Such light, too, as is retrospectively thrown upon it by Coleridge's
correspondence of a later date is of the most fitful description,--
scarcely more than serves, in fact, for the rendering of darkness
visible. Even the sudden and final departure from the Lakes it leaves
involved in as much obscurity as ever. Writing to Mr. Thomas Allsop
[1] from Ramsgate twelve years afterwards (8th October 1822) he says
that he "counts four grasping and griping sorrows in his past life."
The first of these "was when" [no date given] "the vision of a happy
home sank for ever, and it became impossible for me longer even to
hope for domestic happiness under the name of husband." That is plain
enough on the whole, though it still leaves us in some uncertainty as
to whether the "sinking of the vision" was as gradual as the
estrangement between husband and wife, or whether he refers to some
violent rupture of relations with Mrs. Coleridge, possibly
precipitating his departure from the Lakes. If soothe second "griping
and grasping sorrow" followed very quickly on the first, for he says
that it overtook him "on the night of his arrival from Grasmere with
Mr. and Mrs. Montagu;" while in the same breath and paragraph, and as
though undoubtedly referring to the same thing, he speaks of the
"destruction of a friendship of fifteen years when, just at the moment
of Tenner and Curtis's (the publishers) bankruptcy" (by which
Coleridge was a heavy loser, but which did not occur till seven years
afterwards), somebody indicated by seven asterisks and possessing an
income of ??1200 a-year, was "totally transformed into baseness.
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