Coleridge and opium-eating, and other writings / [Thomas De Quincey].

  • Thomas De Quincey
Date:
1863
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Coleridge and opium-eating, and other writings / [Thomas De Quincey]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    14/356
    One of these artists, who is now no longer such, took down, in the year 1810, at Allan Bank, Grasmere, the exact measurements of both Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth (at that time the host of Coleridge and myself). His memorandum on that oc- casion is missing. But as he found the two poets agreeing in height to a hair’s-breadth, which I myself, as an attentive bystander, can vouch for, it will be suf- ficient for me to refer the curious reader to the Auto- biography of Haydon, in whose studio Wordsworth was measured with technical nicety on a day regularly dated. The report is—5 feet 10 inches, within a trifling fraction ; and the same report, therefore, stands good to a nieety for Coleridge. Next, for the face and hearing of Cole- ridge at the time referred to by the lady (1796), an ample authority is found in Wordsworth’s fine stanzas— “Ah! piteous sight it was” [I cannot recall the two or three words of filling up] “when he,” “ This man, came back to us a wither’d fiow’r.” That was perhaps in 1807, when he returned from Malta, where it was that, from solitude too intense, he first took opium in excess. But in 1796, whilst yet apparently un- acquainted with opium, “ Noisy he was, and gamesome as a boy- Tossing his limbs about him in delight. Happiest and most genial he then was of all that taste the morning breezes of life. From Wordsworth we learn
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3