Carlyle described him in 1824 as having "a pair of
strange brown, timid, yet earnest-looking eyes." Emerson visited him in
1833 and found him "with bright blue eyes and fine clear complexion."]
III. THE REST OF THE STORY
Coleridge lived for thirty-six years after he left Stowey for Germany in
1798. His fame as a poet grew as the world became acquainted with and
learned to feel the peculiar charm of his poetry, and he was even more
famous, for a while, as a literary critic and a moral philosopher. But
they were years of weak-willed wandering, of vast hazy plans and feeble
performance, lighted only here and there by glimpses of fragmentary
accomplishment, and that seldom in poetry. Keats died at twenty-six,
leaving behind him a body of poetry hardly less wonderful than Coleridge
had fashioned at the same age; and another poet sang of him:
"The bloom, whose petals, nipt before they blew,
Died on the promise of the fruit, is waste."
In Coleridge the poet died at nearly the same age, almost as completely
as if the man himself had passed "within the twilight chamber ... of
white Death"; and "Dejection" is that poet's dirge. The remaining years
need therefore but few words.
Coleridge had taken opium, perhaps as early as his school-days, for
relief from neuralgia. He had recourse to it in March, 1796, for
sleeplessness; in the following November, for relief from violent
nervous pains; and near the close of the Stowey period, in May, 1798,
when the vagaries of Lloyd, the estrangement from Lamb, domestic
anxiety, and physical suffering had reduced him to a state of extreme
nervous wretchedness, he again took refuge in opiates, of which "Kubla
Khan" is partly the result.
Pages:
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40