BIB_ID
106455
Accession number
MA 1857.10
Creator
Davy, Humphry, Sir, 1778-1829.
Display Date
Bristol, England, 1800 November 26.
Credit line
Purchased from Joanna Langlais, 1957.
Description
1 item (4 pages, with address) ; 23.5 x 18.7 cm
Notes
This collection, MA 1857, includes seventeen autograph letters signed from various correspondents to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, three autograph letters signed to Robert Southey, one each from Edward Coleridge, John Taylor Coleridge and Sara Fricker Coleridge and two autograph letters signed from William Wordsworth, one to Robert Southey and one to Joseph Henry Green. This collection of letters dates from 1794-1834.
This letter is from the Joanna Langlais Collection, a large collection of letters written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to various recipients. The collection has been divided into subsets, based primarily on Coleridge's addressees, and these sub-collections have been cataloged individually as MA 1848- MA 1857.
Address panel with postmarks to "Mr. Coleridge / Greta Hall / Keswick / Cumberland."
Coleridge's reply to this letter is published in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge edited by Earl Leslie Griggs, Volume I, 1785-1800. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1956, no. 365.
This letter is from the Joanna Langlais Collection, a large collection of letters written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to various recipients. The collection has been divided into subsets, based primarily on Coleridge's addressees, and these sub-collections have been cataloged individually as MA 1848- MA 1857.
Address panel with postmarks to "Mr. Coleridge / Greta Hall / Keswick / Cumberland."
Coleridge's reply to this letter is published in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge edited by Earl Leslie Griggs, Volume I, 1785-1800. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1956, no. 365.
Provenance
Purchased from Joanna Langlais in 1957 as a gift of the Fellows with the special assistance of Mrs. W. Murray Crane, Mr. Homer D. Crotty, Mr. and Mrs. Donald F. Hyde, Mr. Robert H. Taylor and Mrs. Landon K. Thorne. Formerly in the possession of Ernest Hartley Coleridge and Thomas Burdett Money-Coutts, Baron Latymer.
Summary
Apologizing for his "...long epistolary indolence" but explaining that he has not been well; saying "...it was connected with real organs living in pain & with ideal organs, only living in pleasure when contemplating you & some other ideal aggregates & as often has that instrument been snatched away by devils in the forms of gas wonder hunters, spectre-exp'ts & sicknesses of the stomach. The literal meaning of this is that during the last three weeks I have been sometimes busy & often ailing with a complaint of the stomach...Oh that the organiser of the universe pleasurable sensation or love would give to impressions exactly the same laws of motion as it has given to ideas, then should my torpid organs that now rest confined in a prison of civilization, i.e., a house, be where their ideas are, with you, wandering over majestic mountains, cooled by the breezes of health, or sleeping upon brown leaves beneath the unclouded heaven or floating on lakes colored by the suns of evening;" suggesting mustard as "... a good palliative for Rheumatism, a better one is perhaps found in the volatile tinc're of guaicum the Tinc : Guaic : Volat : of the slow killers of men given to the dose of 30 drops in water three our four times a day - The parts rheumatically affected should be kept very warm, the diet used should be stimulating, when the pain is great friction with sts of Hartshorn may be employed - You might not to have applied to me for a receipt - Your master the Gallilean was an adept in removing this disease. He was the only physician that ever compleatly cured it. Request the spirit that dwells in the woods & mountains to become concentered with all its powers of modification in your organs & no task will be easier than that of changing the conditions of health, life & disease;" saying he is anxious "...to hear that you have begun your treatise on the elements of poetry - You are to be the Thalata of the Dæmons existing in the world of Language, the rooter out of all the weeds & unnatural plants that the hand of civilized man has sown in the Eden of passion & of nature. - I regret that Cristobel is not to be published in the lyrical ballads; it is however in regret of self interest; arising from the wish that the first part had induced for the perusal & re-perusal of the whole. I have made some important galvanic discoveries which seem to lead to the door of the temple of the mysterious god of Life. I shall some time within the next six months publish a work on this subject - I devised more than three months ago a copy of my book to be left for you at Longmans. Have you not yet received it? Tell me & I will find a mode of sending you one from hence. Farewell my dear Coleridge."
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