For a while Coleridge stayed with the Lambs, to whom his company was ever welcome, and then took up work in the office of the Courier, where he found a room. By the end of September he was at Greta Hall, where his relations with his wife, doubtless made more difficult by the undiplomatic but strenuous and honest Southey, must have gone from bad to worse, for by December the two had decided to separate, Coleridge being allowed to take the boys, Hartley and Derwent, on the understanding that they spent their holidays with their mother. He passed Christmas at Coleorton, lent by Sir George Beaumont to the Wordsworths, and it may be that the relief of the proposed separation accounted for better spirits, better health, and inclination to work. He was still far from well, no day seems to have passed without bringing some hours of pain and unrest, but there was some change, and it was for the better. Wordsworth's dedication of The Prelude may have given him a much-needed stimulus. In the early summer of 1807, Coleridge joined his wife for a time at Nether Stowey, where kindly Thomas Poole managed to patch up the differences between husband and wife, and brought Coleridge and Josiah Wedgwood together again. The poet had refused to answer his patron's letters or to supply promised material for a life of Thomas Wedgwood. In his letter to Josiah Wedgwood he declared that the contribution to the story of Thomas Wedgwood's life had been detained at Malta together with "many important papers," and that he had several works on the eve of publication. The measure of foundation upon which these statements stood was hardly sufficient to support them even in the pages of a letter to a fairly credulous patron. Soon the "penniless and friendless" man was to find another supporter, Thomas de Quincey, who, after meeting the poet and spending one evening in his company, supplied him anonymously, through Cottle the publisher, with a loan of three hundred pounds, without any conditions, in order that his financial troubles might be ended.

Here we have another proof of the extraordinary personal magnetism of Coleridge. However badly he might behave, his friends forgave him and continued to love him, strangers helped to smooth the rough road over which his follies drew him—all in vain. Coleridge accepted the gift from an unknown sympathiser without compunction—he was quite reconciled to doles—merely remarking that he hoped in twelve months to ask the name of his benefactor in order to show him the results of his gift. Towards the end of an unsatisfactory year, Coleridge returned to his room and his work in the office of the Courier, and set himself to prepare some long-promised lectures to be delivered at the Royal Institution. The first were heard in February 1808, and others followed in the spring; they seem to have attracted considerable attention and to have been representative of the lecturer's considerable gifts. This work over, he went to stay at Bury St. Edmunds with his friend Mrs. Clarkson, whose influence was wholly good, and helped in no small measure to restore his health and peace of mind. From there he went to visit the Wordsworths at Allan Bank, and the improvement in health was maintained. He was now separated from Mrs. Coleridge; they met as friends, united to some extent by a genuine interest in their children's welfare. The year 1809 saw the birth of a paper called The Friend, described as "a Literary, Moral, and Political Weekly Paper, excluding Personal and Party Politics and Events of the Day. Conducted by S. T. Coleridge of Grasmere, Westmorland." This was another ill-planned venture, foredoomed to failure from the start. It contrived to appear at regular intervals on twenty-seven occasions, and considering the enormous difficulties associated with its production, this was a remarkable achievement enough. Needless to say helpers came forward with hard work and advances of money. Wordsworth wrote much for the columns of his friend's venture, but success and Coleridge never could run in double harness.

By March 1810, after involving in endless trouble all who helped the editor, The Friend was numbered among the things that had been, and until October the poet lingered on in the Lake Country, apparently at his wits' ends once more. He took his latest failure very much to heart.

In October Coleridge accepted at short notice an invitation from Basil Montague, who was passing to London through Keswick, to stay with him in Soho, and this unfortunate journey led to a break in the very amicable relations that had existed so long between Coleridge and Wordsworth, and had been a source of great comfort to the less fortunate man. The author of The Prelude warned Montague that his friend's habits were not satisfactory, and that he had but little hope of their permanent improvement, and Montague, translating Wordsworth's tempered note of advice into harshest terms, gave Coleridge his own crude version of it. The breach was not mended for two years, and even then the marks of it made the old happy relations between two great poets, who were intellectually brothers, though morally as far as the poles asunder, impossible. Stricken to the heart, Coleridge left Frith Street at once and went to Hammersmith on what was practically a six years' visit to some Bristol friends, the Morgans, who had settled in the western suburb. He had the Lambs to turn to as well, and in their company met Henry Crabb Robinson, to whose voluminous diary students of the poet are so deeply indebted. He completely ignored his relatives and friends in the Lake Country, though their anxiety about him was unfeigned. In 1811 he worked on the Courier until the autumn, when he turned again to the lecture platform, which he could always adorn, for it was possible for Coleridge to speak without notes on almost any subject and to treat it luminously. These lectures, delivered in the rooms of the London Philosophical Society in Crane Court, Fetter Lane, were eminently successful, taking into consideration the conditions of their delivery. They were devoted to examination and criticism of the work of Shakespeare, Milton, and living poets, a study that Coleridge had made his own. The spring of 1812 was at hand before the series was completed, and at its conclusion the poet, who had delighted some of the sanest critics in London, set out for Greta Hall. While he was there—it was destined to be his last visit to the Lake Country—he was on the best of terms with his wife, but kept away from the Wordsworths because William had refused to apologise. It required the persistent efforts of Crabb Robinson to bring the two men together in May of 1812. One Brown, printer of The Friend, had left Penrith owing Coleridge money, so the poet went to his office to investigate the matter, and remained in Penrith for a month, without communicating with any of his anxious friends! Then he returned to the Morgans, who had left Hammersmith for the neighbourhood of Oxford Street, and issued a prospectus for a series of lectures designed to deal with the drama. He delivered about half a dozen, and arranged for a winter series to be given at the Surrey Institution. It was a period of renewed literary activity; he had re-written his play Osorio, now called Remorse, and it had been accepted for Drury Lane; he was working again for Stuart. The winter lectures opened badly and closed brilliantly; the poet was happy in having sympathetic audiences. Then came rehearsals of Remorse, which proved remarkably tedious to the gifted author, who for once in his life found a substantial reward for his work. Remorse appealed sufficiently to the patrons of Drury Lane to yield over four hundred pounds to Coleridge in acting and publishing rights. The money came at an opportune moment, for Josiah Wedgwood had reduced his pension to the poet by one half. He has been very freely blamed for this, but who can say that Coleridge had kept to his promise to devote himself to poetry and philosophy or that he had justified to any reasonable extent the hopes that prompted the generous gift? Naturally, he resented the reduction of his allowance, but it did not stir him to any further effort. On the proceeds of his play he would seem to have lived in comparative idleness until the autumn of the year, when, finding the financial strain no longer bearable, he set out in October for Bristol, to deliver an extended series of lectures. The summer had been spent in formulating good resolutions and talking of the books he proposed to write as soon as his mind was sufficiently tranquil and he had no more worries. On the whole, the Bristol lectures were a great success. It may be said with all respect that Coleridge was always lecturing; even in private life, he had succeeded in keeping the brilliant Madame de StÄel a contented listener by the hour, and it was quite an easy matter for him to stand on a platform and discuss any matter in which he was interested, in a fashion safe to hold an educated audience. There is evidence that while Coleridge was at Bristol doing good work in a desultory fashion he was indulging immoderately in opium. Cottle, his old publisher, remonstrated with him, and some effort was made to raise the money to put him in a doctor's home; but Southey, who was approached, opposed the suggestion firmly and, with a certain brutal frankness that is not hard to condone, declared that nothing but a return to Greta Hall and hard, regular work, would minister effectively to his brother-in-law's complaint. This of course availed to keep Coleridge from the Lake Country, and still further to embitter his relations with the family at Keswick.

In September 1814 he joined the Morgans in a cottage at Ashley, on the Bath Road, and planned the creation of some literary monuments, that when they came to be completed were of comparatively small account. He wrote some papers for the Courier, and towards the end of the year went with the Morgans to Calne in Wiltshire. There he wrote begging-letters, visited the leading representatives of the county and enjoyed the entertainment he received, ignored letters from his family, and wasted his great gifts by devoting them to consideration of local questions of small importance. By the kindness of friends, Hartley had been sent to Oxford, so doubtless his father thought he had done well for one of his family.

The year 1815 passed, finding him more concerned with promises than with the performance of work, but in March 1816 he returned to town with the MS. of a new play—Zapolya. He stayed for a while with his faithful friends, Charles and Mary Lamb, and then took the strongest and wisest decision of his life by putting himself in the hands of Mr. Gillman of Highgate, with whom his life was so closely associated down to the end. He took this step, after much self-searching, and on the advice of a physician, Dr. Adams of Hatton Garden, to whom he told frankly and fully the story of his case. A few days after his arrival at Highgate the "Christabel," "Kubla Khan," and "Pains of Sleep" were published by John Murray, to whom Coleridge appears to have been introduced by Lord Byron. Murray also accepted Zapolya, but parted with it to another publisher.

In the summer of 1816, Coleridge took a holiday at Muddiford, near Christchurch in Hampshire. Back in Highgate, he projected more work, and being in better health, carried on brisk quarrels with publishers. Under Gillman's care he was becoming more temperate, but his system was suffering from lack of its accustomed stimulant. By the spring of 1817, the Metropolitan EncyclopÆdia was projected, and Coleridge was to be a liberal contributor as well as assistant editor in return for £500 a year, but he wanted so much down on account that the publishers, who probably knew their man, broke off negotiations, and Coleridge wrote nothing but his well-known paper, "Preliminary Treatise on Method," for which he received sixty guineas. In March 1817, the publication of the Biographia Literaria, a glorified scrap-book, full of profound thoughts that dazzled many a thinking man, led to bitter criticism in the Edinburgh and Blackwood's. The philosophical prose of Coleridge is of importance, but no attempt will be made to deal with it here, in a sketch that has no other aim than to present a great figure in our literary history to those who need such an introduction. The Biographia Literaria and the Æsthetical Essays have been published as recently as 1907 by the Oxford University Press. They supply a complete reprint of the 1817 edition, and have been edited with a masterly introduction by Mr. J. Shawcross.

In this year (1817) Coleridge renewed his work in the Courier and upheld Southey's reputation in connection with the pirated publication of that poet's twenty-five-year-old indiscretion, "Wat Tyler." This was generous vindication of a severe critic. In the same year he started his stimulating friendship with Joseph Henry Green, philosopher and surgeon. In the autumn he again sought the sea, going this time to Littlehampton in Sussex, where he met the Rev. H. F. Cary, translator of Dante, and Charles Augustus Tulk, afterwards member for Sudbury. It is to the efforts of Coleridge that Mr. Cary owed the first acceptance of his remarkable work. Zapolya sold well towards the close of this year, and the sale helped to stimulate the author. It would seem that residence at Highgate was doing something at last to build up the poet's shattered nervous system, that the bonds of opium were being loosened, that self-respect was coming, however late, into his life. Lectures on Shakespeare and Poetical Literature delivered at Flower-de-Luce Court in Fetter Lane occupied the opening months of the new year, and while engaged on these addresses, Coleridge made a new and valued friend, Thomas Allsop, with whom he maintained for several years an important correspondence. A further course of lectures was delivered in the last weeks of 1818 and for some months in the following year, but although they were doubtless remarkably good, there was no money in them. The year 1819 was a disastrous one financially. Not only was little profit forthcoming from work, but, to make matters worse, Fenner, the poet's publisher, became bankrupt, and the unfortunate Coleridge was compelled to buy back his own books and copyrights, at least he wrote to that effect to Allsop, though one cannot take all these statements au pied de la lettre. In 1820, fortune had still more blows in store. Hartley Coleridge, who to his father's great delight had gained a Fellowship at Oriel, was deprived of it on account of his intemperance, nor could all the influence of friends or of the sorely stricken parent avail to move the Provost of Oriel to reconsider his judgment, though a sum of £300 was paid to Hartley by way of compensation later in the year. The career of Hartley Coleridge, the "little Hartley," beloved of the Lakemen, who, it will be remembered, preferred both his verse and his company to those of the self-centred Wordsworth, is no less sad than that of his father, and was far less brilliant. He inherited all the curses that made the career of Samuel Taylor Coleridge so disastrous, he was constitutionally unable to settle down to hard work, he was weak, and prone to give way to temptation on the least provocation. A great part of his life was passed in the Lake Country, where William and Mary and Dorothy Wordsworth were his staunch friends, loving him perhaps as much for his father's sake as for his own. He died shortly before William Wordsworth, and the graves of the two men, so remote from each other in all things save affection, may be seen side by side in Keswick churchyard. Coleridge was soon reconciled to his erring son, but the blow was the more severe because he could see that he was the father of the lad's faults and failings.

In 1821 we find him turning to Allsop for pecuniary aid; self-respect must be laid aside in the face of financial straits. The excuse is the old one that age cannot wither nor custom stale. He is in sore distress, reduced to writing for Blackwood (who had been to Highgate bearing the olive branch, nearly two years before). He is even writing sermons for illiterate clergymen, he has four books well-nigh ready for press, he wishes to bring about a revolution in the world of French and English metaphysics through the medium of a work of far-reaching importance, still, of course, to be written. What remains, then, at a time when he is being pressed for money for the necessities of life, but an appeal to a few admirers who "think respectfully" of his gifts to subscribe an annuity of about £200 a year for three or four years? Nearly £100 has been promised by young friends whom he is engaged in teaching. Perhaps Allsop will suggest how, without loss of dignity, the appeal may be circulated in the proper quarters. Those of us who admire the work with which Coleridge has enriched his country may be pardoned if they regret the fact that this appeal ever saw the light. It had not even the negative virtue of success. The much-maligned Blackwood came to the rescue with an advance on account of work, and with the amount prepaid Coleridge went to Ramsgate for two months with the Gillmans, where he met Cowden Clarke, and derived benefit from the sea air and ample exercise.

The next plan that came to the fertile brain was an extension of the informal class in philosophy that he held at Gillman's, and something, but not much, was done in this direction. A long visit from Mrs. Coleridge and their daughter Sara marked the comparatively cheerful close of the year 1822. Henry Nelson Coleridge, the poet's nephew, son of Colonel James Coleridge and afterwards Sara's husband, was of the party; his Table Talk, in which Coleridge shows something of his conversational quality, may still be read with interest. These visits and the poet's fast-widening social sphere suggest that the opium habit was being conquered at last, that the closing years of a strangely troubled life were bringing with them some measure of tranquillity. There is yet another indication of improvement; the fire of poetic inspiration flared up for a little while in the fall of 1823, and "Youth and Age," was the result. Aids to Reflection was in the making in these days too, though it was not given to the world until the early summer of 1825, and then in a very slovenly form, which did little or nothing to diminish its value to thinking men and women. While the reception was a mixed one, there was a fairly substantial reward. The Royal Society of Literature gave him an Associateship carrying with it the welcome annuity of 100 guineas; there was balm in Gilead at last. In return for the honour, the poet read a paper on the "Prometheus of Æschylus" before the R.S.L. (May 1825). In addition to some definite relief from financial stress, Coleridge was entering upon a mental phase of infinite comfort to his remaining years. The transcendentalist became suddenly convinced of the efficacy of prayer, of the existence of a personal God, and of other tenets peculiar to Christianity. We cannot indicate the gradual processes by which the brilliant mind reached harbour in the last days. It may be that the futility of his own struggles was becoming apparent, that his reasoning faculties, strengthened by relief from drugs, reverted to the faith of earlier times at Ottery St. Mary when, a little boy with the page of his life fair and unstained, he listened to the teachings of his father, a man of godly ways and simple belief. It may have been the final sense of defeat in the long struggle to realise ambitions, to justify the hopes of friends, and to silence those whose doubts were openly expressed. Whatever the cause, the result was eminently satisfactory; the last years saw the poet baffled and beaten by the world, but for once strong in failure, full of a conviction that there lay beyond the grave that which should atone for unsuccess. There is more dignity and less querulousness in the years that followed publication of Aids to Reflection than in almost any of those that had passed since Coleridge left Cambridge; and for this spell of comparative tranquillity his latter-day admirers must needs be grateful.

There would be interesting matter for speculation, if we had any data to assist us, how far the late-found faith of Coleridge enabled him to atone to his conscience for what seem to us the least reputable incidents of his career, and many remain to be explained away. He was too shrewd a critic, too sound a judge of life and character, to have overlooked his own failings, above all he must have been haunted by fear of his son Hartley's future and known that his own lack of self-discipline had, in all human probability, set yet another soul wandering along the paths of trouble. Perhaps we should be careful to remember, in considering the life of Coleridge, that all his faults were open to the eye. His friends discussed them with the greatest freedom and even set them down in cold print. History has turned a far more careful eye to the blemishes in a strange character than to the virtues that must have been present by their side. The worst foes of Coleridge have never denied the extraordinary influence he spread around him, or doubted that it was for good. They bear witness to the intense theoretical devotion to unattainable ideals, the respect for virtue, even in hours of backsliding, the belief in his own ability ultimately to overcome the faults that beset him and to rebuild the shattered fabric of personal honour. He was ever fighting against his own little company of devils, for ever being worsted, and yet it would be wrong to say that he abandoned the struggle for long. Doubtless, when he looked closely into his own past, he was less conscious of his faults than were his biographers; by him they were regarded as the outcome of forces he could not control. Had he pleaded his own case at the bar of public opinion, and some of his utterances come very near to constitute a plea, he could doubtless have done so with sincerity and conviction. He was at least nearer to the springs of action than were those who judged him by normal standards, forgetting that whether for good or for evil the man of genius is a law to himself, and that genius is at once a disease and a misfortune, which no sane man need covet. Certainly if Coleridge could forgive himself, we of another generation, who have had nothing but the fine fruits of his intellect for our portion, who bear no share of the burden of his weakness, are not called upon to judge him harshly, and only the fact that his life is one long record of faults and failings excuses any reference to them in a brief biography.

The tragedy of the life we have watched for a moment at Highgate now loses something of its intensity. It gains a tranquillity we have learned to associate with evening twilight. The sudden recovery of faith calls for more than a passing word; it must have gladdened the heart not only of Coleridge, but of many of the devout admirers who have succeeded him. The thoughtful readers of our own generation can hardly turn to the life or works of Coleridge to-day without feelings of infinite pity for a man in whom the body and the spirit waged such long and uneven combat. We may remember, too, that his own generation had no perspective by which to judge him; it was unaware of his greatness, and ignored or misjudged him as it ignored Wordsworth and Elia until they had passed beyond the reach of praise or censure. Had it recognised the presence of a great force there might have been more happiness for the author of Aids to Reflection. But we can see, or think we see, that though help came to him in no small measure, there was little understanding save by the few, and in the long run the assistance he received was futile. Like every man born of woman, Coleridge had to seek and find his own salvation; it was his own effort that triumphed in the end.

To the life-long list of disappointments another was added in 1827, when the post of Paymaster of the Gentlemen Pensioners, a sinecure long since abolished, became vacant by the death of William Gifford. A big effort was made by Hookham Frere to obtain this office for Coleridge, but it was not to be. The industrious, steady, resolute Wordsworth had his sinecure, and it seems a little hard, if such things were to exist, that poor Coleridge, whose necessities were not inconsiderable and whose means of satisfying them were so scanty, should have failed to gain one. Happily he still had his pension of one hundred guineas from the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1828 an edition of three hundred copies of his poems was published in three volumes and sold out. William Pickering of London was the publisher, and the preface, with a few unimportant alterations, is a reprint of the one attached to the edition of 1803, published by Longman and Rees, which in its turn was taken from the edition of 1797. Another edition with some added verses was published in 1829. When the volumes of the 1828 edition had been passed for press, Coleridge joined William Wordsworth and his favourite child, Dora, who married Mr. Quillinan and predeceased her father, and the three went to Belgium and Germany. The journey lasted six weeks, and at Bonn the travellers met some of the leading writers of Germany, including Schlegel and Niebuhr. The German visit is recorded by Thomas Colley Grattan, the author of Beaten Paths, and by Julian Young, son of Charles Mayne Young, the actor. Although the warmth of attachment between Wordsworth and Coleridge had undoubtedly suffered since the days when the former wrote his ill-advised letter to Basil Montague, nearly twenty years before, the admiration of the one poet for the other was quite unfeigned. Wordsworth's delight in a great intellect had never faltered; he could always distinguish between a man's gifts and weaknesses, admiring the one while he condemned or regretted the other. The journey refreshed Coleridge in body and mind. He was in high spirits, and the point of his pen was still very keen; witness his lines to Cologne, written when he and his fellow-travellers had passed through that malodorous city in July:

These lines are worth quoting merely as a definite indication of the change in spirits that had come over the poet. Doubtless, for all the angry de Quincey has written to the contrary, Coleridge was in a comparatively healthy condition both mentally and physically in these closing years, nor could he have made the favourable impression upon the illuminati of Bonn had he been still addicted to excess of opium. An easier mind prompted him to take further holiday during the year, for we have a record of a week with Charles and Mary Lamb, who were then at Enfield Chase, and a month at Ramsgate towards the beginning of the winter. In the following year his well-beloved daughter Sara married her cousin Henry Nelson Coleridge, who, in the spring of 1830, resumed the Table Talk records that do so much to show us the extent, variety, and penetration of the poet's comments upon men and things. In this year Coleridge published, through the London firm of Hurst, Chance & Co., his remarkable essay "On the Constitution of the Church and State, according to the idea of each," a publication said to have been the foundation of the famous Oxford Movement.

This year saw the death of George IV, and of the pensions of the Associates of the Royal Literary Society. King William IV pleaded that his very reduced income made it impossible for him to continue the grants of his predecessor, but a strong private representation to Lord Brougham led to the offer of a private grant of £200 to Coleridge, who declined to receive it. Hookham Frere undertook to pay the pension annually as long as Coleridge lived, and the Treasury compounded with King William's conscience by paying a sum of £300 in settlement of further liabilities.

It is well that there were friends at hand in these latter days, for the star of Coleridge had set; he was to publish nothing more. His mind retained its pristine vigour, but his body was failing fast. Wordsworth, Lamb, Crabb Robinson, Walter Savage Landor, Harriet Martineau, Emerson and Poole were among the visitors to Highgate, where the poet, now seldom able to leave the house, waited with patience and resignation for the hour to come when "the dust returns to earth as it was, and the spirit unto God who gave it." He rallied sufficiently to attend the baptism of his granddaughter Edith, and in 1833 he went to the meeting of the British Association at Cambridge, the return to his old haunts being the occasion of great emotion. Too weak to rise betimes, he received old friend and new in his bedchamber. Then he returned to Highgate, never again to leave the Gillmans' hospitable house. In May 1834 his old and faithful comrade Thomas Poole, the man our memory loves to dwell upon, visited him, and Coleridge remarked that all the incidents of his life were now seen by him in a clear light "reconciled and harmonised." A bad attack of weakness in the last days of July was the signal of the end. In his last hours he communicated to his pupil J. H. Green a statement of his religious philosophy, and tired by the supreme effort passed peacefully from the lesser to the greater sleep. He was buried on August 2, in the Churchyard at Highgate. He had written his own epitaph not a year before he died, and no excuse is needed for its quotation here. There are several versions, differing but slightly from each other: