I am called to dinner; so God bless you, and receive all our loves, my very dear friend.
My birth-day, 51; or, as all my collegiates and Mrs. Coleridge swear, 50.
Coleridge was only forty-nine on 21st October 1821, not fifty-one as he supposes. He could never remember his birthday, nor the year in which he was born.
First, let me utter the fervent, God be praised! for the glad tidings respecting your dear Mother, which would have given an abounding interest to a far less interesting letter. May she be long preserved both to enjoy and reward your love and piety! And now I will try to answer the other contents of your letter, as satisfactorily I _hope_, as I am sure it will be sincerely and affectionately. Conscious how heedfully, how watchfully I cross-examined myself whether or no my anxiety for your earthly happiness and free exercise of head and heart had not _warped_ the attention which it was my purpose to give whole and undivided to the one Question--What is the Right, I can repeat (with as much confidence as the slippery and Protean nature of all self-inquisition and the great _à priori_ likelihood of my reason being tampered with by my affections, will sanction me in expressing) what I have already more than once said, viz., that I hold it incredible, at least improbable to the utmost extent, that you and I should decide differently in any one definite instance. Let a case be stated with all its _particulars_, personal and circumstantial, with its antecedents and _involved_ (_n.b._--not its contingent or apprehended) consequents--and my faith in the voice within, whenever the heart desiringly listens thereto, will not allow me to fear that our verdict should be diverse. If this be true, as true it is, it follows--that we have attached a different import to the same terms in some general proposition;--and that, in attempting to generalise my convictions briefly, and yet comprehensively, I have worded it either incorrectly or obscurely. On the other hand, your communications likewise, my dear friend! were indefinite--"taught light to counterfeit a gloom;" and love left in the dusk of twilight is apt to fear the worst, or rather, to think of worse than it fears, and the momentary transformations of posts and bushes into apparitions and foot-pads must not be interpreted as symptoms of brain fever or depraved vision.