inward trains of thought, your faculties and your feelings, will be preserved in a fitness, and, as it were, contempered to a life of ease, and capable of enjoying leisure, because both able and disposed to employ it. Secondly; while you thus render affluence more desirable, you will prevent all undue impatience, and disarm the temptation of poisoning the allotted interval by anxieties, and anxious schemes and efforts to get rich in haste.”

you,

I would fain hope that, not only for you, but for all others, riches, as such, will be better appreciated ere your career commences; this is my anxious hope for others--for all. For it shall be my care to place before you irresistible examples and illustrations of the frightful evils of contemplating riches, power, fame, as ends to be sought and valued for their own sake, not as means to greater and higher ends,—the high aim and purpose of destroying these fruitful sources of crime and misery, or of subjecting them to general not individual adAlas! could I but recal

vancement.

"The time when, though my path was rough,
The joy within me dallied with distress,
And all misfortunes were but as the stuff

Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness;
When hope grew round me like the twining vine,
And fruits and foliage, not my own, seemed mine:"

I might then have some hope of conveying to you with good effect the results of my experience.

"But seared thoughts now bow me down to earth,

Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth.

But, oh! each visitation

Suspends what nature gave me at my birth,

My shaping spirit of imagination.

For not to think of what I needs must feel,
But to be still and patient all I can,
And haply by abstruse research to steal
From my own nature all the natural man,-
This is my sole resource, my only plan;

Till that which suits a part infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the habit of my soul."

LETTER V.

MY DEAR SIR,

Dec. 13th, 1819.

Accept my affectionate thanks; and, in mine, conceive those of my housemates included. Would to heaven I had more than barren thanks to offer you. If you, or rather your residence, were nearer to me, and I could have more of your society, I should feel this the less. It was, for me at least, unfortunate, that, almost every time you have been here, I should have been engaged in the only way that I should have suffered to be a pre-engagement, viz. the duties of friendship. These are now discharged; and whenever you can give me a day, henceforward, I shall have nothing to do but to enjoy it. I could not help "winning an hour from the hard season," as Milton says, the day before yesterday, by surrendering my reason to the detail of a day dream, as I was going over, and after I had gone over, a very pretty house, with beautiful garden and grounds, and a still more lovely prospect, at the moderate rent of £60 and taxes proportionally low, discussing the question with myself, as seriously as if it were actually to be decided, how far the rising at eight, breakfasting, and riding, driving, or staging to London, and returning by the stage or otherwise, would be advantageous to your health; and then the ways and means of improving and enjoying our Sundays, &c. All I can say in excuse of these air-built castles is, that they bring with them no bills for brick and mortar, no quarrels with the masons, no indignation at the deceits and lures of the architects, surveyor, &c., when the final expense is found to treble the amount of the well-paid and costly calculation: in short, that if they do no honour to the head, they leave no harm in the heart. And then, poeta fuimus: and the philosopher, though pressing with the weight of an Etna, cannot prevent the poet from occasionally changing sides, and manifesting his existence by smoke traversed by electrical flashes from the crater.

Have you seen Cobbett's last number? It is the most plausible and the best written of anything I have seen from his pen, and apparently written in a less fiendish spirit than the average of his weekly effusions. The self-complacency with which he assumes to himself exclusively, truths which he can call his own only as a horse-stealer can appropriate a stolen horse, by adding mutilation and deformities to robbery, is as artful as it is amusing. Still, however, he has given great additional publicity to weighty truths, as ex. gr. the hollowness of commercial wealth; and from whatever dirty corner or straw moppet the ventriloquist Truth causes her words to proceed, I not only listen, but must bear witness that it is Truth talking. His conclusions, however, are palpably absurd-give to an over-peopled island the countless back settlements of America, and countless balloons to carry thither man and maid, wife and brat, beast and baggage-and then we might rationally expect that a general crash of trade, manufactures, and credit, might be as mere a summer thunderstorm in Great Britain as he represents it to be in America.

One deep, most deep, impression of melancholy, did Cobbett's letter to Lord Liverpool leave on my mind, the conviction that, wretch as he is, he is an overmatch in intellect for those, in whose hands Providence, in its retributive justice, seems to place the destinies of our country; and who yet rise into respectability, when we compare them with their parliamentary opponents.

I am commanded to add an especial request, that it may not be long before you make yourself visible on the banks of Lake Superior.

T. Allsop, Esq.

Ever, my dear sir,
Yours faithfully and affectionately,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

The tendency of the age is now decidedly practical, and the advocates of abstractions will do well to admit the superiority

of practical knowledge; and to lay claim to it as springing directly from their speculations, from their generalizations. The very opinions here said to be heretical and damnable, are now held (such is the rapid advance of public opinion) to be stale and common-place, and have already given way to a far more searching inquiry into the nature and uses of all property. When we see a man so highly gifted, so far differing from the common sense of his contemporaries and immediate successors, stigmatize as a wretch, one of the most extraordinary writers of the day, for holding opinions which those contemporaries have for the greatest part adopted, and many gone far beyond, we are forcibly struck with the absurdity of all ille-isms or affirmations. If we confine ourselves to the expression of an opinion, or, if more honest, we confess our ignorance of the matter at issue, we shall be more likely to approach true conclusions.

Neither is it the fact, that Cobbett claimed himself to be the discoverer of any or all of the principles he advanced or advocated ; he combined the scattered truths of Paine and the preceding writers into a practical shape; and in that form he has brought them forward so clearly, so often, and in so many ways, that he has forced the attention of his countrymen to the CAUSES of the evils by which they are environed; so impressed with the importance of those principles, that he will take no denial; but, at the sacrifice of ease, and that loved countrylife, and those rural pursuits, in the midst of which he is so happy, and so fond of creating happiness, he prostrates opposition, and is determined that what he has devoted his whole life to make easy to the meanest capacity, shall not perish for want of a fair trial. That Cobbett himself commits the same injustice towards others, I well know; but this proceeds in his case from an impatience of any remedies but his own, until his own has been tried. To you, to whom personal controversies will, as I hope, be pitiable, if not painful, I would say, that speculation upon the cause of an evil, is, like the punishment

of a crime, useless in remedying that crime, and is only useful, if useful at all, in preventing future crimes or evils. The direction of existing powers and combinations, and the formation of new combinations, upon scientific and practical principles, are the matters of most importance at this time; and the knowledge necessary to the attainment and application of these principles, does not to me appear likely to be attained whilst men are in a state of social warfare; whilst the immediate or apparent interests of one man are constantly opposed to those of another, and both, impediments to the well-being of the whole.

LETTER VI.

MY DEAR SIR,

20th March, 1820. You must have thought it strange that I had taken no notice of so kind a letter from you; but the truth is, I received the little packet supposing it to contain the Cobbett only, put it in my pocket for my reading at a leisure hour, and had not opened it until the day before I last saw you. Within a few days, I hope to lay myself open to you in an express letter; till when, I can only say, that the affectionate interest you have taken in my well-being, has been not only a comfort but a spur, when I needed both, and was almost yielding at times to the apprehension, that I had sacrificed all that the world holds precious, without being able to do any effective good in a higher and nobler kind. I have sent the three volumes of the Friend, with my MS. corrections, and additions. The largest, that towards the end of the last philosophical essay in the third volume, had a two-fold object-to guard my own character from the suspicion of pantheistic opinions, or Spinosism (it was written, though not so much at large, before the work was printed, and omitted by wilfulness, or such carelessness as does not fall far short of it); and next, to impress, as