Biographia Epistolaris, vol 1 | Page 4

the
"insulated fragments" of that grand scheme of truth which he called his
"System" ("Table Talk", 12th Sept. 1831, and 26th June 1834).
Coleridge, in his letters, has written his own life, for his life, after all,
was a life of thought, and his finest thoughts and his most ambitious
aspirations are given expression to in his letters to his numerous friends;
and the true biography of Coleridge is that in which his letters are made
the main source of the narrative. A Biographia Epistolaris is what we
want of such a man.
Coleridge's letters are often bizarre in construction and quite regardless
of the conventions of style, and abound in the most curious freaks of
emphasis and imagery. They resemble the letters of Cowper in that they
were not written for publication; and, like Cowper's, they have a
character of their own. But they far surpass the epistles of the poet of
Olney in spiritual vision and intellectuality. The eighteenth century,
from Pope and Swift down to Cowper, is extremely rich in
letter-writing. Bolingbroke, Lord Chesterfield, Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu, Gray, Mason, Johnson, Beattie, Burns, and Gibbon, among

literary personages, have contributed to the great Epistolick Art, as Dr.
Johnson called it; and this list does not include the letters of the
politicians, Horace Walpole, Junius, and others. The eighteenth century,
in fact, was a letter-writing age; and while the bulk of the poetry of its
300 poets, with the exception of a few masterpieces of monumental
quality, has gradually gone out of fashion, its letters have risen into
greater repute. Even among the poets whose verse is still read there is a
hesitation in public opinion as to whether the verses or letters are
superior. There are readers not a few who would not scruple to place
Cowper's letters above his poems, who believe that Gray's letters are
much more akin to the modern spirit than the "Elegy" and the "Ode to
Eton College", and who think that Swift's fly-leaves to his friends will
outlive the fame of "Gulliver" and the "Tale of a Tub".
Coleridge, who stands between the eighteenth and the nineteenth
centuries, was, like the poets of the former age, a multiform
letter-writer. He was often seized with letter-writing when unable to
write poetry or execute those unpublished masterpieces in the
composition of some of which he was engaged.
Coleridge's letters are of the utmost importance as a part of the
literature of the opening of the nineteenth century. It is in the letters
that we see better than elsewhere the germs of the speculations which
afterwards came to fruition between 1817 and 1850, when the poetical
and critical principles of the Lake School gradually took the place of
the Classicism of the eighteenth century, and the theology of Broad
Churchism began to displace the old theology, and the school of Paley
in Evidences and Locke in Philosophy gave way before the inroad of
Transcendentalism.
As the record of the phases of an intellectual development the letters of
Coleridge stand very high; and, indeed, I do not know anything equal to
them except it be the "Journal of Amiel".
The resemblance between Coleridge and Amiel is very striking. Both
valetudinarians and barely understood by the friends with whom they
came into contact, they took refuge in the inner shrine of introspection,
and clothed the most abstruse ideas in the most beautiful forms of
language and imagery that is only not poetry because it is not verse.
While one wrote the story of his own intellectual development in secret
and retained the record of it hidden from all eyes, the other scattered his

to the winds in the shape of letters, which thus, widely distributed, kept
his secret until they were gathered together by later hands. The letters
of Coleridge as a collection is one of the most engaging psychological
studies of the history of an individual mind.
The text of the letters in the present volume is reproduced from the
original sources, the "Biographical Supplement", Cottle, Gillman,
Allsop, and the "Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey". Fuller
texts of some of the letters will be found in "Letters of S. T. C." of 1895,
Litchfield's "Tom Wedgwood", and other recent publications. One of
the objects of the present work is to preserve the text of the letters as
presented in these authentic sources of the life of Coleridge.
Letters Nos. 44, 45, and 46, from "Charles Lamb and the Lloyds", by
Mr. E. V. Lucas (Smith, Elder and Co.); No. 130 from "Anima Poetae"
(W. Heinemann), are printed here by arrangement with the poet's
grandson, Ernest Hartley Coleridge, Esq., to whom my sincere thanks
are also due for his kindness in reading the proofs. Mr. Coleridge, of
course, is not responsible for any of the opinions expressed