Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
General
Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834 -- Correspondence
Coleridge had arrived in London in the end of November (Dyke-Campbell's
'Life', 105); and Mrs. Coleridge and Hartley were also at 21,
Buckingham Street, Strand, on 9th December ('Letters', 318). He was now
a regular contributor to the 'Morning Post', Stuart, the proprietor
paying all expenses ('Letters', 310),[1] Coleridge, too, had made the
acquaintance of Godwin ('Letters', p. 316), whom he had castigated in
the 'Watchman', and who, he says, "is no great things in intellects;
but in heart and manner he is all the better for having been the
husband of Mary Wollstonecraft" ('Letters', 316). He began a
correspondence with Godwin, and of the eighteen letters by Coleridge to
him we are enabled to give nine. Lamb was the means of drawing
Coleridge and Godwin together, and in Lamb's letters of this period
('Ainger', i, 111, 113, 115), we find glimpses of Coleridge while
engaged on his translation of 'Wallenstein'.
While in London Coleridge did not neglect his friends elsewhere; we
have interesting letters to the Wedgwoods, Poole, and Southey. The next
three letters are from London.
[Footnote 1: For an account of Coleridge as a journalist see Mr. H. D.
Traill's 'Life of Coleridge', p. 79.]
LETTER 88. TO THOMAS WEDGWOOD
21, Buckingham Street, Strand, January, 1800.
My dear sir,
I am sitting by a fire in a rug great coat. Your room is doubtless to a
greater degree air tight than mine, or your notions of Tartarus would
veer round to the Greenlander's creed. It is most barbarously cold, and
you, I fear, can shield yourself from it, only by perpetual
imprisonment. If any place in the southern climates were in a state of
real quiet, and likely to continue so, should you feel no inclination to
migrate? Poor Southey, from over great industry, as I suspect, the
industry too of solitary composition, has reduced himself to a terrible
state of weakness, and is determined to leave this country as soon as he
has finished the poem on which he is now employed. 'Tis a melancholy
thing that so young a man, and one whose life has ever been so simple
and self-denying * * *
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