Coleridge's Letters

The whole letter is fascinating but I ran out of steam (pecking things out on a tablet in MI) -- so this is the best I could do.

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To James Gillman

October 10, 1825

My dear Friend, -- It is a flat'ning thought that the more we have seen, the less we have to say. In youth and early manhood the mind and nature are, as it were, two rival artists both potent magicians, and engaged, like the King's daughter and the rebel genie in the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, in sharp conflict of conjuration, each having for its object to turn the other into canvas to paint on, clay to mould, or cabinet to contain. For a while the mind seems to have the better in the contest, and makes of Nature what it likes, takes her lichens and weatherstains for types and printers' ink, and prints maps and facsimiles of Arabic and Sanscrit MSS. on her rocks; composes country dances on her moonshiny ripples, fandangos on her waves, and waltzes on her eddy-pools, transforms her summer gales into harps and harpers, lovers' sighs and sighing lovers, and her winter blasts into Pindaric Odes, Christabels, and Ancient Mariners set to music by Beethoven, and in the insolence of triumph conjures her clouds into whales and walruses with palanquins on their backs, and chases the dodging stars in a sky-hunt! But alas! alas! that Nature is a wary wily long-breathed old witch, tough-lived as a turtle and divisible as a polyp, repullulative in a thousand snips and cuttings, integra et in toto. She is sure to get the better of Lady Mind in the long run and to take her revenge too; transforms our to-day into a canvas dead-colored to receive the dull, featureless portrait of yesterday: not alone turns the mimic mind, the cidevant sculptress with all her kaleidoscopic freaks and symmetries! into clay, but leaves it such a clay to cast dumps or bullets in; and lastly (to end with that which suggested the beginning) she mocks the mind with its own metaphor, metamorphosing the memory into a lignum vitae escritoire to keep unpaid bills and dun's letters in, with outlines that had never been filled up, MSS. that never went further than the title-pages, and proof sheets, and foul copies of Watchmen, Friends, Aids to Reflection, and other stationary wares that have kissed the publishers' shelf with all the tender intimacy of inosculation! Finis! and what is all this about? ...