paid to him by Josiah, the senior. Coleridge, however, had landed in
England in ignorance of his patron's death. He had wholly neglected to
keep up any correspondence with the Wedgwoods during his stay in Malta,
and though "dreadfully affected" by it, as Mr. Poole records, he seems
to have allowed nearly a year to elapse before communicating with the
surviving brother. The letter which he then wrote deserves quotation,
not only as testimony to his physical and pecuniary condition on his
arrival in England, but as affording a distressing picture of the
morbid state of his emotions and the enfeebled condition of his will.
"As to the reasons for my silence, they are," he incoherently begins,
"impossible, and the numbers of the _causes_ of it, with the
almost weekly expectation for the last eight months of receiving my
books, manuscripts, etc. from Malta, has been itself a cause of
increasing the procrastination which constant ill health, despondency,
domestic distractions, and embarrassment from accidents, equally
unconnected with my will or conduct" [every cause mentioned, it will be
seen, but the true one], "had already seated deep in my very muscles,
as it were. I do not mean to accuse myself of idleness--I have enough
of self-crimination without adding imaginary articles--but in all
things that affect my moral feelings I have sunk under such a strange
cowardice of pain that I have not unfrequently kept letters from
persons dear to me for weeks together unopened. After a most miserable
passage from Leghorn of fifty-five days, during which my life was twice
given over, I found myself again in my native country, ill, penniless,
and worse than homeless. I had been near a month in the country before
I ventured or could summon courage enough to ask a question concerning
you and yours, and yet God Almighty knows that every hour the thought
had been gnawing at my heart. I then for the first time heard of that
event which sounded like my own knell, without its natural hope or
sense of rest. Such shall I be (is the thought that haunts me), but O!