Читать книгу The Letters Volume 2 - Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Страница 19

Bell Inn, Friday Street,

Monday morning, August 18, 1806.

My dear Sir,—I arrived here from Stangate Creek last night, a little after ten, and have found myself so unusually better ever since I leaped on land yester-afternoon, that I am glad that neither my strength nor spirits enabled me to write to you on my arrival in Quarantine on the eleventh. Both the captain and my fellow-passengers were seriously alarmed for my life; and indeed such have been my unremitting sufferings from pain, sleeplessness, loathing of food, and spirits wholly despondent, that no motive on earth short of an awful duty would ever prevail on me to take any sea-voyage likely to be longer than three or four days. I had rather starve in a hovel, and, if life through disease become worthless, will choose a Roman death. It is true I was very low before I embarked.... To have been working so hard for eighteen months in a business I detested; to have been flattered, and to have flattered myself that I should, on striking the balance, have paid all my debts and maintained both myself and family during my exile out of my savings and earnings, including my travels through Germany, through which I had to the very last hoped to have passed, and found myself!—but enough! I cannot charge my conscience with a single extravagance, nor even my judgment with any other imprudences than that of suffering one good and great man to overpersuade me from month to month to a delay which was gnawing away my very vitals, and in being duped in disobedience to my first feelings and previous ideas by another diplomatic Minister.... A gentleman offered to take me without expense to Rome, which I accepted with the full intention of staying only a fortnight, and then returning to Naples to pass the winter.... I left everything but a good suit of clothes and my shirts, etc., all my letters of credit, manuscripts, etc. I had not been ten days in Rome before the French torrent rolled down on Naples. All return was impossible, and all transmission of papers not only insecure, but being English and many of them political, highly dangerous both to the sender and sendee.... But this is only a fragment of a chapter of contents, and I am too much agitated to write the details, but will call on you as soon as my two or three remaining [guineas] shall have put a decent hat upon my head and shoes upon my feet. I am literally afraid, even to cowardice, to ask for any person or of any person. Including the Quarantine we had fifty-five days of shipboard, working up against head-winds, rotting and sweating in calms, or running under hard gales with the dead lights secured. From the captain and my fellow-passenger I received every possible tenderness, only when I was very ill they laid their wise heads together, and the latter in a letter to his father begged him to inform my family that I had arrived, and he trusted that they would soon see me in better health and spirits than when I had quitted them; a letter which must have alarmed if they saw into it, and wounded if they did not. I was not informed of it till this morning. God bless you, my dear sir! I have yet cheerful hopes that Heaven will not suffer me to die degraded by any other debts than those which it ever has been, and ever will be, my joy and pride still to pay and still to owe; those of a truly grateful heart, and to you among the first of those to whom they are due.

S. T. Coleridge.