Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Letter from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Highgate, to Joseph Henry Green, 1820 May 25 : autograph manuscript signed.

BIB_ID
415941
Accession number
MA 1856.11
Creator
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834.
Display Date
London, England, 1820 May 25.
Credit line
Purchased from Joanna Langlais, 1957.
Description
1 item (7 pages, with address) ; 18.6 x 11.3 and 22.6 x 18.6 cm
Notes
Date and place of writing taken from the postmark.
This collection, MA 1856, is comprised of 48 letters from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Joseph Henry Green and 2 autograph manuscripts, written between 1817 and 1834. See the collection-level record for more information (MA 1856.1-50).
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: "J.H. Green, Esqre / Surgeon / Lincoln's Inn Fields."
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
Saying that he was deeply distressed to hear of how ill Green had been; writing of his own illness, as well as his "utter & sinful helplessness & worthlessness"; mentioning that his nephew, the Reverend William Hart Coleridge, came to visit them, in order to meet Derwent; saying that his nephew brought a copy of Herbert Marsh's lecture on "the authenticity and credibility of the Books collected in the New Testament"; giving his response to Marsh's arguments at length, based in part on his knowledge of the work of Eichhorn; discussing the connection between external evidence and faith in Christianity; discussing the question of whether all illness is physiological ("Does the efficient cause of Disease & disordered Action, & collectively of Pain & Perishing, lie entirely in the Organs?"), referring both to his own case and more generally; asking "For which of the two, Soul or Body, am I to call 'I'?"; writing about the relationship of these questions to the will, to the possibility of recovery, to insanity and suicide; adding "Under these views I cannot read the VIth Chapter of St John without great emotion" and discussing the implications of this chapter at length; asking "if Faith be an energy, a positive Act, and that too an Act of intensest power -- why should it necessarily differ in toto genere from any other Act, ex. gr. from that of the animal life in the Stomach? -- It will be found easier to laugh or stare at the Question, than to prove it's irrationality"; writing of his pleasure at meeting the zoologist and marine biologist William Elford Leach; sending his love to Mrs. Green; saying that the Gillmans are eager to see them and were very affected by the account of his health; describing Thomas Allsop as more like a son than a friend: "He came up yesterday at 10 o'clock, & left the House at 8 this morning, in order to urge me to go to some Sea Bathing Place -- if it was thought at all adviseable"; saying that Derwent "goes on in every respect to my satisfaction & comfort."