specific and professional purposes. It is saying less than the truth to affirm, that an excellent book (and the remark holds almost equally good of a Raphael as of a Milton) is like a well-chosen and well-tended fruit tree. Its fruits are not of one season only. With the due and natural intervals, we may recur to it year after year, and it will supply the same nourishment and the same gratification, if only we ourselves return with the same healthful appetite.

"The subjects of the lectures are indeed very different, but not, in the strict sense of the term, diverse: they are various rather than miscellaneous. There is this bond of connection common to them all, that the mental pleasure which they are calculated to excite is not dependent on accidents of fashion, place, or age, or the events or the customs of the day, but commensurate with the good sense, taste, and feeling, to the cultivation of which they themselves so largely contribute, as being all in kind, though not all in the same degree, productions of GENIUS.

"What it would be arrogant to promise, I may yet be permitted to hope, that the execution will prove correspondent and adequate to the plan. Assuredly, my best efforts have not been wanting so to select and prepare the materials, that, at the conclusion of the lectures, an attentive auditor, who should consent to aid his future recollection by a few notes, taken either during each lecture or soon after, would rarely feel himself, for the time to come, excluded from taking an intelligent interest in any general conversation likely to occur in mixed society.

"S. T. COLERIDGE."

LETTER XXVII.

March 4th, 1822.

MY DEAREST FRIEND,

I have been much more than ordinarily unwell for more than a week past—my sleeps worse than my vigils, my nights than my days;

"The night's dismay

Sadden'd and stunned the intervening day;"

but last night I had not only a calmer night, without roaming in my dreams through any of Swedenborg's Hells modéré; but arose this morning lighter and with a sense of relief.

I scarce know whether the enclosed Detenu is worth enclosing or reading. I fancy that I send it because I cannot write at any length that which is even tolerably adequate to what I wish to say. Mrs. Gillman returned from town-very much pleased with her reception by Mrs. Allsop, and with the impression that it would be her husband's fault if she did not make him a happy home.

I shall make you smile, as I did dear Mary Lamb, when I say that you sometimes mistake my position. As individual to individual, from my childhood, I do not remember feeling myself either superior or inferior to any human being; except by an act of my own will in cases of real or imagined moral or intellectual superiority. In regard to worldly rank, from eight years old to nineteen, I was habituated, nay, naturalised, to look up to men circumstanced as you are, as my superiors-a large number of our governors, and almost all of those whom we regarded as greater men still, and whom we saw most of, viz. our committee governors, were such—and as neither awake nor asleep have I any other feelings than what I had at Christ's Hospital, I distinctly remember that I felt a little flush of pride and consequence-just like what we used to feel at school when the boys came running to us-" Coleridge! here's your friends want you-they are quite grand," or "It is quite a lady"-when I first heard who you were, and laughed at myself for it with that pleasurable sensation that, spite of my sufferings at that school, still accompanies any sudden re-awakening of our school-boy feelings and notions. And oh, from sixteen to nineteen what hours of Paradise had Allen and I in escorting the Miss Evanses home on a Saturday, who were then at a milliner's whom we used to think, and who I believe really was, such a nice lady ;-and we used to carry thither, of a summer morning, the pillage of the flower gardens within six miles of town, with Sonnet or Love Rhyme wrapped round the nose-gay. To be feminine, kind, and genteelly (what I should now call neatly) dressed, these were

the only things to which my head, heart, or imagination had any polarity, and what I was then, I still am.

T. Allsop, Esq.

God bless you and yours,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

Letter to a Young Lady.

If there be any one subject which it especially concerns a young woman to understand, both in itself generally, and in its application to her own particular habits and circumstances, IT IS THAT OF MARRIAGE; and if there be any one subject of more perplexing delicacy than any other to advise a young woman about, above all for one of a different sex, and of no marked inequality in respect of age, however the attempt may seem authorised by intimacy and nearness of kindred; if there be one that at once attracts by its importance and repels by its difficulty, IT IS THAT OF MARRIAGE. To both sexes, indeed, it is a state of deep and awful interest, and to enter into it without proportionate Forethought is in both alike an act of Folly and Self-degradation. But in a Woman, if she have sense and sensibility enough to deserve the name, it is an act tantamount to Suicide-for it is a state which, once entered into, fills the whole sphere of a Woman's moral and personal Being, her Enjoyments and her Duties, dismissing none, adding many, and modifying all. Even those Duties (if such there be) which it may seem to* leave behind, it does but transfer; say rather, it re-imposes and re-consecrates them under yet dearer names (though names more dear than those of Daughter and Sister it is not easy to imagine); at all events, with obligations, additionally binding on her conscience, because undertaken by an act of her own free will. A woman-mark me! in using that term I still have before my

* Too often, I fear, on the supposed sanction of the mistranslated, and still worse interpreted, text, Genesis ii. 29.

or

mind the idea of Womanhood, and suppose the individual to possess its characteristic constituents—a woman in a single state may be happy and may be miserable; but most happy, most miserable-these are epithets which, with rare exceptions, belong exclusively to a Wife. The tree of full life, and that "whose mortal taste brings death" into the heart, these, my dear, grow in the probationary Eden of courtship alone. To the Many of both sexes I am well aware this Eden of matrimony is but a Kitchen-garden, a thing of Profit and convenience, in an even temperature between indifference and liking; where the beds, bordered with Thrift, reject all higher attractions than the homely charms of Marygold and Penny-royal, or whatever else is good to boil in the Pot, or to make the Pot boil; or if there be aught of richer fragrance and more delicate hues, it is put or suffered there not for the Blossom but for the Pod. But this, my dear is neither the soil, climate, nor aspect, in which "" "Heart's-ease your your "Herbs of grace" would bloom or burgeon. To be happy in Marriage Life, nay (unless you marry with the prospect of sinking into a lower state of moral feeling, and of gradually quenching in yourself all hope and all aspiration that looks beyond animal comforts and the outside shows of worldly respectability), in order not to be miserable, you must have a Soul-mate as well as a House or a Yoke-mate; you must have a Husband whom before the Altar, making yourself at that moment distinctly conscious of the presence of the Almighty God to whom you appeal, you can safely, that is, according to your confident belief, grounded on sufficient opportunities of observation, conscientiously vow to love, honour, and respect. With what disgust would you not turn from a sordid, with what horror would you not recoil from a contagious or infectious garment offered to you? you would not suffer it to come near your skin. And would you surrender your person, would you blend your whole personality, as far as God has put it in your power to do so, all that you call "I"-soul, body, and estate—

with one, the contagion of whose Principles, the infection or sordidness of whose habits and conversation you would have to guard against in behalf of your own soul; and the insidious influence of which on the tone and spirit of your thoughts, feelings, objects, and unconscious tendencies and manners, would be as the atmosphere in which you lived! Or were the Man's character merely negative in these respects, were he only incapable of understanding the development of your moral Being, including all those minor duties and objects of quiet pursuit and enjoyment which constitute the moral Taste; were he only indifferent to the interest you felt for his and your own salvation, and for the conditions of your re-union in the world to come-still it would be a benumbing influence, and the heart may be starved where it is neither stabbed nor poisoned. God said that it was not well for the human Being to be alone; to be what we ought to be, we need support, help, communion in good. What, then, if instead of a Helpmate we take an Obstacle, a daily counteraction? But the mere want of what God has rendered necessary or most desirable for us is itself an obstacle. Virtue sickens in the air of the Marshes, loaded with poisonous Effluvia; but even where the air is merely deficient in the due quantity of its vital Element, and where there is too little, though what there is may be faultless, human virtue lives but a panting and anxious life. For as to a young woman's marrying in the hope of reforming the man's principles, you will join with me in smiling at the presumption, or more probably the pretext; as if the Man was likely to appreciate as of very serious importance a danger which the Wife had not feared to risk on so slender a chance, or be persuaded by her to feel as hateful the very qualities which she had taken to her Bosom, as a few weeds in a Nosegay that she might pick out at leisure.

Well (you will perhaps reply), you would have convinced me, if I had not been convinced before, of the misery attendant on an unfit choice, and the criminal folly of a rash and