BIB_ID
415956
Accession number
MA 1856.17
Creator
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834.
Display Date
London, England, 1824 June 28.
Credit line
Purchased from Joanna Langlais, 1957.
Description
1 item (4 pages, with address) ; 18.5 x 11.3 cm
Notes
Place and date 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 / Lincoln's Inn Fields."
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 / 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
Asking Green to bring, on his next visit, "any work that contains a succession of the Figures of the animated, I mean, animal World -- [Lorenz] Oken's Plates would do"; commenting on Henrich Steffen's "Biography of Water"; laying out a theory: "During the, or rather constituting the, Moon Epoch of this now and this here Planet, the Earth and Air were bedevil'd by a spirit of Self-lust and reciprocal Hate -- Each stood in sullen Japanese Incluseness, a realized Alien-Act, on the stale maxim of keeping one's self to one's self -- the Earth would have no sort of intercourse with the air, nor the air with the Earth"; describing how this could be demonstrated with a post, a piece of string and two birds, and including a sketch of this; adding "Now so were Earth & Air; Noose and Post representing the Magnetismus -- At length, the Redeemer (either Jesus Christ or the Holy Ghost) passed an electrical twitch of Conscience thro' the cord or perhaps Wire -- & they repented. 'And Water is the Repentance of Earth & Air'!!!!"; criticizing Steffens sharply for this idea; saying that the best part of Steffens's Beiträge zur inneren Naturgeschichte der Erde is the "Statement of the Deluge Question, especially of the Alluvial and Diluvial Animals, in connection with the Problem of the Polar Climate"; referring to their previous day's discussion on metaphysical matters; asking in a postscript if "Cuvier's Great Works" are at the College of Surgeons and saying that he would like to look over them with Green.
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