“One by one, my old friends drop away, and though I want not well-wishers, nor active benefactors, I feel painfully how few are left of those who were bound to me by nature, or a parent’s memory.”

Mourning the gradual loss of relationships rooted in shared history · Letter to Mrs Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 13 January 1838

• Friendship
• Memory
• Mortality

“I do not feel fatherless—I often find my mind disputing with itself—What would my Father think of this?”

Describing how an inward conversation can preserve a dead parent’s presence · Letter to Mrs Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 4 August 1834

• Death
• Memory

“You see she never grows any older in my imagination.”

Showing how affection can preserve a loved person outside ordinary time · Letter to Mrs Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 16 April 1831

• Love
• Memory
• Time

“Could I disburse from the treasure of my memory, but one farthing in the pound of the mighty debt of happiness which I owe to dream-nourish’d childhood, and pay the dividend to the heirs and assignees of childhood.”

Imagining childhood happiness as a remembered wealth owed to later children · Letter to Mrs Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1829

• Childhood
• Joy
• Memory

“It is the plague of epistolatory correspondence, that ever and anon it brings to mind the sad recollection of your absence.”

Observing how correspondence can sharpen rather than relieve absence · Letter to George May Coleridge, 3 January 1820

• Friendship
• Memory
• Solitude

“I know not why less respect should be paid to an innocent vestige of old manners, which serves to bring times of yore to mind, than to a fragment of ancient sculpture.”

Defending living customs as vessels of cultural memory · Letter to Charles Lamb, 16 May 1815

• Art
• Memory
• Time