that never did I display one half the scorn and ferocity. The next morning, the moment when I awoke, O mercy! I did feel like a very wretch. I got up and immediately wrote and sent off by a porter, a letter, I dare affirm an affecting and eloquent letter to him, and since then have been working for him, for I was heart-smitten with the recollection that I had said all, all in the presence of his wife. But if I had known all I now know, I will not say that I should not have apologised, but most certainly I should not have made such an apology, for he confessed to Lamb that he should not have persisted in irritating me, but that Mrs. Godwin had twitted him for his prostration before me, as if he was afraid to say his life was his own in my presence. He admitted, too, that although he never to the very last suspected that I was tipsy, yet he saw clearly that something unusual ailed me, and that I had not been my natural self the whole evening. What a poor creature! To attack a man who had been so kind to him at the instigation of such a woman![19] And what a woman to instigate him to quarrel with me, who with as much power as any, and more than most of his acquaintances, had been perhaps the only one who had never made a butt of him—who had uniformly spoken respectfully to him. But it is past! And I trust will teach me wisdom in future.
I have undoubtedly suffered a great deal from a cowardice in not daring to repel unassimilating acquaintances who press forward upon my friendship; but I dare aver, that if the circumstances of each particular case were examined, they would prove on the whole honourable to me rather than otherwise. But I have had enough and done enough. Hereafter I shall show a different face, and calmly inform those who press upon me that my health, spirits, and occupation alike make it necessary for me to confine myself to the society of those with whom I have the nearest and highest connection. So help me God! I will hereafter be quite sure that I do really and in the whole of my heart esteem and like a man before I permit him to call me friend.
I am very anxious that you should go on with your “Madoc.” If the thought had happened to suggest itself to you originally and with all these modifications and polypus tendrils with which it would have caught hold of your subject, I am afraid that you would not have made the first voyage as interesting at least as it ought to be, so as to preserve entire the fit proportion of interest. But go on!
I shall call on Longman as soon as I receive an answer from him to a note which I sent....
God bless you and
S. T. Coleridge.
P. S. I have just received Sara’s four lines added to my brother George’s letter, and cannot explain her not having received my letters. If I am not mistaken I have written three or four times: upon an average I have written to Greta Hall once every five days since I left Liverpool—if you will divide the letters, one to each five days. I will write to my brother immediately. I wrote to Sara from Dunmow; to you instantly on my return, and now again. I do not deserve to be scolded at present. I met G. Burnett the day before yesterday in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, so nervous, so helpless with such opium-stupidly-wild eyes.
Oh, it made the place one calls the heart feel as it was going to ache.
CL. TO HIS WIFE.
Mr. J. C. Motley’s, Thomas Street, Portsmouth,
Sunday, April 1, 1804.
My dear Sara,—I am waiting here with great anxiety for the arrival of the Speedwell. The Leviathan, Man of War, our convoy, has orders to sail with the first fair wind, and whatever wind can bring in the Speedwell will carry out the Leviathan, unless she have other orders than those generally known. I have left the Inn, and its crumena-mulga natio, and am only at the expense of a lodging at half a guinea a week, for I have all my meals at Mr. Motley’s, to whom a letter from Stuart introduced me, and who has done most especial honour to the introduction. Indeed he could not well help, for Stuart in his letter called me his very, very particular friend, and that every attention would sink more into his heart than one offered to himself or his brother. Besides, you know it is no new thing for people to take sudden and hot likings to me. How different Sir G. B.! He disliked me at first. When I am in better spirits and less flurried I will transcribe his last letter. It breathed the very soul of calm and manly yet deep affection.
Hartley will receive his and Derwent’s Spillekins with a letter from me by the first waggon that leaves London after Wednesday next.
My dear Sara! the mother, the attentive and excellent mother of my children must needs be always more than the word friend can express when applied to a woman. I pray you, use no word that you use with reluctance. Yet what we have been to each other, our understandings will not permit our hearts to forget! God knows, I weep tears of blood, but so it is! For I greatly esteem and honour you. Heaven knows if I can leave you really comfortable in your circumstances I shall meet Death with a face, which I feel at the moment I say it, it would rather shock than comfort you to imagine.
My health is indifferent. I am rather endurably unwell than tolerably well. I will write Southey to-morrow or next day, though Motley rides and drives me about sightseeing so as to leave me but little time. I am not sure that I shall see the Isle of Wight.
Write to Wordsworth. Inform him that I have received all and everything and will write him very soon, as soon as I can command spirits and time.... Motley can send off all letters to Malta under Government covers. You direct, therefore, at all times merely to me at Mr. J. C. Motley’s, Portsmouth.
My very dear Sara, may God Almighty bless you and your affectionate
S. T. Coleridge.
I mourn for poor Mary.
CLI. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.
Off Oporto and the coast of Portugal,
Monday noon, April 16, 1804.
My dear Southey,—I was thinking long before daylight this morning, that I ought, spite of toss and tumble and cruel rocking, to write a few letters in the course of this and the three following days; at the end of which, if the northwest wind still blows behind, we may hope to be at Gibraltar. I have two or three very unpleasant letters to write, and I was planning whether I should not begin with these, have them off my hands and thoughts, in short, whistle them down into the sea, and then take up the paper, etc., a whole man. When, lo! I heard the Captain above deck talking of Oporto, slipped on my greatcoat and went shoeless up to have a look. And a beautiful scene verily it was and is! The high land of Portugal, and the mountain land behind it, and behind that fair mountains with blue pyramids and cones. By the glass I could distinguish the larger buildings in Oporto, a scrambling city, part of it, seemingly, walls washed by the sea, part of it upon hills. At first view, it looked much like a vast brick kiln in a sandy, clayey country on a hot summer afternoon; seen more distinctly, it gave the nobler idea of a ruined city in a wilderness, its houses and streets lying low in ruins under its ruined walls, and a few temples and palaces standing untouched. But over all the sea between us and the land, short of a stone’s throw on the left of the vessel, there is such a delicious warm olive green, almost yellow, on the water, and now it has taken in the vessel, and its boundary is a gunshot to my right, and one fine vessel exactly on its edge. This, though occasioned by the impurity of the nigh shore and the disemboguing rivers, forms a home scene; it is warm and landlike. The air is balmy and genial, and all that the fresh breeze can do can scarcely keep under its vernal warmth. The country round about Oporto seems darkly wooded; and in the distant gap far behind and below it on the curve of that high ridge forming a gap, I count seventeen conical and pyramidal summits; below that the high hills are saddlebacked. (In picturesque cant I ought to have said but below that, etc.) To me the saddleback is a pleasant form which it never would have occurred to me to christen by that name. Tents and marquees with little points and summits
