In one of my juvenile poems (on a Friend who died in a Frenzy Fever), you will find[128] that I was jealous of this in myself; and that it is (as I trust it is), otherwise, I attribute mainly to the following causes:--A naturally, at once searching and communicative disposition, the necessity of reconciling the restlessness of an ever-working Fancy with an intense craving after a resting-place for my Thoughts in some _principle_ that was derived from experience, but of which all other knowledge should be but so many repetitions under various limitations, even as circles, squares, triangles, etc., etc., are but so many positions of space. And, lastly, that my eloquence was most commonly excited by the desire of running away and hiding myself from my personal and inward feelings, _and not for the expression of them_, while doubtless this very effort of feeling gave a passion and glow to my thoughts and language on subjects of a general nature, that they otherwise would not have had. I fled in a Circle, still overtaken by the Feelings, from which I was ever more fleeing, with my back turned towards them; but above all, my growing deepening conviction of the _transcendancy of the moral to the intellectual_, and the inexpressible comfort and inward strength which I experience myself to derive as often as I contemplate truth realised into Being by a human Will; so that, _as I cannot love without esteem, neither can I esteem without loving_. Hence I _love_ but few, but those I love as my own Soul; for I feel that without them I should--not indeed cease to be kind and effluent, but by little and little become a soul-less fixed Star, receiving no rays nor influences into my Being, _a Solitude which I so tremble at, that I cannot attribute it even to the Divine Nature_.
_God_father or not (have not Girls Godfathers?), the little lady shall be to me a dear Daughter, and I will make her love me by loving her own Papa and Mamma. God bless you.
The last letter refers to the birth of "Titania Puckinella," as Coleridge loved to call Allsop's girl. The next letter refers to Coleridge's four "griping and grasping sorrows." The third sorrow was the break with Sarah Hutchinson, who, as we have seen, had been one of Coleridge's good angels, the "Lady" of _Dejection; an Ode_.