The Letters Volume 2 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Author:Samuel Taylor Coleridge [Coleridge, Samuel Taylor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Klassiker
Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
Published: 2018-06-05T22:00:00+00:00

CCVI. TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

Calne, May 30, 1815.

My honoured Friend,—On my return from Devizes, whither I had gone to procure some vaccine matter (the small-pox having appeared in Calne, and Mrs. Morgan’s sister believing herself never to have had it), I found your letter: and I will answer it immediately, though to answer it as I could wish to do would require more recollection and arrangement of thought than is always to be commanded on the instant. But I dare not trust my own habit of procrastination, and, do what I would, it would be impossible in a single letter to give more than general convictions. But, even after a tenth or twentieth letter, I should still be disquieted as knowing how poor a substitute must letters be for a vivâ voce examination of a work with its author, line by line. It is most uncomfortable from many, many causes, to express anything but sympathy, and gratulation to an absent friend, to whom for the more substantial third of a life we have been habituated to look up: especially where a love, though increased by many and different influences, yet begun and throve and knit its joints in the perception of his superiority. It is not in written words, but by the hundred modifications that looks make and tone, and denial of the full sense of the very words used, that one can reconcile the struggle between sincerity and diffidence, between the persuasion that I am in the right, and that as deep though not so vivid conviction, that it may be the positiveness of ignorance rather than the certainty of insight. Then come the human frailties, the dread of giving pain, or exciting suspicions of alteration and dyspathy, in short, the almost inevitable insincerities between imperfect beings, however sincerely attached to each other. It is hard (and I am Protestant enough to doubt whether it is right) to confess the whole truth (even of one’s self, human nature scarce endures it, even to one’s self), but to me it is still harder to do this of and to a revered friend.

But to your letter. First, I had never determined to print the lines addressed to you. I lent them to Lady Beaumont on her promise that they should be copied, and returned; and not knowing of any copy in my own possession, I sent for them, because I was making a MS. collection of all my poems—publishable and unpublishable—and still more perhaps for the handwriting of the only perfect copy, that entrusted to her ladyship. Most assuredly, I never once thought of printing them without having consulted you, and since I lit on the first rude draught, and corrected it as well as I could, I wanted no additional reason for its not being published in my lifetime than its personality respecting myself. After the opinions I had given publicly, in the preference of “Lycidas” (moral no less than poetical) to Cowley’s Monody, I could not have printed it consistently. It is for the biographer, not the poet, to give the accidents of individual life.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.