Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Autograph Letter, unsigned, to his schoolfriend, G. L. Tuckett, during hisbrief service in the army Henley on Thames, “thursday night — feb 6thâ” [1794] An important early letter from Coleridge, written in the desperation and despair he found himself in after secretly enlisting in the army in late 1793. Wracked by guilt over the college debts he had amassed, depressed over his unrequited love for Mary Evans, Coleridge, without telling his family and swearing his friends to secrecy, enlisted in the 15th or King’s Light Dragoons under the pseudonym of Silas Tompkin Comberbache. Eventually word leaked out to his family, and his older brother Captain George Coleridge intervened and arranged his discharge. (As this letter demonstrates, it was Tuckett who informed the family). After two months of basic training at Reading, during which, according to Richard Holmes in COLERIDGE, EARLY VISION, p. 54, he “he did guard duty at the Reading Fair and wrote love-letters on behalf of his illiterate comrades, he was ordered to Henley on Thames as temporarily unfit to ride.” Coleridge’s orders were to nurse a fellow soldier who was suffering from smallpox, sharing a small, cramped, single room with him in the Pest House (“It is four strides in length, and three in breadth”). Coleridge had developed saddle sores and boils from his unfortunate riding experiences and complains of those “those dreadfully troublesome eruptions, which so grimly constellated my Posteriors”, as well as “…the almost total want of Sleep, the putrid smell and the fatiguing Struggles with my Comrade during his delirium …” (Holmes suggests that the claustrophobic ordeal of Henley may have contributed something to the hallucinations of THE ANCIENT MARINER, written four years later. But Coleridge then moves abruptly to the subject weighing on him. Although he acknowledges Tuckett’s good intentions, he exclaims: “In an hour of extreme anguish under he most solemn Imposition of secrecy I entrusted my place of residence to the young men of Christ’s Hospital — the intelligence you extorted from their Imbecility, should have remained sacred with you … to the eye of your friendship , the divulging might have appeared necessary — but what shade of necessity is there to excuse you in shewing my letters — to stab the very heart of confidence! …… I doubtless have offended you — I would to God, that I too possessed the tender irritableness of unhandled sensibility — mine is a sensibility gangrened with inward corruption. Your gossip with the commanding officer seems so totally useless and unmotived that I almost find a difficulty in believing it …” Coleridge is especially anguished, too, by the presence of an unopened letter brought to him from his older brother George (“… am I not already sufficiently miserable?”): “… my brother George proposes the cheering consolations of Conscience — but I am talking I know not what / yet there is a pleasure doubtless an exquisite pleasure mingled up in the most painful of our virtuous Emotions. He completes this remarkable letter with an expostulation of doom and guilt over his treatment of his mother: “Alas! my poor Mother! What an intolerable weight of guilt is suspended over my head … … and if I endure to live — the look ever downward — insult — pity — and hell. — God or Chaos preserve me! What but infinite Wisdom or infinite Confusion can do it!” Folio. 3 pp. on two conjugate leaves; addressed by Coleridge on verso of second leaf. Minor spotting, postal marks, trace of seal tear slightly affecting text. Published in COLLECTED LETTERS, ed. Griggs, I, 61-63 Price: USD 14,000.00 other currencies   order no. 210863    inquire

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