Letter from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Keswick, to Robert Southey, 1803 January 8 : autograph manuscript signed.

Assuring Southey that his conduct towards George Burnett has been kind and writing "For myself, I have no heart to spare for a Coxcomb mad with vanity & stupified with opium. He may not have a bad heart, but he wants a good one [...] I grieve sincerely that there should be such helpless self-tormenting Tormentors; tho' I cannot say, that it adds much to my grief, that one of them is called George Burnet"; saying that Southey's account of the improvements in his health and eyesight comforted him greatly: "I love my Milton / & will not endure any other Poet's addresses to his Blindness -- yet of the two fearful evils I would rather, you were blind, than stomach-deranged to any high degree"; describing his daily diet and telling him about a method of boiling eggs that he believes is superior; saying that his wife Sara is "middling [...] nothing to lament, nothing to boast of" and his daughter "Sariola" is well except for a case of thrush; saying that a walk on New Year's Day and the day following over a mountain to Ambleside has caused a severe attack of dysentery; writing that he recovered, went back over the same route and got caught in a violent storm on the mountainside: "I am no novice in Storms; but such as this I never before witnessed, combining the violence of the wind & rain with the intensity of the cold. My hands were shrivelled like a Washer-woman's: & the rain was pelted, or rather slung, by the wind against my face, like splinters of Flint; and seemed to cut my flesh"; saying that because of the exposure, he is now sick again; writing noncommittally about plans to go to Europe, to stay in Keswick or to move to Bristol; asserting that his views of Charles James Fox and France are his own and are not influenced by Daniel Stuart, and that in fact Stuart took his opinions from Coleridge and was hesistant to publish Coleridge's writings on Fox until forced to by circumstances; adding that if Southey had read his Letters to Fox, he would have seen that "only a few conciliatory Passages were Stuartian, but all the reprehensory parts I myself I"; asking if Southey has heard anything from France that would lead him to think favorably of Bonaparte, the French government or Fox's adulation of both; commenting on a review of "Thalaba" in the Edinburgh Review and assuring him "no living Poet possesses the general reputation, which you possess"; dismissing other contemporary poets like Samuel Rogers and Robert Bloomfield, and qualifying the praise given to Wordsworth and himself; saying how delighted he is that "Madoc" will be published quickly; writing of himself "I am become a gentle & tranquilized Being, but, O Southey! I am not the Coleridge, which you knew me"; sending in a postscript his "affectionate esteem" to Charles Danvers.