BIB_ID
415515
Accession number
MA 1848.58
Creator
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834.
Display Date
Keswick, England, 1803 August 7.
Credit line
Purchased from Joanna Langlais, 1957.
Description
1 item (4 pages, with address) ; 23.4 x 19.2 cm
Notes
Coleridge gives only "Sunday" for the date of writing. Based on the contents, the letter was almost certainly written in the summer of 1803. Additionally, the letter appears to be postmarked August 10 (a Wednesday); in 1803, the Sunday of that week fell on the 7th. See the published edition of the correspondence, cited below, for additional information.
Signed with his initials.
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 / St James's Parade / Kingsdown / Bristol."
Signed with his initials.
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 / St James's Parade / Kingsdown / Bristol."
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
Writing of a memory: "I had a vivid recollection -- indeed an ocular Spectrum -- of our room in College Street -- / a curious instance of association / you remember how incessantly in that room I used to be compounding these half-verbal, half-visual metaphors"; making several points on memory, metaphysics and old age; arguing that memory "depends in a much greater degree on the recurrence of resembling states of Feeling, than on Trains of Idea"; adding "I almost think, that Ideas never recall Ideas, as far as they are Ideas -- any more than Leaves in a forest create each other's motion -- The Breeze it is that runs thro' them / it is the Soul, the state of Feeling"; saying that he will support Southey in whatever plan he pursues, but explaining his concerns about a proposed "Catalogue of all British Books," among them the low sales potential; adding "O how I wish to be talking, not writing -- for my mind is so full, that my thoughts stifle & jam each other / & I have presented them as shapeless Jellies"; making suggestions for changes to the idea and how to execute it; commenting "[a]n encyclopedia appears to me a worthless monster" and discussing the challenges of writing for a general audience; commenting on how little he has learned from reviews; saying that after Southey sends him his "final & total Plan," he will then tell him which articles he will attempt and when he can deliver them; describing a change in the weather and the effect it may have on his intended journey to Scotland; writing in a postscript that he has received Southey's letter, which answers some of his objections, though many remain; adding "I can rely with the most heartfelt confidence, that you will not suffer me to hurt the work, or the work to hurt me / both which would take place, if my Quota were heterogeneous, & out of the Plan of the Work at large."
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