BIB_ID
415344
Accession number
MA 1850.5
Creator
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834.
Display Date
Place not specified, 1824 October 26.
Credit line
Purchased from Joanna Langlais, 1957.
Description
1 item (4 pages, with address) ; 22.8 x 18.7 cm
Notes
This collection, MA 1850, is comprised of five autograph letters signed and one autograph letter from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to James Gillman, written from November 10, 1816 through January 10, 1832.
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 "J. Gillman Esq're."
Date of writing from published letter cited below.
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 "J. Gillman Esq're."
Date of writing from published letter cited below.
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
Relating details of a stormy night, his very poor sleep and his dreams; commenting at length on the character of Gillman; saying "So far I see plainly, that your having been from Boyhood compelled to struggle for yourself with the Hopes & Fears, both of Life and of your own striving nature, while unaided & untempered by the warmth ab extra of a setting and hatching Sympathy. Had we, each of us, know the other from 12 to 15 years earlier, we should both of us have been entirer men - and (I speak it with solemn conviction of it's truth) I should have been even more benefited than you - for my evil is in habit, supervening on a constitutional weakness, hidden beneath a vivid Varnish of extra-ordinary power - the maximum of Power with the minimum of Strength, being my invoice - while your's is in a hypochondria that subjects your imagination to your animal spirits, under this special aggravation - that you are not permitted, & from your early youth never have been enabled, to withdraw yourself in thought or act from real life for any continuity of time, and that this real life has forced upon you, & ever forced on you, specimens of folly, imbecillity, and selfishness - your best harbour from which was for too long a time your own vivid perception of their being such - while there was no one individual, no man at least, to whom you could revert as a part of yourself, as a holden and appropriated Stay, whom you could consider as absolutely on the other & better side of Humanity...You compare yourself with regard to power of abstraction, and intellectual construction with me, whose most remarkable quality it is, and in whom it has been nourished even to disease and misgrowth, by domestic disappointment and by constitutional Indolence, Cowardice of Pain, & the accidental sad Consequents - and then unjustly put yourself down to Zero;" adding that he looks forward to welcoming James whose "...intellectual Attainments will not in the end be less profitable or efficient, for having grown slowly and with seeming reluctance out of the rock of Duty, instead of the garden mould of Liking & the manure of Emulation;" concluding with news of the household.
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