[Footnote 1:  Mr. Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner.]

MY RELATIONS

I am arrived at that point of life, at which a man may account it a blessing, as it is a singularity, if he have either of his parents surviving.  I have not that felicity—­and sometimes think feelingly of a passage in Browne’s Christian Morals, where he speaks of a man that hath lived sixty or seventy years in the world.  “In such a compass of time,” he says, “a man may have a close apprehension what it is to be forgotten, when he hath lived to find none who could remember his father, or scarcely the friends of his youth, and may sensibly see with what a face in no long time OBLIVION will look upon himself.”

I had an aunt, a dear and good one.  She was one whom single blessedness had soured to the world.  She often used to say, that I was the only thing in it which she loved; and, when she thought I was quitting it, she grieved over me with mother’s tears.  A partiality quite so exclusive my reason cannot altogether approve.  She was from morning till night poring over good books, and devotional exercises.  Her favourite volumes were Thomas a Kempis, in Stanhope’s Translation; and a Roman Catholic Prayer Book, with the matins and complines regularly set down,—­terms which I was at that time too young to understand.  She persisted in reading them, although admonished daily concerning their Papistical tendency; and went to church every Sabbath, as a good Protestant should do.  These were the only books she studied; though, I think, at one period of her life, she told me, she had read with great satisfaction the Adventures of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman.  Finding the door of the chapel in Essex-street open one day—­it was in the infancy of that heresy—­she went in, liked the sermon, and the manner of worship, and frequented it at intervals for some time after.  She came not for doctrinal points, and never missed them.  With some little asperities in her constitution, which I have above hinted at, she was a steadfast, friendly being, and a fine old Christian.  She was a woman of strong sense, and a shrewd mind—­extraordinary at a repartee; one of the few occasions of her breaking silence—­else she did not much value wit.  The only secular employment I remember to have seen her engaged in, was, the splitting of French beans, and dropping them into a China basin of fair water.  The odour of those tender vegetables to this day comes back upon my sense, redolent of soothing recollections.  Certainly it is the most delicate of culinary operations.

Male aunts, as somebody calls them, I had none—­to remember.  By the uncle’s side I may be said to have been born an orphan.  Brother, or sister, I never had any—­to know them.  A sister, I think, that should have been Elizabeth, died in both our infancies.  What a comfort, or what a care, may I not have missed in her!—­But I have cousins, sprinkled about in Hertfordshire—­besides