He began a
correspondence with Godwin, and of the eighteen letters by Coleridge to
him we are enabled to give nine. Lamb was the means of drawing
Coleridge and Godwin together, and in Lamb's letters of this period
('Ainger', i, 111, 113, 115), we find glimpses of Coleridge while
engaged on his translation of 'Wallenstein'.
While in London Coleridge did not neglect his friends elsewhere; we
have interesting letters to the Wedgwoods, Poole, and Southey. The next
three letters are from London.
[Footnote 1: For an account of Coleridge as a journalist see Mr. H. D.
Traill's 'Life of Coleridge', p. 79.]
LETTER 88. TO THOMAS WEDGWOOD
21, Buckingham Street, Strand, January, 1800.
My dear sir,
I am sitting by a fire in a rug great coat. Your room is doubtless to a
greater degree air tight than mine, or your notions of Tartarus would
veer round to the Greenlander's creed. It is most barbarously cold, and
you, I fear, can shield yourself from it, only by perpetual
imprisonment. If any place in the southern climates were in a state of
real quiet, and likely to continue so, should you feel no inclination to
migrate? Poor Southey, from over great industry, as I suspect, the
industry too of solitary composition, has reduced himself to a terrible
state of weakness, and is determined to leave this country as soon as he
has finished the poem on which he is now employed.
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