ccupied
with plans for a great philosophical work covering these two fields of
thought. One of the fragments of the great work that actually came to
light, the _Biographia Literaria_, seems to have been sent to the
printers in 1815. A collected edition of his poetry was also begun while
he was under the Morgans' care.

From 1816 till his death in 1834 he lived in comparative peace, if not
in happiness, with a Mr. Gilman of Highgate near London, an apothecary.
Gilman and his wife were able so far to wean him from the drug, or to
regulate his use of it, that he brought to the birth something of his
vast plans in criticism and philosophy, notably the _Biographia
Literaria_ (1817) and the "Aids to Reflection" (1825). The beginning of
his stay with Gilman was also marked by the publication of "Christabel"
and "Kubla Khan" (1816), and of a collected edition of his other poems
(including "The Ancient Mariner," considerably revised) under the title
"Sibylline Leaves" (1817). But the poems that were not finished in the
first great period at Stowey remained unfinished. He talked divinely
("an archangel a little damaged," Lamb said), and both by his talk and
his metaphysical writings profoundly influenced the literature and
philosophy of the century, both in England and America; but the poet in
him was dead.

"Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain,
And genius given, and knowledge won in vain;
And all which I had culled in woodwalks wild,
And all which patient toil had reared, and all
Commune with _thee_ had opened out--but flowers
Strewed on my corse, and borne upon my bier,
In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!"[1]

It would be a mistake to ascribe the paralysis of Coleridge's powers of
constructive imagination exclusively to laudanum. Rather the resort to
narcotics and the inability to control his creative faculty are alike
symptoms of a temperamental malady which had its roots in his nature
close to the seat of that special faculty. Under a favorable conjunction
of outward circumstance and inward state, imagination came; it possessed
him, and he labored in it, happily. Afterwards he could revise what he
had shaped, analyze it philosophically, perfect some details of it, but
he could not proceed in the creative act after the inspiration had left
him. His own description of his nature--"_indolence capable of
energies_"--is accurate as far as it goes. The opium, resorted to often,
no doubt, to qui