Believe me, my dear sir, with grateful and affectionate thanks, your sincere friend,
MY DEAR POOLE,--My health is as the weather. That, for the last month, has been unusually bad, and so has my health. I go by the heavy coach this afternoon. I shall be at Liverpool tomorrow night. Tuesday, Wednesday, I shall stay there; not more _certainly_, for I have taken my place all the way to London, and this stay of two days is an indulgence and entered in the road-bill, so I expect to be in London on Friday evening about six o'clock, at the Saracen's Head, Snow Hill. Now my dearest friend! will you send a twopenny post letter directed, "Mr. Coleridge (Passenger in the Heavy Coach from Kendal and Liverpool), to be left at the bar, Saracen's Head, Snow Hill," informing me whether I can have a bed at your lodgings, or whether Mr. Rickman could let me have a bed for one or two nights,--for I have such a dread of sleeping at an Inn or Coffee house in London, that it quite unmans me to think of it. To love and to be beloved makes hothouse plants of us, dear Poole!
Though wretchedly ill, I have not yet been deserted by hope--less dejected than in any former illness--and my mind has been active, and not vaguely, but to that determinate purpose which has employed me the last three months, and I want only one fortnight steady reading to have got _all_ my materials before me, and then I neither stir to the right nor to the left, so help me God! till the work is finished. Of its contents, the title will, in part, inform you, "Consolations and Comforts from the exercise and right application of the Reason, the Imagination, the Moral Feelings, Addressed especially to those in sickness, adversity, or distress of mind, _from speculative gloom_,[3] etc."
I put that last phrase, though barbarous, for your information. I have puzzled for hours together, and could never hit off a phrase to express that idea, that is, at once neat and terse, and yet good English. The whole plan of my literary life I have now laid down, and the exact order in which I shall execute it, if God vouchsafe me life and adequate health; and I have sober though confident expectations that I shall render a good account of what may have appeared to you and others, a distracting manifoldness in my objects and attainments. You are nobly employed,--most worthily of you. _You_ are made to endear yourself to mankind as an immediate benefactor: I must throw my bread on the waters. You sow corn and I plant the olive. Different evils beset us. You shall give me advice, and I will advise you, to look steadily at everything, and to see it as it is--to be willing to see a thing to be evil, even though you see, at the same time, that it is for the present an irremediable evil; and not to overrate, either in the convictions of your intellect, or in the feelings of your heart, the Good, because it is present to you, and in your power--and, above all, not to be too hasty an admirer of the Rich, who seem disposed to do good with their wealth and influence, but to make your esteem strictly and severely proportionate to the worth of the Agent, not to the _value_ of the Action, and to refer the latter wholly to the Eternal Wisdom and Goodness, to God, upon whom it wholly depends, and in whom alone it has a moral worth.