I am uneasy to know how my friend, J. Cottle, goes on. The walk I took last Monday to enquire, in person, proved too much for my strength, and shortly after my return, I was in such a swooning way, that I was directed to go to bed, and orders were given that no one should interrupt me. Indeed I cannot be sufficiently grateful for the skill with which _the surgeon treats me._ But it must be a slow, and occasionally, an interrupted progress, after a sad retrogress of nearly twelve years. To God all things are possible. I intreat your prayers, your brother has a share in mine. What an astonishing privilege, that a sinner should be permitted to cry, 'Our Father!' Oh, still more stupendous mercy, that this poor ungrateful sinner should be exhorted, invited, nay, commanded, to pray--to pray importunately. That which great men most detest, namely, importunacy; to _this_ the GIVER and the FORGIVER ENCOURAGES _his_ sick petitioners! I will not trouble you except for one verbal answer to this note. How is your brother? With affectionate respects to yourself and your sister, S. T. Coleridge. To Miss Cottle, Brunswick Square." "Friday, 27th May, 1814. My dear Cottle, Gladness be with you, for your convalescence, and equally so, at the hope which has sustained and tranquillized you through your imminent peril. Far otherwise is, and hath been, my state; yet I too am grateful; yet I cannot rejoice. I feel, with an intensity, unfathomable by words, my utter nothingness, impotence, and worthlessness, in and for myself. I have learned what a sin is, against an infinite imperishable being, such as is the soul of man. I have had more than a glimpse of what is meant by death and outer darkness, and the worm that dieth not--and that all the _hell_ of the reprobate, is no more inconsistent with the love of God, than the blindness of one who has occasioned loathsome and guilty diseases to eat out his eyes, is inconsistent with the light of the sun. But the consolations, at least, the sensible sweetness of hope, I do not possess. On the contrary, the temptation which I have constantly to fight up against, is a fear, that if _annihilation_ and the _possibility_ of _heaven_, were offered to my choice, I should choose the former. This is, perhaps, in part, a constitutional idiosyncracy, for when a mere boy, I wrote these lines: Oh, what a wonder seems the fear of death, Seeing how gladly we all sink to sleep; Babes, children, youths and men, Night following night, for three-score years and ten.[96] And in my early manhood, in lines descriptive of a gloomy solitude, I disguised my own sensations in the following words: