The picture shall be sent.[1] For your love gifts and bookloans accept
our hearty love. The "Joan of Arc" is a divine book; it opens lovelily.
I hope that you will take off some half dozen of our "Poems" on great
paper, even as the "Joan of Arc".
Cottle, my dear Cottle, I meant to have written you an Essay on the
Metaphysics of Typography, but I have not time. Take a few hints,
without the abstruse reasons for them, with which I mean to favour you.
18 lines in a page, the line closely printed, certainly more closely
printed than those of the "Joan";[2] ("Oh, by all means, closer, "W.
Wordsworth"") equal ink, and large margins; that is beauty; it may even,
under your immediate care, mingle the sublime! And now, my dear Cottle,
may God love you and me, who am, with most unauthorish feelings,
Your true friend,
S. T. COLERIDGE.
P.S.--I walked to Linton the day after you left us, and returned on
Saturday. I walked in one day, and returned in one.[3]
[Footnote 1: A portrait of Mr. Wordsworth, correctly and beautifully
executed, by an artist then at Stowey; now in my possession. [Cottle's
note.]]
[Footnote 2: "Joan of Arc", 4to first edition, had twenty lines in a
page. [Cottle.]]
[Footnote 3: Letters LXXXVI-XCII follow 81.]
Coleridge has given his account of the origin of the "Lyrical Ballads"
in the fourteenth chapter of the "Biographia Literaria", and
Wordsworth's account is found in the Fenwick Note to "We are Seven".
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