[It was in the Spring of 1816 that Coleridge took refuge from himself and the world and came to the Gillmans of Highgate, and became the great lay preacher of his time. Before this he had been staying at 42, Norfolk Street, Strand, and consulting a physician, Dr. Joseph Adams, who recommended him to Mr. Gillman. The letter of Dr. Adams to Mr. Gillman is as follows:

Hatton Garden, April 9, 1816.

Dear Sir.

A very learned, but in one respect an unfortunate gentleman, has applied to me on a singular occasion. He has for several years been in the habit of taking large quantities of opium. For some time past he has been in vain endeavouring to break himself of it. It is apprehended his friends are not firm enough, from a dread, lest he should suffer by suddenly leaving it off, though he is conscious of the contrary; and has proposed to me to submit himself to any regimen, however severe. With this view he wishes to fix himself in the house of some medical gentleman, who will have courage to refuse him any laudanum, and under whose assistance, should he be the worse for it, he may be relieved. As he is desirous of retirement, and a garden, I could think of no one so readily as yourself. Be so good as to inform me whether such a proposal is absolutely inconsistent with your family arrangements. I should not have proposed it, but on account of the great importance of the character, as a literary man. His communicative temper will make his society very interesting, as well as useful. Have the goodness to favour me with an immediate answer, and believe me, dear sir,

Before calling on Dr. Gillman, Coleridge wrote the following letter:

Letter 166. To James Gillman

My Dear Sir.

The first half hour I was with you convinced me that I should owe my reception into your family exclusively to motives not less flattering to me than honourable to yourself. I trust we shall ever in matters of intellect be reciprocally serviceable to each other. Men of sense generally come to the same conclusions; but they are likely to contribute to each other’s enlargement of view, in proportion to the distance or even opposition of the points from which they set out. Travel and the strange variety of situations and employments on which chance has thrown me, in the course of my life, might have made me a mere man of observation, if pain and sorrow and self-miscomplacence had not forced my mind in on itself, and so formed habits of meditation. It is now as much my nature to evolve the fact from the law, as that of a practical man to deduce the law from the fact.

With respect to pecuniary remuneration, allow me to say, I must not at least be suffered to make any addition to your family expenses—though I cannot offer anything that would be in any way adequate to my sense of the service; for that indeed there could not be a compensation, as it must be returned in kind, by esteem and grateful affection.

And now of myself. My ever wakeful reason, and the keenness of my moral feelings, will secure you from all unpleasant circumstances connected with me save only one, viz. the evasion of a specific madness. You will never hear anything but truth from me:—prior habits render it out of my power to tell an untruth, but unless carefully observed, I dare not promise that I should not, with regard to this detested poison, be capable of acting one. No sixty hours have yet passed without my having taken laudanum, though for the last week comparatively trifling doses. I have full belief that your anxiety need not be extended beyond the first week, and for the first week, I shall not, I must not be permitted to leave your house, unless with you. Delicately or indelicately this must be done, and both the servants and the assistant must receive absolute commands from you. The stimulus of conversation suspends the terror that haunts my mind; but when I am alone, the horrors I have suffered from laudanum, the degradation, the blighted utility, almost overwhelm me. If (as I feel for the first time a soothing confidence it will prove) I should leave you restored to my moral and bodily health, it is not myself only that will love and honour you; every friend I have (and thank God! in spite of this wretched vice[94] I have many and warm ones, who were friends of my youth, and have never deserted me,) will thank you with reverence. I have taken no notice of your kind apologies. If I could not be comfortable in your house, and with your family, I should deserve to be miserable. If you could make it convenient, I should wish to be with you by Monday evening, as it would prevent the necessity of taking fresh lodgings in town.

With respectful compliments to Mrs. Gillman and her sister, I remain, dear sir,

The Gillmans felt spellbound by Coleridge’s talk, and consented to receive him into their household, where he remained for the last eighteen years of his life.

It was at Highgate that Coleridge sat looking down upon the “illimitable limitary ocean of London,” as Carlyle finely puts it. He had still his ambitions to do something for the Permanent; but the world of England was not yet ripe for Transcendentalism, and the fine distinctions between the Reason and the Understanding, Imagination and Fancy, the Person and the Thing, and all the other subtle analysings of the Human Intellect; but he still had his lore on Shakespeare to fall back on, and he could re-churn it into a new series of Lectures. His ninth course he delivered in 1818, 27th January to 13th March. The course was delivered at “Flower de Luce” Court (Fleur-de-Lis Court). The notes of these lectures occupy about a half of the Bohn Library volume of the Lectures on Shakespeare. They are often, like the rest of Coleridge’s prose writing, a series of brilliant digressions from the main point, but like De Quincey’s similar wanderings, they often come wonderfully round to the subject in hand. H. Crabb Robinson attended only four of the course, and he does not give a very favourable account of them. Gillman says: “He lectured from notes, yet it was obvious that his audience was more delighted when, putting his notes aside, he spoke extempore. He was brilliant, fluid, and rapid; his words seemed to flow from a person repeating with grace and energy some delightful poem. If, however, he sometimes paused, it was not for the want of words, but that he was seeking the most appropriate, or their most logical arrangement.” The following letters, given by Gillman in his Life of Coleridge, are supposed to belong to this period.

Letter 167. To ——

(— 1816?)

In a copy of verses, entitled A Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni, I describe myself under the influence of strong devotional feelings, gazing on the mountain, till as if it had been a shape emanating from and sensibly representing her own essence, my soul had become diffused through the mighty vision: and there,

As in her natural form, swell’d vast to Heaven.

Mr. Wordsworth, I remember, censured the passage as strained and unnatural, and condemned the hymn in toto, (which, nevertheless, I ventured to publish in my Sibylline Leaves,) as a specimen of the mock sublime. It may be so for others, but it is impossible that I should myself find it unnatural, being conscious that it was the image and utterance of thoughts and emotions in which there was no mockery. Yet, on the other hand, I could readily believe that the mood and habit of mind out of which the hymn rose, that differs from Milton’s and Thomson’s and from the psalms, the source of all three, in the author’s addressing himself to individual objects actually present to his senses, while his great predecessors apostrophize classes of things presented by the memory, and generalized by the understanding;—I can readily believe, I say, that in this there may be too much of what our learned med’ciners call the idiosyncratic for true poetry.—For, from my very childhood, I have been accustomed to abstract, and as it were, unrealize whatever of more than common interest my eyes dwelt on, and then by a sort of transfusion and transmission of my consciousness to identify myself with the object; and I have often thought within the last five or six years, that if ever I should feel once again the genial warmth and stir of the poetic impulse, and refer to my own experiences, I should venture on a yet stranger and wilder allegory than of yore—that I would allegorize myself as a rock, with its summit just raised above the surface of some bay or strait in the Arctic Sea, “while yet the stern and solitary night brooked no alternate sway”—all around me fixed and firm, methought, as my own substance, and near me lofty masses, that might have seemed to “hold the moon and stars in fee,” and often in such wild play with meteoric lights, or with the quiet shine from above, which they made rebound in sparkles, or dispand in off-shoot, and splinters, and iridescent needle shafts of keenest glitter, that it was a pride and a place of healing to lie, as in an apostle’s shadow, within the eclipse and deep substance-seeming gloom of “these dread ambassadors from earth to heaven, great hierarchs!” And though obscured, yet to think myself obscured by consubstantial forms, based in the same foundation as my own. I grieved not to serve them—yea, lovingly and with gladsomeness I abased myself in their presence: for they are my brothers, I said, and the mastery is theirs by right of older birth, and by right of the mightier strivings of the hidden fire that uplifted them above me.

Letter 168. To ——[96]

(—1816?)

My dear sir,

Accept my thanks for your kind remembrance of me, and for the proof of it in the present of your tribute of friendship, I have read it with uninterrupted interest, and with satisfaction scarcely less continuous. In adding the three last words, I am taking the word satisfaction in its strictest sense: for had I written pleasure, there would have been no ground for the limitation. Indeed as it was, it is a being scrupulous over much. For at the two only passages at which I made a moment’s halt (viz. § p. 3, and p. 53, last line but five,) “she had seldom”——“oppressive awe,” my not objection but stoppage at the latter amounted only to a doubt, a quÆre, whether the trait of character here given should not have been followed by some little comment, as for instance, that such a state of feeling, though not desirable in a regenerate person, in whom belief had wrought love, and love obedience, must yet be ranked amongst those constitutional differences that may exist between the best and wisest Christians, without any corresponding difference in their spiritual progress. One saint fixes his eyes on the palm, another saint thinks of the previous conflict, and closes them in prayer. Both are waters of the same fountain—this the basin, that the salient column, both equally dear to God, and both may be used as examples for men, the one to invite the thoughtless sceptic, the other to alarm the reckless believer. You will see, therefore, that I do not object to the sentence itself; but as a matter of feeling, it met me too singly and suddenly. I had not anticipated such a trait, and the surprise counterfeited the sensation of perplexity for a moment or two. On as little objection to anything you have said, did the desiderium the sense of not being quite satisfied, proceed in regard to the § p. 3. In the particular instance in the application of the sentiment, I found nothing to question or qualify. It was the rule or principle which a certain class of your readers might be inclined to deduce from it, it was the possible generalization of the particular instance that made me pause. I am jealous of the disposition to turn Christianity or Religion into a particular business or line. “Well, Miss, how does your pencil go on, I was delighted with your last landscape.” “Oh, sir, I have quite given up that, I have got into the religious line.” Now, my dear sir, the rule which I have deduced from the writings of St. Paul and St. John, and (permit me also to add) of Luther, would be this. Form and endeavour to strengthen into an habitual and instinct-like feeling, the sense of the utter incompatibility of Christianity with every thing wrong or unseemly, with whatever betrays or fosters the mind of flesh, the predominance of the animal within us, by having habitually present to the mind, the full and lively conviction of its perfect compatibility with whatever is innocent of its harmony, with whatever contra-distinguishes the Human from the animal; of its sympathy and coalescence with the cultivation of the faculties, affections, and fruitions, which God hath made peculiar to man, either wholly or in their ordained combination with what is peculiar to humanity, the blurred, but not obliterated signatures of our original title deed, (and God said, man will we make in our own image.) What?—shall Christianity exclude or alienate us from those powers, acquisitions, and attainments, which Christianity is so preeminently calculated to elevate and enliven and sanctify?

Far, very far, am I from suspecting in you, my dear sir, any participation in these prejudices of a shrivelled proselyting and censorious religionist. But a numerous and stirring faction there is, in the so-called Religious Public, whose actual and actuating principles, with whatever vehemence they may disclaim it in words, is, that redemption is a something not yet effected—that there is neither sense nor force in our baptism—and that instead of the Apostolic command, Rejoice, and again I say unto you, rejoice; baptized Christians are to put on sackcloth and ashes, and try, by torturing themselves and others, to procure a rescue from the devil. Again, let me thank you for your remembrance of me, and believe me from the hour we first met at Bristol, with esteem and regard,

In 1816 an attempt was made to revive Remorse at Drury Lane, and Coleridge had some intercourse with Byron regarding it and another tragedy he was proposing to write for the theatre (Westminster Review, 94 (1874), p. 2). He wrote the following fragment on Byron probably about this time:

Letter 169. To——

(—1816?)

If you had seen Lord Byron, you could scarcely disbelieve him—so beautiful a countenance I scarcely ever saw—his teeth so many stationary smiles—his eyes the open portals of the sun—things of light and for light—and his forehead so ample, and yet so flexible, passing from marble smoothness into a hundred wreathes and lines and dimples correspondent to the feelings and sentiments he is uttering.[97]]