Letter from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Highgate, to Joseph Henry Green, 1832 March 29 : autograph manuscript signed.

Writing of his illness and addiction: "On Monday I had a sad trial of intestinal pain and restlessness; but thro' God's Mercy, without any craving for the Poison, which for more than 30 years has been the guilt, debasement, and misery of my Existence. I pray, that God may have mercy on me -- tho' thro' unmanly impatiency of wretched sensations, that produced a disruption of my mental continuity of productive action I have for the better part of my life yearning [yearned?] towards God, yet having recourse to the evil Being -- i.e. a continued act of thirty years' Self-poisoning thro' cowardice of pain, & without other motive -- say rather without motive but solely thro' the goad a tergo of unmanly and unchristian fear"; saying that he has been tranquil since Monday, but "still, placing the palm of my hand with it's lower edge on the navel, I feel with no intermission a death-grasp, sometimes relaxed, sometimes tightened, but always present: and I am convinced, that if Medical Ethics permitted the production of a Euthanasia, & a Physician, convinced that at my time of Life there was no rational hope of revalescence to any useful purpose, should administer a score drops of the purest Hydro-cyanic Acid, & I were immediately after opened (as is my earnest wish) the state of the mesenteric region would solve the problem"; adding that he writes to acknowledge God's goodness in connecting him with Green and to say that, though he is indifferent to fame and reputation, he is thankful that through Green "my labors of thought may be rendered not wholly unseminative"; continuing "But in what last Sunday you read to me, I had a sort of Jealousy, probably occasioned by the weakened state of my intellectual powers, that you had in some measure changed your pole. My principle has ever been, that Reason is subjective Revelation, Revelation objective Reason -- and that our business is not to derive Authority from the mythoi of the Jews & the first Jew-Christians (i.e. the O. and N. Testament) but to give it to them -- never to assume their stories as facts, any more than you would Quack Doctors' affidavits on oath before the Lord Mayor [...] but by science to confirm the Facit, kindly afforded to beginners in Arithmetic. If I lose my faith in Reason, as the perpetual revelation, I lose my faith altogether. I must deduce the objective from the subjective Revelation, or it is no longer a revelation for me, but a beastly fear, and superstition"; writing that he hopes to see Green on Sunday and that James Gillman and other members of the household have also been sick; reiterating that he has been quiet and without cravings: "Compared with this mercy, even the felt and doubtless by you perceived decay & languor of intellectual energy is a trifling counter-weight. -- Again, God bless you, my dear friend!"