A reconciliation between Southey and Coleridge marked the return of the latter to Stowey, where Mr. and Mrs. Southey came on a visit of some weeks. Following this Coleridge took his wife to Ottery St. Mary and joined the family circle for a month. In October he stayed with the Wordsworths at Sockburn-on-Tees, in the house of Mrs. Wordsworth's parents, and was with John and William Wordsworth when they lighted on the old inn that was to become Dove Cottage, the home of William Wordsworth during the period of his most fruitful labours, and in these latter days a centre of pilgrimage. By the end of the year Coleridge was in London again, living at 21 Buckingham Street in the Strand, and writing for the Morning Post. The association was a lengthy one, but it was not always pleasant, and it gave rise to controversy during the poet's life and when he was dead. Coleridge said in after years that Stuart had offered him a partnership and that he had declined it on the ground that any income in excess of five pounds a week was an evil. Coleridge may have said this, and doubtless believed what he said; we have seen that he was quite unable to deal authoritatively with financial matters. It is fair to say that the poet had few if any of the qualities that are demanded for daily journalism, in which a man must be safe and reliable. If he be brilliant, so much the better for those who employ him, but brilliance is not to be compared with punctuality in a newspaper office. Coleridge declared that he "wasted the prime and manhood of his intellect" on the Morning Post and the Courier; but latter-day judgment, while acknowledging the high quality of some of his journalistic work, cannot accept the statement, which is yet another example of poetic licence. Modern Fleet Street does not treat erratic contributors as patiently or liberally as Stuart treated Coleridge; the rapid march of events and the stress of competition alike forbid.

When he gave up his regular work on the papers he stayed for some weeks with Lamb at Pentonville, then went to Stowey, and from there to Dove Cottage. The translation from Schiller, on which he had been engaged, was now finished. From Dove Cottage he moved to Greta Hall, near Keswick, a semi-detached house some twelve miles or so from the Wordsworths. His landlord, who lived next door, was the possessor of a good library. Neighbours called upon the new-comer and offered hospitality, for his work had already attracted some attention. "Christabel" was finished, but when the two volumes of Lyrical Ballads were published in January 1801, Coleridge had not fulfilled his promise in regard to them. He was busy promising volumes, still unwritten, to publishers, he was anticipating his allowance from the Wedgwoods, and nursing an attack of rheumatic fever. With the road clear before him, with a certain market for his work, he was paying tribute to "the thief of time." If at length he wrote, his writing took the form of long and brilliant letters to private friends. For relief from physical pain he was indulging in opium. The year 1801 is full of complaints and of direct or indirect appeals for money. In April 1802 came the famous "Ode to Dejection"; if space permitted it should be quoted here, for, in a couple of hundred lines, Coleridge has penned a picture of his own mental state that none can pass by with indifference, or without compassion. Not only were there monetary worries and the trouble of a mind diseased at this early period of the poet's uneasy life; there was also domestic unhappiness. The breach between the poet and his wife, already of long standing, was now serious, and he sought solace from his troubles not at Greta Hall but at Grasmere; his harmless devotion to Dorothy Wordsworth giving offence, not unnaturally, to his wife. The following year was uneventful. Coleridge was intensely unhappy at Keswick, though he had the pleasure of a visit from Charles and Mary Lamb in August. Later, he went on a tour with his patrons, the Wedgwoods, and stayed with them for a time in their country house, sending a few papers to the patient Stuart the while. Thomas Wedgwood was inclined to trifle with drugs, so he was at best a dangerous companion for Coleridge.

In 1803, when bad health was the chief source of trouble, a volume of the earlier poems was reprinted with the editorial aid of Lamb. In 1804, Coleridge joined William and Mary Wordsworth on their Scottish tour, but did not remain with them for long. He left them for a solitary walking tour in the Highlands, apparently seeking in vain to tire himself so completely that drugs should cease to be a necessity. There is unfortunately no reason to believe that the device was successful. By mid-September he was back at Greta Hall, where Robert Southey and his wife were now installed. Southey, methodical, hard-working and temperate, was not likely to side with his brother of the pen in the controversies that made the household unhappy. Further residence in that house, the home that had so many outside attractions, was becoming impossible, and Coleridge started for the south, only to fall ill at Dove Cottage, where he stopped on the way. Recovered, he went for a while to London, thence to the Beaumonts' place at Dunmow in Essex. In town again, he sat for his portrait to Northcote, one that seems to present an accurate picture enough of his strength and weakness, "the heaven-eyes and flabby irresoluteness of mien." In April left England for Malta armed with letters to the Civil Commissioner, Vice-Admiral Ball, and, mirabile dictu, a pocket full of money. He had £100 lent by his patient and admiring friend William Wordsworth, whose position had improved by the return of the money borrowed from his father, in years long past, by the head of the Lonsdale family, and he had prevailed upon his conscience to accept a gift of £100 from Sir George Beaumont. His fellow-passengers on board the Speedwell were but two, one of them the "unconscionably fat woman who would have wanted elbow-room on Salisbury Plain." Mrs. Coleridge remained at Greta Hall in the company of her sister and brother-in-law, dependent for her support upon the continued charity of the Wedgwoods, but it may be noticed that her husband corresponded with her while he was abroad. When the ill-matched pair were not under the same roof they could be good friends.

The years so briefly summarised here show Coleridge at his best as a poet and at his worst as a man, sometimes kindled by the fire of genius, sometimes so degraded that he is dangerously near the ranks of the begging-letter writer. He is only saved from the contempt of his critics because he was at least sincere in his belief that the lack of pence alone stood between him and the mental tranquillity that would enable him to enrich the world with a masterpiece.

There is a passage in Lucretius, in which the poet speaks of the wealthy senator, no longer able to endure the turmoil of the capital, galloping away as hard as his chariot can carry him to his country villa, only to find that change cannot cure his unrest, and to come thundering back to Rome. It is of himself that he is tired, and from himself there is no escape. So it has been with men of uneven mind for all time, so it was with Coleridge, so it will ever be with those to whom the secret of rational living is "a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed."

For rather more than two years he left England behind him, but his letters, or those that remain to us, would suggest that he was no happier out of England than he was at home. At first the change stimulated his sick mind, he enjoyed his stay in Gibraltar, even while he complained that the lack of exercise on board affected his health and spirits. At Valetta, he became first the guest and then the private secretary of the Civil Commissioner, in whose service he describes himself rather complacently as "a sort of diplomatic understrapper." In August he left Malta for Sicily, to draw up a report of the island's possibilities. Sir Alexander Ball had a firm belief that Sicily should be taken over by Great Britain to keep it from falling into Napoleon's hands. Nothing came of the proposal, and by the beginning of the winter Coleridge was back in Malta, to find himself formally installed as the Commissioner's private secretary. The Public Secretary of Malta died soon afterward, and, while his successor was absent from the island, Coleridge was appointed to the temporary charge of the department at a salary of £600, no bad allowance for the man who could assure his friends that he had refused to accept a share in the Morning Post because he thought that £250 per annum was enough for anybody, the man whose wife and children were being supported in his absence from England by the charity of friends. But the work at Malta was regular, and demanded constant attention; there was no leisure for dreaming of what was to be accomplished some day, so the position was bound to prove irksome to Coleridge, who was soon full of bitter complaints. The official salary attaching to the post was £1200 per annum; Coleridge, as a temporary substitute for the gentleman appointed, a Mr. Chapman, was paid half, and this inequality of reward provided ground for a considerable grievance. But the real trouble lay more in the work than in the pay, for at the end of April we find him greatly distressed by the news that Mr. Chapman could not arrive before July. Even that month brought no Secretary; he did not reach Malta until September, and then Coleridge went in company with a friend to Rome and Naples. Of his stay in Italy his own accounts are vague and unsatisfactory, but he claims to have obtained a better knowledge of the Fine Arts in three months spent at Rome than he could have gained in his own country in twenty years. Doubtless his health was bad; the Roman winter in 1805-6 was not as healthy as it is to-day; it may be, too, that the poet was particularly susceptible to low fever and ague, and that he cured his attacks, or sought to cure them, with the aid of drugs. He reached London in the middle of August 1806, and described his forlorn state in a letter written long after to Josiah Wedgwood, whose brother Thomas had died in the previous year. He said he had reached England, "ill, penniless, and worse than homeless." That he was ill is undoubted; that he was homeless is a figure of speech that will pass, though it should be remembered that Greta Hall was still open to him; but inasmuch as he had been the Civil Commissioner's private secretary, had earned over four hundred pounds as Public Secretary, and had gone to Italy at the expense of his travelling companion, the financial straits are more than ever inexplicable and unsatisfactory. Stuart was still willing and anxious to publish and pay for his erratic contributor's work; travel had increased its value. There can be no doubt but that Coleridge's will-power and self-respect were both at the lowest ebb at this period, all had gone save the love of friends and the admiration of those with whom he came in contact. He could still hold an audience silent, still prove to his immediate circle that his intellect was of the keenest and highest order. But the world, which demands from all poor men a definite expression of their rights to live, was far too strong for him, nor could any of the chances that came his way, and they were many, give to his strange character the strength it needed. He seemed to have inherited the curse of Cain—"a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be on the earth." So with a sick mind and an ailing body he cast about once more for the means to live in some position which should meet his own undefined requirements.