BIB_ID
415168
Accession number
MA 1848.23
Creator
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834.
Display Date
Nether Stowey, England, 1799 July 29.
Credit line
Purchased from Joanna Langlais, 1957.
Description
1 item (2 pages, with address) ; 25.3 x 20.3 cm
Notes
This collection, MA 1848, is comprised of 92 letters from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Robert Southey, written between 1794 and 1819. See the collection-level record for more information (MA 1848.1-92).
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 as MA 1848-1857.
Address panel with postmarks: "Mr Southey / Mr Holloway's / Minehead."
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 as MA 1848-1857.
Address panel with postmarks: "Mr Southey / Mr Holloway's / Minehead."
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
Hesitating about whether to write or stay silent, but saying "I have been absent, Southey! ten months, & little Hartley prattles about you / and if you knew, that domestic affliction was hard upon me, and that my own health was declining, would you not have shootings within you of an affection, which ('tho fall'n, tho' chang'd') has played too important a part in the events of our lives & the formation of our characters, ever to be forgotten?"; saying that he does not wish for "any participation in each other's moral Being," because he knows that this is impossible; writing "But, Southey, we have similiar Talents, Sentiments nearly similar, & kindred pursuits -- we have likewise in more than one instance common objects of our esteem and love"; asking that, if they happen to meet, "let us not withhold from each other the outward Expression of daily Kindliness"; asking him also, if he cannot change his opinion of Coleridge, to "make your feelings at least more tolerant towards me -- / a debt of humility which assuredly we all of us owe to our most feeble, imperfect and self-deceiving Nature"; adding "We are few of us good enough to know our own Hearts -- and as to the Hearts of others, let us struggle to hope that they are better than we think them / & resign the rest to our common maker"; ending "God bless you & yours --."
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