Letter from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, London, to William Godwin, 1802 January 22 : autograph manuscript signed.

Referring to the letter he had written him the previous day (cataloged as MA 2204.17) and saying that after he wrote it, he went to a lecture at the Royal Institution, had dinner with a large party, including Thomas Poole and Humphry Davy, went to bed early and slept soundly; quoting two lines from Christabel about sleep; saying that this morning he re-read Godwin's letter and would like to respond to it now with a clearer head; saying that he wishes Godwin to know the whole truth about him and that he knows that Godwin believes there has been an estrangement between them dating from the previous summer, "& my conduct since my arrival in town from the North you have regarded as an exacerbation of the Disease;" stating "You appear to me not to have understood the nature of my body & mind -. Partly from ill-health, & partly from an unhealthy & reverie-like vividness of Thoughts, & (pardon the pedantry of the phrase) a diminished Impressibility from Things, my ideas, wishes, & feelings are to a diseased degree disconnected from motion & action. In plain & natural English, I am a dreaming & therefore an indolent man -. I am a Starling self-incaged, & always in the Moult, & my whole Note is, Tomorrow, & tomorrow, & tomorrow. The same causes, that have robbed me to so great a degree of the self-impelling self-directing Principle, have deprived me too of the due powers of Resistances to Impulses from without. If I might so say, I am, as an acting man, a creature of mere Impact. 'I will' & 'I will not' are phrases, both of them equally, of rare occurrence in my dictionary. - This is the Truth - I regret it, & in the consciousness of this Truth I lose a larger portion of Self-estimation than those, who know me imperfectly, would easily believe - / I evade the sentence of my own Conscience by no quibbles of self-adulation ; I ask for Mercy indeed on the score of my ill-health ; but I confess, that this very ill-health is as much an effect as a cause of this want of steadiness & self-command ; and it is for mercy that I ask, not for justice;" explaining how this applies to the present circumstances; addressing his alleged neglect of Godwin since he moved to London and arguing that he has tried to keep a low profile generally; saying that the altered tone of his letters is a different matter and that he did feel that Godwin became less interested in him over the course of the summer: "This offended my moral nature, & (so help me God) not my personal Pride. I considered it as a great Defect in your character, & as I always write from my immedia[te] feelings (with more or less suppression) I suffered the Belief to appear in the tone of my language - I was struggling with sore calamities, with bodily pain, & languor - with pecuniary Difficulties - & worse than all, with domestic Discord, & the heart-withering Conviction - that I could not be happy without my children, & could not but be miserable with the mother of them. Of all this you knew but a part, & that, no doubt, indistinctly / yet there did appear to me in your letters a sort of indifference - a total want of affectionate Enquiry - pardon me, if I dare express all my meaning in a harsh form - it did appear to me, as if without any attachment to me you were simply gratified by the notion of my attachment to you;" reiterating that this offended his moral feelings, not his personal ones, "for I have purchased Love by Love. - I am boisterous & talkative in general company ; & there are those, who have believed that Vanity is my ruling Passion. They do not know me;" saying as an author, he has neither vanity nor ambition and that he thinks little of what he has done or might do in the future; adding that his character is sketched in Lyrical Ballads in the poem "A character in the antithetical manner;" concluding "You seemed to doubt my regard & esteem for you : to whom but to a man whom I regarded & esteemed, would I, or could I, have written this Letter?"