Letter from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Highgate, to Joseph Henry Green, 1832 May 18 : autograph manuscript signed.

Saying that he hates to tease him, but "Mr [Joseph] Hardman has during the last fortnight made so many applications for the return of [Charles Brockden] Brown's Alcuin, and Mr Gillman as the conducting pipe communicating to the fluid, a chalybeate Astringency of it's own, and I have as regularly forgot, as I had resolved, to remind you of the same"; using a mathematical metaphor to describe the motives for and against Green's coming to see him and saying that he is not especially in a state to receive him; asking him to send Alcuin by mail directed to himself or Gillman; saying he suspects that the developments in his health over the past few days "have shaken Mr Gillman's faith in the infallibility of the routine Tests, the Pulse, the Tongue, the face-complexion, and the non-production of pain by local pressure, more than he will as yet allow even to his own mind. The distinction between Disorder & Disease is no less important than it is just; but like the terms Nervous, Dyspepsia, Asthenia & hypersthenia, &c &c, are excellent stuffing for the Tick Bed of respectable Routine"; adding that if he improves, "& with such a change the craving to see you will return, as the craving for a pinch of snuff follows the first glass of Wine in a man, who has abjured the Snuff Box, from Bed Time till the post-prandium of the following day," he will let Green know; asking if Green is personally acquainted with Dr. Wilson Philip; mentioning that his brother Colonel James Coleridge has put himself under the treatment of Dr. Brodie and called on him [Coleridge himself] this morning, "but I would not expose him to the fatigue of getting out of his Carriage, & climbing 5 flights of Stairs, in order to behold a Mask of Syphilis, as a Venus sub Medicis et Mercurio, when he had expected to see the Son of his Father"; describing Harriet Macklin's reaction to seeing Coleridge's swollen face and Gillman's comments on it; asking to be remembered to Mrs. Green and recalling the particular kindness of Green's mother; adding in a postscript that he has read with care Professor John James Park's work The Dogmas of the Constitution; saying that Park quotes from Coleridge but he doesn't feel that he has actually read the essay he quoted from and that a morning's conversation with him might have been more productive; writing "If 14 lines sufficed to justify the name of a Sonnet, the off-slough of my 'Youth & Age' might appear per se, as such Sonnet"; including a sonnet (this sonnet was then published under the title "An Old Man's Sigh" in Blackwood's Magazine, June 1832).