Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
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Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834 -- Correspondence
I am agitated by many things, and only write now because you desired an
answer by return of post. I have been dangerously ill, but the illness
is going about, and not connected with my immediate ill health, however
it may be with my general constitution. It was the cholera-morbus. But
for a series of the merest accidents I should have been seized in the
streets, in a bitter east wind, with cold rain; at all events have
walked through it struggling. It was Sunday-night.
I have suffered it at Tobin's; Tobin sleeping out at Woolwich. No fire,
no wine or spirits, or medicine of any kind, and no person being within
call, but luckily, perhaps the occasion would better suit the word
providentially, Tuffin, calling, took me home with him. * * * I tremble
at every loud sound I myself utter. But this is rather a history of the
past than of the present. I have only enough for memento, and already on
Wednesday I consider myself in clear sunshine, without the shadow of the
wings of the destroying angel.
What else relates to myself, I will write on Monday. Would to heaven you
were going with me to Malta, if it were but for the voyage! With all
other things I could make the passage with an unwavering mind. But
without cheerings of hope. Let me mention one thing; Lord Cadogan was
brought to absolute despair, and hatred of life, by a stomach complaint,
being now an old man. The symptoms, as stated to me, were strikingly
like yours, excepting the nervous difference of the two characters; the
flittering fever, etc. He was advised to reduce lean beef to a pure
jelly, by Papin's digester, with as little water as could secure it from
burning, and of this to take half a wine glass 10 or 14 times a day.
This and nothing else. He did so. Sir George Beaumont saw, within a few
weeks a letter from himself to Lord St. Asaph, in which he relates the
circumstance of his perseverence in it, and rapid amelioration, and
final recovery. "I am now," he says, "in real good health; as good, and
in as cheerful spirits as I ever was when a young man."
May God bless you, even here,
S. T. COLERIDGE.
Before Coleridge left for Malta, Humphry Davy wrote the following
beautiful letter to Coleridge, and Coleridge replied in a letter equally
beautiful in its self-portraiture.
Royal Institution, Twelve o'clock, Monday.
My dear Coleridge,
My mind is disturbed, and my body harassed by many labours; yet I cannot
suffer you to depart, without endeavouring to express to you some of the
unbroken and higher feelings of my spirit, which have you at once for
their cause and object.
Years have passed since we first met; and your presence, and
recollections in regard to you, have afforded me continued sources of
enjoyment. Some of the better feelings of my nature have been elevated
by your converse; and thoughts which you have nursed, have been to me an
eternal source of consolation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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