is far superior to what it appears on first acquaintance. I will write likewise to Mr. Wallis and conjure him not to leave Amelia. I have heard in Leghorn a sad, sad character of one of those whom you called acquaintance, but who call you their dear friend.
My dear Allston, somewhat from increasing age, but more from calamity and intense fra[ternal affections], my heart is not open to more than kind, good wishes in general. To you, and to you alone, since I left England, I have felt more, and had I not known the Wordsworths, should have esteemed and loved you first and most; and, as it is, next to them I love and honour you. Heaven knows, a part of such a wreck as my head and heart is scarcely worth your acceptance.
S. T. Coleridge.
CLIX. TO DANIEL STUART.
Bell Inn, Friday Street,
Monday morning, August 18, 1806.
My dear Sir,—I arrived here from Stangate Creek last night, a little after ten, and have found myself so unusually better ever since I leaped on land yester-afternoon, that I am glad that neither my strength nor spirits enabled me to write to you on my arrival in Quarantine on the eleventh. Both the captain and my fellow-passengers were seriously alarmed for my life; and indeed such have been my unremitting sufferings from pain, sleeplessness, loathing of food, and spirits wholly despondent, that no motive on earth short of an awful duty would ever prevail on me to take any sea-voyage likely to be longer than three or four days. I had rather starve in a hovel, and, if life through disease become worthless, will choose a Roman death. It is true I was very low before I embarked.... To have been working so hard for eighteen months in a business I detested; to have been flattered, and to have flattered myself that I should, on striking the balance, have paid all my debts and maintained both myself and family during my exile out of my savings and earnings, including my travels through Germany, through which I had to the very last hoped to have passed, and found myself!—but enough! I cannot charge my conscience with a single extravagance, nor even my judgment with any other imprudences than that of suffering one good and great man to overpersuade me from month to month to a delay which was gnawing away my very vitals, and in being duped in disobedience to my first feelings and previous ideas by another diplomatic Minister.... A gentleman offered to take me without expense to Rome, which I accepted with the full intention of staying only a fortnight, and then returning to Naples to pass the winter.... I left everything but a good suit of clothes and my shirts, etc., all my letters of credit, manuscripts, etc. I had not been ten days in Rome before the French torrent rolled down on Naples. All return was impossible, and all transmission of papers not only insecure, but being English and many of them political, highly dangerous both to the sender and sendee.... But this is only a fragment of a chapter of contents, and I am too much agitated to write the details, but will call on you as soon as my two or three remaining [guineas] shall have put a decent hat upon my head and shoes upon my feet. I am literally afraid, even to cowardice, to ask for any person or of any person. Including the Quarantine we had fifty-five days of shipboard, working up against head-winds, rotting and sweating in calms, or running under hard gales with the dead lights secured. From the captain and my fellow-passenger I received every possible tenderness, only when I was very ill they laid their wise heads together, and the latter in a letter to his father begged him to inform my family that I had arrived, and he trusted that they would soon see me in better health and spirits than when I had quitted them; a letter which must have alarmed if they saw into it, and wounded if they did not. I was not informed of it till this morning. God bless you, my dear sir! I have yet cheerful hopes that Heaven will not suffer me to die degraded by any other debts than those which it ever has been, and ever will be, my joy and pride still to pay and still to owe; those of a truly grateful heart, and to you among the first of those to whom they are due.
S. T. Coleridge.
CHAPTER VIII. HOME AND NO HOME. 1806-1807
CLX. TO DANIEL STUART.
Monday, (?) September 15, 1806.
My dear Stuart,—I arrived in town safe, but so tired by the next evening, that I went to bed at nine and slept till past twelve on Sunday. I cannot keep off my mind from the last subject we were talking about; though I have brought my notions concerning it to hang so well on the balance that I have in my own judgment few doubts as to the relative weight of the arguments persuasive and dissuasive. But of this “face to face.” I sleep at the “Courier” office, and shall institute and carry on the inquiry into the characters of Mr. Pitt and Mr. Fox, and having carried it to the Treaty of Amiens, or rather to the recommencement of the War, I propose to give a full and severe Critique of the “Enquiry into the State of the Nation,” taking it for granted that this work does, on the whole, contain Mr. Fox’s latest political creed; and this for the purpose of answering the “Morning Chronicle”(!) assertions, that Mr. Fox was the greatest and wisest statesman; that Mr. Pitt was no statesman. I shall endeavour to show that both were undeserving of that high character; but that Mr. Pitt was the better; that the evils which befell him were undoubtedly produced in great measure by blunders and wickedness on the Continent which it was almost impossible to foresee; while the effects of Mr. Fox’s measures must in and of themselves produce calamity and degradation.
To confess the truth, I am by no means pleased with Mr. Street’s character of Mr. Fox as a speaker and man of intellect. As a piece of panegyric, it falls woefully short of the Article in the “Morning Chronicle” in style and selection of thoughts, and runs at least equally far beyond the bounds of truth. Persons who write in a hurry are very liable to contract a sort of snipt, convulsive style, that moves forward by short repeated pushes, with iso-chronous asthmatic pants, “He—He—He—He—,” or the like, beginning a dozen short sentences, each making a period. In this way a man can get rid of all that happens at any one time to be in his memory, with very little choice in the arrangement and no expenditure of logic in the connection. However, it is the matter more than the manner that displeased me, for fear that what I shall write for to-morrow’s “Courier” may involve a kind of contradiction. To one outrageous passage I persuaded him to add a note of amendment, as it was too late to alter the Article itself. It was impossible for me, seeing him satisfied with the Article himself, to say more than that he appeared to me to have exceeded in eulogy. But beyond doubt in the political position occupied by the “Courier,” with so little danger of being anticipated by the other papers in anything which it ought to say, except some obvious points which being common to all the papers can give credit to none, it would have been better to have announced his death, and simply led the way for an after disquisition by a sort of shy disclosure with an appearance of suppression of the spirit with which it could be conducted.
There are letters at the Post Office, Margate, for me. Be so good as to send them to me, directed to the “Courier” office. I think of going to Mr. Smith’s[35] to-morrow, or not at all. Whether Mr. Fox’s death[36] will keep Mr. S. in town, or call him there, I do not know. At all events I shall return by the time of your arrival.
May God bless you! I am ever, my dear sir, as your obliged, so your affectionately grateful friend,
S. T. Coleridge.
CLXI. TO HIS WIFE.