BIB_ID
416104
Accession number
MA 1856.22
Creator
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834.
Display Date
London, England, 1828 January 25.
Credit line
Purchased from Joanna Langlais, 1957.
Description
1 item (3 pages, with address) ; 22.7 x 18.1 cm
Notes
Place and date of writing taken from the postmark. See the published edition of the correspondence, cited below, for additional information.
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 seal and 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 seal and 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
Writing that Mrs. Gillman has taken upon herself the blame for importuning Green to come and see Coleridge before Sunday and that she wishes "to ensure your coming against light obstacles. -- Nay, quoth I, but a Surgeon hath no light obstacles. A pebble of an ounce weight might, it should seem, be easily kicked out of the way -- but ask the Patient -- and he will tell you [...] that one of a few grains is enough to gravel him"; saying that his "peccant Toe" is much sorer and he is experiencing periods of "I can scarcely call it throbbing -- it is a kind of heavy deep-seated pain"; describing a new inflammation that stretches from his knee to his instep; describing how he has been trying to treat the inflammation with medicine and "sponging the Stocking with cold water"; writing further of his health: "Tuesday Night I was feverish, with little sleep & that little disturbed by flying whirling confused Dreams with a number of crimson colored & luminous objects. My Spirits are depressed; but my mind calm and active -- & all above knee not worse than usual"; saying that he has no pain or soreness in his chest during the day, but he "make[s] a great deal of light-colored clear Urine," which he has been thinking of boiling to see whether it would coagulate and confirm a certain diagnosis, "but I was afraid, it would co-agulate -- & turned coward at the thought. I know that nothing can be done, but by keeping myself still, & taking no stimulus that I can possibly do without -- but yet it will be a great Comfort to me to see you next Sunday"; writing of his own mortality: "I have no wish to have my life prolonged but what is involved in the wish to complete the views, I have taken, of Life as beginning in separation from Nature and ending in Union with God, and to reduce to an intelligible if not artistical form the results of my religious, biblical and ecclesiastical Lucubrations -- & as I ground my hope of redemption from the after-death on the capability of a righteousness not my own, I have no other fear of Dying than that of being seized with the stolen goods on me -- the talents which had been entrusted to me & which I had retained from the Persons, for whose benefit they should have been traded with--"; meditating in a postscript on "the necessary inference from the Phænomenon of the Races -- assuming the rejection of the Ouran outang Hypothesis & that of Five Pairs of Adams & Eves"; discussing the extent and effects of depravity: "What a dreadful inversion! a guilty Nature, and a necessitated Individual -- an Individual sunk below guilt!"
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