With Coleridge's name and memory must ever be associated the names of James and Anne Gillman. It was beneath the shelter of their friendly roof that he spent the last eighteen years of his life, and it was to their wise and loving care that the comparative fruitfulness and well-being of those years were due. They thought themselves honoured by his presence, and he repaid their devotion with unbounded love and gratitude. Friendship and loving-kindness followed Coleridge all the days of his life. What did he not owe to Poole, to Southey for his noble protection of his family, to the Morgans for their long-tried faithfulness and devotion to himself? But to the Gillmans he owed the "crown of his cup and garnish of his dish," a welcome which lasted till the day of his death. Doubtless there were chords in his nature which were struck for the first time by these good people, and in their presence and by their help he was a new man. But, for all that, their patience must have been inexhaustible, their loyalty unimpeachable, their love indestructible. Such friendship is rare and beautiful, and merits a most honourable remembrance.
42, Norfolk Street, Strand, Saturday noon, [April 13, 1816.]
MY DEAR SIR,--The very first half hour I was with you convinced me that I should owe my reception into your family exclusively to motives not less flattering to me than honourable to yourself. I trust we shall ever in matters of intellect be reciprocally serviceable to each other. Men of sense generally come to the same conclusion; but they are likely to contribute to each other's exchangement of view, in proportion to the distance or even opposition of the points from which they set out. Travel and the strange variety of situations and employments on which chance has thrown me, in the course of my life, might have made me a mere man of _observation_, if pain and sorrow and self-miscomplacence had not forced my mind in on itself, and so formed habits of _meditation_. It is now as much my nature to evolve the fact from the law, as that of a practical man to deduce the law from the fact.
With respect to pecuniary remuneration,[138] allow me to say, I must not at least be suffered to make any addition to your family expenses--though I cannot offer anything that would be in any way adequate to my sense of the service; for that, indeed, there could not be a compensation, as it must be returned in kind, by esteem and grateful affection.