suppress this blazon of their forefathers, or to assist in their genealogical researches, I could never learn satisfactorily."

MY DEAREST FRIEND,

LETTER XXXII.

Ramsgate, Oct. 8th, 1822.

In the course of my past life I count four griping and grasping sorrows, each of which seemed to have my very heart in its hands, compressing or wringing. The first, when the Vision of a Happy Home sunk for ever, and it became impossible for me any longer even to hope for domestic happiness under the name of Husband, when I was doomed to know

That names but seldom meet with Love,

And Love wants courage without a name !

The second commenced on the night of my arrival (from Grasmere) in town with Mr. and Mrs. Montagu, when all the superstructure raised by my idolatrous Fancy during an enthusiastic and self-sacrificing Friendship of fifteen yearsthe fifteen bright and ripe years, the strong summer of my Life-burst like a Bubble! But the Grief did not vanish with it, nor the love which was the stuff and vitality of the grief, though they pined away up to the moment of . .'s last total Transfiguration into Baseness; when, with £1,200 a year, and just at the moment that the extraordinary Bankruptcy of Fenner and Curtis had robbed me of every penny I had been so many years working for, every penny I possessed in the world, and involved me in a debt of £150 to boot, he first regretted that he was not able to pay a certain bill of mine to his 's wife's brother, himself, 'never wanted money so much in his life,' &c. &c.; and an hour after attempted to extort from me a transfer to himself of all that I could call my own in the world-my books-as the condition of his paying a debt which in equity was as much, but in honour and gratitude was far more, his debt than mine!

My third sorrow was in some sort included in the second; what the former was to Friendship the latter was to a yet more inward bond. The former spread a wider gloom over the world around me, the latter left a darkness deeper within myself; the former is more akin to indignation, and moody scorn at my own folly in my weaker moments, and to contemplative melancholy and alienation from the Past in my ordinary state; the latter had more of self in its character, but of a Self, emptied-a gourd of Jonas: and is this it under which I hoped to have prophesied ?

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My fourth commenced with the tidings of the charge against . . . —remitted with the belief and confidence of the Falsehood of the charge-relapsed again and again--and again-blended with the sad convictions, that neither E. nor I. thought of or felt towards me as they ought, or attributed any thing done for them to me; and lastly, reached its height on the nineteenth day of E.'s fever by J.'s desertion of him, when it trembled in the scales whether he should live or die, and the cause of this desertion first awakening the suspicion that I had been deliberately deceived and made an accomplice in deceiving others.

And yet, in all these four griefs, my recollection, as often as they were recalled to my mind, turned not to what I suffered, but on what account-at worst, I never thought of the sufferings apart from the causes and occasions of them; but the latter were ever uppermost. It was reserved for the interval between six o'clock and twelve on that Saturday evening to bring a suffering which, do what I will, I cannot help thinking of and being affrighted by, as a terror of itself—a self-subsisting, separate something, detached from the cause. I cannot help hearing the sound of my voice at the moment when I ... took me by surprise, and asked me for the money to pay a debt to, and take leave of, Mr. Williams, promising to overtake me if possible before I had reached his aunt Martha's, but at latest before five. "Nay, say six. Be, if you can, by five, but say

six." Then, when he had passed a few steps-"J...six; O my God! think of the agony, the sore agony, of every moment after six!" And though he was not three yards from me, I only saw the colour of his Face through my Tears!-No more of this! I will finish this scrawl after my return from the Beach.

When I had left behind me what I had no power to make better or worse, and arrived at the sea side, I had soon reason to remember that I was not at home, or at Muddiford, or at Little Hampton, or at Ramsgate, but under the conjunct signs of Virgo and the Crab; the one in the wane, the other in advance, yet in excellent agreement with the former, by virtue of its rare privilege of advancing backward. In sober prose, I verily believe we should have found as genial a birth in a nest hillock of Termites or Bugaboos as with this single Ant-consanguineous. As soon therefore as dear Mr. Gillman returned to us, you will not hold it either strange or unwise that, in agreeing to accompany him to Dover, the kingdom of France west of Paris, Ramsgate, Sandwich, and foreign parts in general, I determined to give myself up to each moment as it came, with no anticipations and with no recollections, save as far as is involved in the wish every now and then, that you had been with me; and in this resolve it was that I destroyed the kitcat or bust at least of the letter I had meant to have sent you. But oh! how often have I wished, and do I wish, that you and Mrs. Allsop could form a household in common at Ramsgate with us next year.

And now for your second Letter. What shall I say? When our Griefs and Fears and agitations are strongly roused towards one object, we almost want some fresh memento to remind us that we have other Loves, other Interests. Forgive me if I tell you that your last letter did, in something of this way, make me feel afresh, that there was that in my very heart that called you Son as well as Friend, and reminded me that a Father's affection could not exist exempt from a Father's

anxiety. I am fully aware that every syllable in the latter half of your letter proceeded from the strong two-fold desire at once to comfort and to conciliate, and that I ought to regard your remarks as the mere straining of the Soul towards an End felt and known to be pure and lovely; and even so I do regard them, yet I cannot read them without anxiety: not indeed anxious Thoughts, but anxious Feeling. Sane or insane, fearful thing it is, when I can be comforted by an assurance of the latter; but I neither know nor dare hear of any mid state, of no vague necessities dare I hear. Our own wandering thoughts may be suffered to become Tyrants over the mind, of which they are the Offspring and the most effective Viceroys, or substitutes of that dark and dim spiritual Personëity, whose whispers and fiery darts holy men have supposed them to be, and that these may end in the loss, or rather Forfeiture of Free agency, I doubt not. But, my dearest friend, I have both the Faith of Reason and the Voice of Conscience and the assurance of Scripture, that, “resist the evil one, and he will flee from you." But for self-condemnation, J. .. would never have tampered with Fatalism; and but for Fatalism, he would never have had such cause to condemn himself. With truest love,

T. Allsop, Esq.

Yours,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

P.S. Affectionate remembrances to Mrs. Allsop, in short, to you and yours. While I write the two last words, my lips felt an appetite to kiss the baby.

This and the preceding letters are painful, very painful, to me. I know not whether they have not given birth to sensations more afflicting in the re-perusal, than they caused me to feel even at the time. Then, I could hope that the clouds which darkened the life of hope would pass away, and

that the genial sunshine of my friend's mind would again shine, inward at least, with unobscured brilliancy. Now, I can but garner in my heart the experience of the past, to be conveyed, as all personal experience must be, to unwilling or inattentive ears: to be part of that experience which he himself so beautifully and so truly describes, as like the sternlights of a vessel, illuminating only the past. In the instance alluded to, the extreme sensitiveness of my young friend caused him, to avoid a little present pain, so to act, as to give a far greater amount of pain to Mr. Coleridge than he could ever compensate, and to store up for himself the most acute and protracted regrets. Moral courage, my dear children, the daring to suffer the present evil, be it an expiation for the past, or as an offering or a testimony to convictions, not lightly attained, is always its own great reward.

To say nothing, or to say all you think, and at all times, provided no personal offence is intended or sought to be given, is the course for an honest man, for a lover of truth, invariably to pursue. It may be said that the course of affairs is so complicated and so tortuous, that conduct to harmonise with it must be tortuous also, and that in the necessity that exists for numerous and skilful combinations, simplicity must altogether be cast aside as unsuited to the present state and necessities of the social condition. I have come to a wholly different conclusion. I deem it most important, even on these very grounds, and for these (to me, at least) always secondary objects, to preserve sincerity in the means, and simplicity in the end, however extensive may be the combinations by which that end is sought to be obtained. For if, in addition to the complications of society, and to the combinations necessary to our individual success, we superadd suppressions and those moral falsehoods which are worse and every way more injurious than direct lies, we render success far less probable, and even in its attainment, less valuable, from the recollection of the very unworthy means by which it has been achieved.