BIB_ID
128698
Accession number
MA 1857.2
Creator
Beaumont, George Howland, Sir, 1753-1827.
Display Date
Great Dunmow, England, 1803 September 29.
Credit line
Purchased from Joanna Langlais, 1957.
Description
1 item (4 pages, with address) ; 22.8 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 to "S.T. Coleridge Esq're / Greta Hall / Keswick."
Date and place of writing from postmarks.
This letter is written in reply to Coleridge's letter of September 22, 1803 to Sir George & Lady Beaumont (see MA 1581.26).
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 to "S.T. Coleridge Esq're / Greta Hall / Keswick."
Date and place of writing from postmarks.
This letter is written in reply to Coleridge's letter of September 22, 1803 to Sir George & Lady Beaumont (see MA 1581.26).
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
Expressing concern for Coleridge's health and praising his poem "Dejection;" expressing relief at hearing from him; saying "Your kind letter relieved us from real anxiety, we have been forming dismal conjectures about you from morning till night, we fancied among other things you were taken ill in the highlands & that Mrs. Coleridge had been suddenly summoned to attend you, we congratulate you both on your return & according to the never failing burthen of my letters I hope you will take care of yourself & above all things abstain from reading by night;" saying that reading Coleridge's descriptions of his time in Scotland revived his own memories of travels there in 1779; praising "Dejection" saying "I have read that fragment over & over & I can say without flattery it is one of the most touching things as well as one of the most beautiful I ever read. - How very flattering it is to me that you should employ your pen upon my sketches & yet I declare I blush even by myself & when I think of it - this is not affectation - I will confess your approbation gives me confidence & tho I impute much of what you feel to your own vivid imagination I cannot help flattering myself these sketches as far as they go have not mislead your exquisite sensibility. How happy we should have been to have met Mr. Southey at Keswick it is needless to say we are his admirers we doubt not your conversation aided by old Skiddaw & his brethren will in time restore his mind to tranquility;" continuing the letter in a postscript, in the hand of Lady Beaumont, in which she transcribes part of a letter from her sister in which her sister shares her fond memories of Grasmere; asking that she "...not let dear little Derwent forget my name. I wish I could hear him say "you must not doe away."
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