Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
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Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834 -- Correspondence
For God's sake, my dear fellow, tell me what we are to gain by taking a
Welsh farm? Remember the principles and proposed consequences of
Pantisocracy, and reflect in what degree they are attainable by
Coleridge, Southey, Lovell, Burnett, and Co., some five men _going
partners_ together! In the next place, supposing that we have found
the preponderating utility of our aspheterising in Wales, let us by our
speedy and united inquiries discover the sum of money necessary. Whether
such a farm with so very large a house is to be procured without
launching our frail and unpiloted bark on a rough sea of anxieties? How
much money will be necessary for "furnishing" so large a house? How much
necessary for the maintenance of so large a family--eighteen people--for
a year at least?]
[Note: Letters XLIII gives the full text of this Letter 13. Letters
XLIV-L follow 13.]
In January 1795, he was to return--and then with Spring breezes to
repair to the banks of the Susquehanna! But his fate withstood;--he took
no degree, nor ever crossed the Atlantic. Michaelmas Term, 1794, was the
last he kept at Cambridge; the vacation following was passed in London
with Charles Lamb, and in the beginning of 1795 he returned with Southey
to Bristol, and there commenced man.
The whole spring and summer of this year he devoted to public Lectures
at Bristol, making in the intervals several excursions in Somersetshire,
one memorial of which remains in the "Lines composed while climbing
Brockley Combe". It was in one of these excursions that Mr. Coleridge
and Mr.Wordsworth first met at the house of Mr. Pinney. [1] The first
six of those Lectures constituted a course presenting a comparative view
of the Civil War under Charles I and the French Revolution. Three of
them, or probably the substance of four or five, were published at
Bristol in the latter end of 1795, the first two together, with the
title of "Conciones ad Populum", and the third with that of "The Plot
Discovered". The eloquent passage in conclusion of the first of these
Addresses was written by Mr. Southey. The tone throughout them all is
vehemently hostile to the policy of the great minister of that day; but
it is equally opposed to the spirit and maxims of Jacobinism. It was
late in life that, after a reperusal of these "Conciones", Coleridge
wrote on a blank page of one of them the following words:--"Except the
two or three pages involving the doctrine of philosophical necessity and
Unitarianism, I see little or nothing in these outbursts of my youthful
zeal to retract; and with the exception of some flame-coloured epithets
applied to persons, as to Mr. Pitt and others, or rather to
personifications--(for such they really were to me)--as little to
regret."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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