cken the dreams in his brain as well as to relieve his
bodily suffering, helped to enfeeble his will; but the "indolence" was
in him before he became addicted to opium, and he was never "capable of
energies" at the call of duty, but only at the call of his "shaping
spirit," over whose coming and going he had no control.

Poetically it is perhaps as well. Had he been like his friend Wordsworth
in strength and steadiness of purpose--which is to suppose him another
nature than he was--his life would have been happier and more edifying,
but he would hardly have given us anything better than "Christabel" and
"The Ancient Mariner." Romantic poetry of the higher type is essentially
the creature of mood. Even Wordsworth's long and conscientious labors
produced but a small bulk of poetry of this character, amid dreary
reaches of uninspired preaching. Coleridge waited--in despondency often,
in self-upbraidings, in the temporary deception of opium dreams with
their consequent misery--for the return of the spirit; and it did not
come.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: From the lines addressed to Wordsworth after hearing him
read "The Prelude," in 1807.]

II. COLERIDGE'S POEMS.

"THE ANCIENT MARINER"

"The Ancient Mariner" was first printed in the first edition of "Lyrical
Ballads," 1798, again with considerable changes in the second edition,
1800, and without further significant change in the editions of 1802 and
1805. Its fifth appearance was in "Sibylline Leaves," 1817, again with
some important changes, and the addition of the Latin motto and the
marginal gloss. In the "Poetical Works," 1828, and again in the
"Poetical Works," 1829, the poem appeared in its final form as we now
have it,--differing very little from the form it had in "Sibylline
Leaves." One or two significant minor changes will be mentioned in the
notes.

Coleridge's own account of the genesis of the poem, given in the
_Biographia Literaria_ nearly twenty years later, is interesting.
"During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our
conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry,
the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence
to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty
by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm, which
accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset, diffused over a
known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent th