Letter from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wrexham and other locations, to Robert Southey, 1794 July 13-22 : autograph manuscript.

Saying that Southey's letter made him melancholy; warning him against despondency; encouraging him to think of all the advantages he has ("Health, Strength of Mind, and confirmed Habits of strict Morality"), suggesting that he could become a clerk in a "Compting House" and writing "For God's sake, Southey! enter not into the church"; telling the story of a friend of Joseph Hucks who accepted a government post: "he took the Oaths -- shuddered -- went home and threw himself in an Agony out of a two pair of stairs' Window!"; writing "These dreams of Despair are most soothing to the Imagination -- I well know it. We shroud ourselves 'in the mantle of Distress, and tell our poor Hearts, This is Happiness! There is a dignity in all these solitary emotions, that flatters the pride of our Nature"; saying "As I was meditating on the capabilities of Pleasure in a mind like your's I unwarily fell into Poetry" and following this with sixteen lines from the poem "Happiness"; weighing different possibilities for a motto and quoting six lines from William Lisle Bowles's poem "The Philanthropic Society"; commenting "Poor Poland. They go on sadly there"; discussing the relationship between friendship and philanthropy: "Philanthropy (and indeed every other virtue) is a thing of Concretion -- Some home-born Feeling is at the center of the Ball, that, rolling on thro' Life collects and assimilates every congenial Affection"; asking what Southey meant by a line in his letter; writing "My heart is so heavy at present, that I will defer the finishing of this letter till to morrow" and explaining that he had seen "a face at Wrexham Church this morning, which recalled 'thoughts full of bitterness' and images too dearly beloved!"; including a poem dedicated to "the man of Ross"; recommencing the letter again on Monday from Ruthin; describing an encounter with Mary Evans and her sister at the church in Wrexham and how acutely it affected him; including four lines of Latin verse; writing "I neither eat, nor slept yesterday -- but Love is a local Anguish -- I am 16 miles distant, and am not half so miserable"; confiding his love for Mary Evans, as well as the hopelessness of the situation, and saying "Southey! There are few men of whose delicacy I think so highly as to have written all this -- I am glad, I have so deemed of you -- we are soothed by communication"; recommencing the letter from Denbigh and describing the journey from Oxford into Wales thus far; noting that at Llanvillin "I preached Pantisocracy and Aspheterism with so much success that two great huge Fellows, of Butcher like appearance, danced about the room in enthusiastic agitation"; describing a dinner at Llangunnog and a walk over the mountains to Bala: "It was scorchingly hot -- I applied my mouth ever and anon to the side of the Rocks and sucked in draughts of water cold as Ice, and clear as infant Diamonds in their embryo Dew!"; describing an altercation over republicanism that broke out in an inn after he proposed a toast to General Washington and how he attempted to quell it by appealing to the combatants' shared Christian faith; adding "Welch Politics could not prevail over Welch Hospitality -- they all except the Parson shook me by the hand, and said I was an open-hearted honest-speaking Fellow, tho' I was a bit of a Democrat"; saying that from Bala they traveled to Llanvollin and met on their way two of his classmates; describing an encounter at a ruined castle in Denbigh, where a young man played the flute in the moonlight; telling him they will be in Aberystwyth in a week and adding "I anticipate much accession of Republicanism from [Robert] Lovell! I have positively done nothing but dream of the System of no Property every step of the Way since I left you -- till last Sunday. Heigho!"