BIB_ID
416196
Accession number
MA 1856.32
Creator
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834.
Display Date
London, England, 1831 December 15.
Credit line
Purchased from Joanna Langlais, 1957.
Description
1 item (2 pages, with address) ; 24.1 x 19.3 cm
Notes
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 seal and postmarks: "J.H. Green, Esqre / &c / 36 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 / &c / 36 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
Describing the state of his health over the past few days and saying that "this day, both for Looks and inward feelings, has been my best day"; adding "I have so repeatedly given and suffered disappointment, that I cannot even communicate this gleam of Convalescence without a little fluttering distinctly felt at my heart, and a sort of Cloud-shadow of dejection flitting over me. God knows with what Aims, motives, and aspirations I pray for an interval of ease and competent strength!"; saying that one of his current desires is to improve terminology and nomenclature: "I have long felt the exceeding inconvenience of the many different meanings of the term, Objective -- sometimes equivalent to apparent, or sensible, sometimes in opposition to it..."; giving examples of this and arguing that the indeterminacy of the word "forms an obstacle to the fixation of the great truth -- that the perfect reality is predicable, only where Actual and Real are terms of identity -- i.e. where there is no potential being -- and that this alone is absolute reality -- and further, of that most fundamental truth -- that the ground of all reality, the Objective no less than of the Subjective, is the absolute Subject"; suggesting "noumenal" as an alternative; telling Green that the Gillman's son James has passed "an unusually strict & long examination for ordination with great Credit, & was selected by the Bishop to read the Lessons in Service --. The Parents are of course delighted"; concluding "& now, my dear Friend, with affectionate remembrances to Mrs. Green, may God bless you...".
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