BIB_ID
415525
Accession number
MA 1848.61
Creator
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834.
Display Date
Edinburgh, Scotland, 1803 September 13.
Credit line
Purchased from Joanna Langlais, 1957.
Description
1 item (4 pages, with address) ; 20 x 21.7 cm
Notes
Coleridge gives the date of writing as "Tuesday Morning." The letter is postmarked "September 13, 1803," which fell on a Tuesday. See the published edition of the correspondence, cited below, for additional information.
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: "Robert Southey Esqre / Greta Hall / Keswick / Cumberland / S. Britain."
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: "Robert Southey Esqre / Greta Hall / Keswick / Cumberland / S. Britain."
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
Admitting "I wrote you a strange Letter, I fear: but in truth your's affected my wretched Stomach, & that my head in such a way, that I wrote mechanically in the wake of the first vivid Idea"; discussing how he will be making his way back to Keswick and promising to be there on Thursday for dinner; writing admiringly of Edinburgh: "What alteration of Height & Depth! -- a city looked at in the polish'd back of a Brobdignag Spoon, held lengthways -- so enormously stretched-up are the Houses!"; describing his first impressions of the city and the experience of looking out over it and the Firth from Arthur's Seat at sunset; describing the street where Walter Scott's house is located and the view of Edinburgh Castle and the Rock: "I' faith, I exclaimed, the Monks formerly, but the Poets now, know where to fix their Habitations"; listing the four main sights worth going to Scotland for, for a person who has seen Cumberland and Westmorland ("the view of all the Islands at the Foot of Loch Lomond [...] the Trossachs at the foot of Loch Ketterin [...] The Chamber & anti-chamber of the Falls of Foyers [...] the City of Edinburgh"); saying that Glencoe is another possibility, "& very well worth going to see, if a Man be a Tory & hate the Memory of William the Third --which I am very willing to do"; saying that he is tolerably well in the daytime, but his nights are still difficult and he often wakes himself up with a "loud Scream of Agony"; describing how he is bearing up under this "Bodily Torture": "it is constitutional with me to sit still & look earnestly upon it, & ask it, what it is? -- Yea often & often, the seeds of Rabelaism germinating in me, I have laughed aloud at my own poor metaphysical Soul. But these Burrs, by Day, of the Will & the Reason, these total Eclipses by night -- O it is hard to bear them"; saying that he is complaining when he ought to be comforting Southey, "but even this is one way of comfort"; adding "We must none of us brood: we were not made to be Brooders. God bless you, dear Friend"; writing in a postscript that Sara will get clean flannels ready for him.
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