Chapter Coleridge to Coleridge of C by Biographical Dictionary of English Literature

John Morgan at Calne. While there he published Christabel and Kubla Khan in 1816, and in 1817 Biographia Literaria, Sybilline Leaves, and an autobiography. In 1818 he appeared for the last time as a lecturer. He found in 1819 a final resting-place in the household of James Gillman, a surgeon, at Highgate. His life thenceforth was a splendid wreck. His nervous system was shattered, and he was a constant sufferer. Yet these last years were, in some respects, his best. He maintained a struggle against opium which lasted with his life, and though he ceased to write much, he became the revered centre of a group of disciples, including such men as Sterling, Maurice, and Hare, and thus indirectly continued and increased his influence in the philosophic and theological thought of his time. He returned to Trinitarianism, and a singular and childlike humility became one of his most marked characteristics. In 1824 he was elected an Associate of the Royal Society of Literature, which brought him a pension of 100 guineas. His latest publications were Aids to Reflection (1825) and The Constitution of Church and State. After his death there were published , among other works, Table Talk (1835), Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit (1840), Letters and Anima Poetœ (1895).

Endowed with an intellect of the first order, and an imagination at once delicate and splendid, Coleridge, from a weakness of moral constitution, and the lamentable habit already referred to, fell far short of the performance which he had planned, and which included various epic poems, and a complete system of philosophy, in which all knowledge was to be co-ordinated. He has, however, left enough poetry of such excellence as to place him in the first rank of English poets, and enough philosophic, critical, and theological matter to constitute him one of the principal intellectually formative forces of his time. His knowledge of philosophy, science, theology, and literature was alike wide and deep, and his powers of conversation, or rather monologue, were almost unique. A description of him in later life tells of “the clerical-looking dress, the thick, waving, silver hair, the youthful coloured cheek, the indefinable mouth and lips, the quick, yet steady and penetrating greenish-grey eye, the slow and continuous enunciation, and the everlasting music of his tones.”

Summary.—Born 1772, educated Christ’s Hospital and Cambridge, enlists 1794 but bought off, became intimate with Southey, and proposes to found pantisocracy, settles at Clevedon and Nether Stowey 1795, and became friend of Wordsworth, began to take opium 1796, writes Ancient Mariner, and joins W. in Lyrical Ballads, became Unitarian preacher, visits Germany 1798, published translation of Wallenstein 1800, settles at Greta Hall and finishes Christabel, goes to Malta 1804, lectures on Shakespeare 1808, leaves his family and lives with W. 1809, and thereafter with various friends, latterly with Gillman at Highgate, returned to Trinitarianism, published various works 1808-1825, died 1834.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative, J. D. Campbell (1893), also H. D. Traill (Men of Letters Series, 1884), also Pater’s Appreciations, De Quincey’s Works, Principal Shairp’s Studies in Poetry and Philosophy (1868).