the estimate of the public,
doubtless, _that_ will seem a bad exchange. Every man to his taste.
Meantime, what we wish to show is, that the loss was not absolute, but
merely relative.

It is urged, however, that, even on his philosophic speculations,
opium operated unfavourably in one respect, by often causing him to
leave them unfinished. This is true. Whenever Coleridge (being highly
charged, or saturated, with opium) had written with distempered
vigour upon any question, there occurred soon after a recoil of
intense disgust, not from his own paper only, but even from the
subject. All opium-eaters are tainted with the infirmity of leaving
works unfinished, and suffering reactions of disgust. But Coleridge
taxed himself with that infirmity in verse before he could at all have
commenced opium-eating. Besides, it is too much assumed by Coleridge
and by his biographer, that to leave off opium was of course to regain
juvenile health. But all opium-eaters make the mistake of supposing
every pain or irritation which they suffer to be the product of opium.
Whereas a wise man will say, suppose you _do_ leave off opium, that
will not deliver you from the load of years (say sixty-three) which
you carry on your back. Charles Lamb, another man of true genius, and
another head belonging to the Blackwood Gallery, made that mistake in
his _Confessions of a Drunkard_. "I looked back," says he, "to the
time when always, on waking in the morning, I had a song rising to my
lips." At present, it seems, being a drunkard, he has no such song.
Ay, dear Lamb, but note this, that the drunkard was fifty-six years
old, the songster was twenty-three. Take twenty-three from fifty-six,
and we have some reason to believe that thirty-three will remain;
which period of thirty-three years is a pretty good reason for not
singing in the morning, even if brandy has been out of the question.

It is singular, as respects Coleridge, that Mr Gillman never says one
word upon the event of the great Highgate experiment for leaving off
laudanum, though Coleridge came to Mr Gillman's for no other purpose;
and in a week, this vast creation of new earth, sea, and all that in
them is, was to have been accomplished. We _rayther_ think, as Bayley
junior observes, that the explosion must have hung fire. But _that_ is
a trifle. We have another pleasing hypothesis on the subject. Mr
Wordsworth, in his exquisite lines written on a fly-leaf of his own
_Castle of Indolence