a. 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. He returned from Germany in 1799, worked for
a while on a newspaper in London and on a translation of Schiller's
"Wallenstein," and in the summer of 1800 removed to Keswick in
Cumberland, in the Lake Country, where the Wordsworths had already
established themselves. Here, in the autumn of 1800, he strove to
finish "Christabel," and did finish the second part. In the winter and
spring he suffered from a complicated illness, in which he again had
recourse to laudanum; and from the spring of 1801 he was confirmed in
the opium habit, sinking often to pitiful depths of moral and physical
misery. He was in the Mediterranean, chiefly at Malta, from 1804 to
1806. His wife and children remained at Keswick, where Southey and his
family had become co-tenants with them of Greta Hall. Southey, it might
almost be said, took care of Coleridge's family henceforth; for
Coleridge had begun to find his own fireside an intolerable place as
early as 1802, lived little at home, and made a formal separation from
his wife in 1808,--though they saw each other occasionally after that
and the Wedgwood annuity continued to be paid to Mrs. Coleridge. In 1809
he was living with the Wordsworths at Grasmere, where he wrote several
numbers of a politico-philosophical paper called "The Friend." About the
close of 1810 he was taken in hand by a Mr. and Mrs. Morgan of
Hammersmith, near London, under whose care he kept the opium in check
sufficiently to give his famous lectures on the "Principles of Poetry"
in the winter of 1811-12, and another series in the early summer on
Shakespeare. In the winter following, his play of "Remorse," a recast of
the "Osorio" of 1797, was acted in London with some success. In the
winter of 1813-14 he lectured, in a "conversational" fashion, at
Bristol. He also wrote irregularly for the London papers during these
years. But his studies, since his return from Germany, had been directed
to metaphysics, and especially to the philosophical bases of poetry and
theology; and the last twenty years of his life, at least, were o