al affairs, and his
native indolence and procrastination were increased by his indulgence in
the opium habit. On his return to England, in 1800, he went to reside at
Keswick, in the Lake Country, with his brother-in-law, Southey, whose
industry supported both families. During his last nineteen {235} years
Coleridge found an asylum under the roof of Mr. James Gilman, of
Highgate, near London, whither many of the best young men in England were
accustomed to resort to listen to Coleridge's wonderful talk. Talk,
indeed, was the medium through which he mainly influenced his generation.
It cost him an effort to put his thoughts on paper. His _Table
Talk_--crowded with pregnant paragraphs--was taken down from his lips by
his nephew, Henry Coleridge. His criticisms of Shakspere are nothing but
notes, made here and there, from a course of lectures delivered before
the Royal Institute, and never fully written out. Though only hints and
suggestions, they are, perhaps, the most penetrative and helpful
Shaksperian criticism in English. He was always forming projects and
abandoning them. He projected a great work on Christian philosophy,
which was to have been his _magnum opus_, but he never wrote it. He
projected an epic poem on the fall of Jerusalem. "I schemed it at
twenty-five," he said, "but, alas! _venturum expectat_." What bade fair
to be his best poem, _Christabel_, is a fragment. Another strangely
beautiful poem, _Kubla Khan_--which came to him, he said, in sleep--is
even more fragmentary. And the most important of his prose remains, his
_Biographia Literaria_, 1817, a history of his own opinions, breaks off
abruptly.

It was in his suggestiveness that Coleridge's great service to posterity
resided. He was what J. S. Mill called a "seminal mind," and his thought
{236} had that power of stimulating thought in others, which is the mark
and the privilege of original genius. Many a man has owed to some
sentence of Coleridge's, if not the awakening in himself of a new
intellectual life, at least the starting of fruitful trains of reflection
which have modified his whole view of certain great subjects. On every
thing that he left is set the stamp of high mental authority. He was
not, perhaps, primarily, he certainly was not exclusively, a poet. In
theology, in philosophy, in political thought, and literary criticism, he
set currents flowing which are flowing yet. The terminology of
criticism, for example, is in