From Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Thomas Allsop, october 8, 1822:
My dearest Allsop
…It was reserved for the interval be-
tween six o’clock and 12 on ThAT SAT-
UrDAY Evening to bring a Suffering
which, do what I will, I cannot help think-
ing of & being affrightened by, as a terror of
itself, a self-subsisting separate Something.
Two years had passed since hartley left
oriel. he had come to London to try his
hand as a writer and failed to make ends
meet, though he wrote a good deal of poetry
and contributed some witty essays to London
Magazine. STC’s response to his efforts must
have stung: “You have made the experiment
of trying—to maintain yourself by writ-
ing for the Press—and the result—I do not
know, what conclusion you have drawn from
it—has been such, as makes me shrink, and
sink away inwardly, from the thought of a
second trial.”
on “ThAT SATUrDAY,” less than two
weeks after STC’s rebuke, father and son rushed
to London from highgate together to run some
urgent errands. Both were exhausted, having spent
many days and nights at the sickbed of hartley’s
brother, Derwent, then a hardworking but undis-
tinguished Cambridge undergraduate, who lay ill
with typhus. As soon as they arrived in London,
hartley asked STC for money to repay a debt.
STC gave it to him, and they agreed to meet again
at 6:00 p.m. at a shop on York Street. As hartley
vanished into the crowd, his father was overcome
by an awful presentiment. he described it thus to
his young friend Thomas Allsop:
When he had passed a few steps—[I
called] hartley!—Six! o my god! think of
the agony, the sore agony, of every moment
after six!—And tho’ he was not three yards
from me, I only saw the color of his Face
thro’ my Tears!
STC, who was all too familiar with hartley’s
tendency to flee or hide rather than face criti-
