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MS untraced; text taken from William Knight, Memorials of Coleorton, 2 vols (London, 1887). Previously published: William Knight, Memorials of Coleorton, 2 vols (London, 1887), II, pp. 126–128.
These letters were edited with the assistance of Carol Bolton, Tim Fulford and Ian Packer
For permission to publish the text of MSS in their possession, the editor wishes to thank the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the Bodleian Library Oxford University; the British Library; Boston Public Library; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge; Haverford College, Connecticut; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Hornby Library, Liverpool Libraries and Information Services; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the John Rylands Library, Manchester; the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; Luton Museum (Bedfordshire County Council); Massachusetts Historical Society; McGill University Library; the National Library of Scotland; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the New York Public Library (Pforzheimer Collections); the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the Public Record Offices of Bedford, Suffolk (Bury St Edmunds) and Northumberland, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne; the Trustees of the William Salt Library, Stafford, the Wisbech and Fenland Museum; the University of Virginia Library.
A research grant from the British Academy made much of the archival work possible, as did support from the English Department of Nottingham Trent University.
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The more necessary it becomes for Coleridge to exert himself in providing means for meeting the growing demands of his children, the more incapable, by some strange and fatal infirmity, does he become of exertion. Knowing his prodigious powers, and that there is no bodily disease which incapacitates him, so that the mere effort of his own will would at any moment render him all that his friends and family wish him to be, it is impossible not to feel a hope that that effort will one day be made; yet this is hoping for an intellectual and moral conversion, a new birth produced by an operation of grace, of which there is no example to encourage us to hope for it.
Wordsworth passed a few days with me lately. The enclosure of Skiddaw is likely to put him in possession of the eastern side of Applethwaite glen.
I expected to have been in London at this time, but business which admits of no delay has grown under my hands, and it
will be impossible for me to leave this place before the first or second week in May, just when I should be wishing to come back to it.
My headquarters will not be in town, as usual, but at Streatham, where my uncle has lately settled as rector. My goings on here are something like those of a
horse in a mill for labour and regularity – I may add too, for quietness and content. I have made some little progress in a blank verse
poem, of which Pelayo, the restorer of Spain, is the hero;
That sweet island
Mrs. S. and her sisters Sarah Coleridge and Mary Lovell. join me in respects to Lady Beaumont. – Believe me, Sir George, very truly and respectfully yours,