On May 27 1814, Samuel Taylor Coleridge writes to Joseph Cottle. His letter is grandly despondent, and despair filled.
My dear Cottle, — Gladness be with you, for your convalescence, and equally so, at the hope which has sustained and tranquillised you through your imminent peril. Far otherwise is, and hath been, my state ; yet I too am grateful; yet I cannot rejoice. I feel, with an intensity unfathomable by words, my utter nothingness, impotence, and worthlessness, in and for myself. I have learned what a sin is, against an infinite imperishable being, such as is the soul of man!
I have had more than a glimpse of what is meant by death and outer darkness, and the worm that dieth not — and that all the hell of the reprobate is no more inconsistent with the love of God, than the blindness of one who has occasioned loathsome and guilty diseases, to eat out his eyes, is inconsistent with the light of the sun. But the consolations, at least, the sensible sweetness of hope, I do not possess. On the contrary, the temptation which I have constantly to fight up against is a fear, that if annihilation and the possibility of heaven were offered to my choice, I should choose the former.
This is, perhaps, in part, a constitutional idiosyncrasy, for when ‘a mere boy I wrote these lines : —
O, what a wonder seems the fear of death,
Seeing how gladly we all sink to sleep,
Babes, children, youths, and men,
Night following night, for three-score years and ten !
And in my early manhood, in lines descriptive of a gloomy solitude, I disguised my own sensations in the following words : —
Here wisdom might abide, and here remorse !
Here, too, the woe-worn man, who, weak in soul,
And of this busy human heart aweary.
Worships the spirit of unconscious life
In tree or wild-flower. Gentle lunatic !
If so he might not wholly cease to be.
He would far rather not be what he is ;
But would be something that he knows not of,
In woods or waters, or among the rocks.
My main comfort, therefore, consists in what the divines call the faith of adherence, and no spiritual effort appears to benefit me so much as the one earnest, importunate, and often for hours, momently repeated prayers : ” I believe ! Lord, help my unbelief ! Give me faith, but as a mustard seed, and I shall remove this mountain! Faith! faith! faith! I believe. Oh, give me faith! Oh, for my Redeemer’s sake, give me faith in my Redeemer.”
In all this I justify God, for I was accustomed to oppose the preaching of the terrors of the gospel, and to represent it as debasing virtue by the admixture of slavish selfishness.
I now see that what is spiritual can only be spiritually apprehended. Comprehended it cannot.
Mr. Eden gave you a too flattering account of me. It is true, I am restored as much beyond my expectations almost as my deserts ; but I am exceedingly weak. I need for myself solace and refocillation of animal spirits, instead of being in a condition of offering it to others. Yet as soon as I may see you, I will call upon you.
S. T. Coleridge.
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