Fear at my heart

It is a most instructive part of my Life the fact, that I have been always preyed on by some Dread, and perhaps all my faulty actions have been the consequence of some Dread or other on my mind / from fear of Pain, or Shame, not from prospect of Pleasure / - so in my childhood & Boyhood the horror of being detected with a sorehead; afterwards imaginary fears of having the Itch in my Blood - / then a short-lived Fit of Fears from sex - then horror of DUNS, & a state of struggling with madness from an incapability of hoping that I should be able to marry Mary Evans (and this strange passion of fervent tho' wholly imaginative and imaginary Love uncombinable by my utmost efforts with (any regular) Hope - / possibly from deficiency of bodily feeling, of tactual ideas connected with the image) had all the effects of direct Fear, & I have lain for hours together awake at night, groaning & praying - Then came that stormy time / and for a few months America really inspired Hope, & I became an exalted Being - then came Rob. Southey's alienation / my marriage - constant dread in my mind respecting Mrs Coleridge's Temper, &c - and finally stimulants in the fear & prevention of violent Bowel-attacks from mental agitation / then (almost epileptic) night-horrors in my sleep / & since then every error I have committed, has been the immediate effect of the Dread of these bad most shocking Dreams - any thing to prevent them / - all this interwoven with its minor consequences, that fill up the interspaces - the cherry juice running in between the cherries in a cherry pie / procrastination in dread of this - & something else in consequence of that procrast. &c / - and from the same cause the least languor expressed in a Letter from S.H. drives me wild / & it is most unfortunate that I so fearfully despondent should have concentered my soul thus on one almost as feeble in Hope as myself. 11 Jan. 1805.

Text source: Notebooks, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 3 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957-1973), ii.2398, online here