Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 2: being The Biographical Supplement of Coleridge's Biographia LiterariaColeridge, Samuel Taylor
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Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 2: being The Biographical Supplement of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834 -- Correspondence
Words I know are not wanted between you and me. But there are occasions
so awful, there may be instances and manifestations of friendship so
affecting, and drawing up with them so long a train from behind, so
many folds of recollection as they come onward on one's mind, that it
seems but a mere act of justice to oneself, a debt we owe to the dignity
of our moral nature to give them some record; a relief which the spirit
of man asks and demands to contemplate in some outward symbol, what it
is inwardly solemnizing. I am still too much under the cloud of past
misgivings, too much of the stun and stupor from the recent peals and
thunder-crush still remains, to permit me to anticipate others than by
wishes and prayers. What the effect of your unwearied kindness may be on
poor M.'s mind and conduct, I pray fervently, and I feel a cheerful
trust that I do not pray in vain, that on my own mind and spring of
action, it will be proved not to have been wasted. I do inwardly
believe, that I shall yet do something to thank you, my dear--in the way
in which you would wish to be thanked--by doing myself honour.--Dear
friend and brother of my soul, God only knows how truly, and in the
depth, you are loved and prized by your affectionate friend,
S. T. COLERIDGE.[130]
LETTER 207. TO ALLSOP
Dec. 26th, 1822.
My very dear Friend,
I might with strict truth assign the not only day after day, but hour
after hour employment, if not through the whole period of my waking
time, yet through the whole of my writing power, as the cause of my not
having written to you with my own hand; but then I ought to add that it
was enforced and kept up by the expectation of seeing you. There are two
ways of giving you pleasure and comfort; would to God I could have made
the one _compossible_ with the other and done both! The first, the
having finished the Logic in its three main divisions,--as the Canon, or
that which prescribes the rule and form of all _conclusion_ or
conclusive reasoning; second, as the Criterion, or that which teaches to
distinguish truth from falsehood, containing all the sorts, forms, and
sources of error, and means of deceiving or being deceived; third, as
the Organ, or positive instrument for discovering truth, together with
the general introduction to the whole.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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