"Some men-Jeffrey is one-refer taste to palate.” "Absurd terms, when compared, as 'conclusion of a war,' 'conclusion of a peace.' In the one case it means the end, in the other the beginning." "I am unable to account for Mr. Locke's popularity; in some degree it may be owing to his having exposed and confuted the absurdities, or rather the absurd part, of the schoolmen. Hume has carried his premises to their natural and inevitable conclusion." "The idea of the mind forming images of itself, is as absurd as the belief of Descartes with respect to the external world. There is nothing in the mind which was not previously in the senses, except the mind itself. Philosophy, properly so called, began with Pythagoras. He saw that the mind, in the common sense of the word, was itself a fact, that there was something in the mind not individual; this was the pure reason, something in which we are, not which is in us." "Socrates seems to have been continually oscillating between the good and the useful." "To most men, experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illumine only the track it has passed." "On William Smith, of Norwich, asking me what I thought of the Monthly Review or Magazine, and of Dr. Aikin, its editor, I was provoked, by his evident wish that I should say something in its favour, to reply,— That all men of science or literature could attest that the one was a void Aikin, and the other an aching void.'' LETTER XIV. MY VERY DEAR FRIEND, Nov. 27, 1820. I have been more than usually unwell, with great depression of spirits, loss of appetite, frequent sickness, and a harassing pain in my left knee; and at the same time anxious to preclude, as much as I can, the ill effects of poor J.'s procrastination— indolence it is not, for he is busy enough in his own way, and rapidly bringing together materials for his future credit as a man of letters and a poet, but shrinking from all things connected with painful associations, and of that morbid temperament, which I too well understand, that renders what would be motives for men in general, narcotics for him, in exact proportion to their strength; and this I could only do by taking on myself as much of the document writing as was contrivable. Besides this, I have latterly felt increasingly anxious to avail myself of every moment that ill health left me, to get forward with my Logic and with my "Assertion of Religion." Nay, foolish though it be, I cannot prevent my mind from being affected by the alarming state of public affairs, and, as it appears to me, the want of stable principle even in the chiefs of the party that seem to feel aright, yet chirrup like crickets in warmth without light. The consequence of all this is, that I not only have deferred writing to you, but have played the procrastinator with myself, even in giving attention to your very interesting letter. For minor things your kindness and kind remembrances are so habitual, that my acknowledgments you cannot but take for granted. Mr. Gillman has been ill; Mrs. Gillman—and this leads me to the particular object of this letter-expresses aloud and earnestly what I feel no less, her uneasiness that three weeks have passed, and we have not had the comfort of seeing you. Do come up when you can, with justice to yourself and other connections, for it is a great comfort to me; something, I trust, I shall have to show you. A note of warning from one who has been a true but unheard prophet to my countrymen for five-and-twenty years. May God bless you, my dear friend, T. Allsop, Esq. S. T. COLERIDGE. As I do not intend that these brief notices shall form any consecutive narrative of the events in the life of the writer, any farther than the letters may contain allusions to them, the life itself being, I hope, soon to make its appearance from the pen of his best friend, I shall content myself with the insertion of the following sonnet; it is well worthy a place in future editions. The second sonnet I have found on a detached piece of paper, without note or observation. How it came into my possession I have now forgotten, though I have some faint impression that I wrote it down from dictation, and that it was the transcript of an early, a very early sonnet, written probably at the time when the author's heart, as well as his head, was with Spinosa. FAREWELL TO LOVE. Farewell, sweet Love! yet blame you not my truth; More fondly ne'er did mother eye her child Than I your form: yours were my hopes of youth Your fair creations, and had won her kindness, Say, but for her if aught in earth I prized! Your dreams alone I dreamt, and caught your blindness. O grief!-but farewell, Love! I will go play me With thoughts that please me less, and less betray me. TO NATURE. It may indeed be phantasy, when I Essay to draw from all created things Deep, heartfelt, inward joy that closely clings; And trace, in leaves and flowers that round me lie, Lessons of love and earnest piety. So let it be; and if the wide world rings Nor fear, nor grief, nor vain perplexity. And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be, And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields, Thee only God! and thou shalt not despise LETTER XV. MY DEAR YOUNg Friend, January, 1821. The only impression left by you on my mind is an increased desire to see you again, and at shorter intervals. Were you my son by nature, I could not hold you dearer, or more earnestly desire to retain you the adopted of whatever within me will remain, when the dross and alloy of infirmity. shall have been purged away. I feel the most entire confidence that no prosperous change of my outward circumstances would add to your faith in the sincerity of this assurance; still, however, the average of men being what it is, and it being neither possible nor desirable to be fully conscious in our understanding of the habits of thinking and judging in the world around us, and yet to be wholly impassive and unaffected by them in our feelings, it would endear and give a new value to an honourable competence, that I should be able to evince the true nature and degree of my esteem and attachment beyond the suspicion even of the sordid, and separate from all that is accidental or adventitious. But yet the friendship I feel for you is so genial a warmth, and blends so undistinguishably with my affections, is so perfectly one of the family in the household of love, that I would not be otherwise than obliged to you: and God is my witness, that my wish for an easier and less embarrassed lot is chiefly (I thing I might have said exclusively) grounded on the deep conviction, that exposed to a less bleak aspect I should bring forth flowers and fruits both more abundant and more worthy of the unexampled kindness of your faith in me. Interpreting the "wine" and the "ivy garland" as figures of poetry signifying competence, and the removal of the petty needs of the body that plug up the pipes of the playing fountain (and such it is too well known was the intent and meaning of the hardly used poet), and oh! how often, when my heart has begun to swell from the genial warmth of thought, as our northern lakes from the (so called) bottom winds, when all above and around is stillness and sunshine-how often have I repeated in my own name the sweet stanza of Edmund Spenser : "Thou kenst not, Percie, how the rhyme should rage, O! if my temples were bedewed with wine, And girt in garlands of wild ivy twine; How I could rear the muse on stately stage, And teach her tread aloft in buskin fine With queint Bellona in her equipage." Read what follows as you would a note at the bottom of a page. "But ah! Mecenas is ywrapt in clay, and great Augustus long ago is dead." (This is a natural sigh, and natural too is the reflection that follows.) "And if that any buds of poesy Yet of the old stock 'gin to shoot again, "Tis or self-lost the worldling's meed to gain, Tom Piper makes them better melody." But though natural, the complaint is not equally philosophical, were it only on this account,-that I know of no age in which the same has not been advanced, and with the |