viz., his "shaping spirit of Imagination." It was also that the use of this stimulant dulled his perception of the distinctions of conduct, and blunted the edge of his mind even to the consequences of actions.

His stay at Malta, his return to England, and his residence at Allan Bank, have been referred to in previous chapters; and certain it is that the Wordsworths did not cease to feel towards him the old friendship of the Quantock days. In 1801-2 the stanzas were written by Wordsworth in his pocket copy of Thomson's Castle of Indolence, in which he says:And, sooth, these two were each to the other dear; No livelier love in such a place could be; There did they dwell-from earthly labour free, As happy spirits as were ever seen.

And Dorothy Wordsworth wrote of Coleridge in November 1801:-"Every sight and sound reminded me of Coleridge -dear, dear fellow, of his many talks to us, by day and by night, of all dear things. I was melancholy, but at last eased my heart by weeping. Oh how many, many

But there can be no doubt, from the letter written to the Beaumonts in 1806, that the Wordsworths were aware of the fact that Coleridge had begun to yield to the use of stimulants; and, although this produced no alienation between the households, it gave acute pain to the Wordsworths and to Sarah Hutchinson. They must have seen a good deal more than anyone of them ventured to record during the winter that Coleridge lived at Allan Bank. But before that winter of 1809 Wordsworth wrote a most pathetic poem, which may possibly refer to Coleridge. It is called simply A Complaint

There is a change—and I am poor;
Your love hath been not long ago
A fountain at my fond heart's door,
Whose only business was to flow;

And flow it did; not taking heed

Of its own bounty, or my need.

(compare this with the stanzas written in Thomson's Castle of Indolence), and then he tells us :—

Now for that consecrated fount

Of murmuring, sparkling, living love,
What have I Shall I dare to tell?

A comfortless and hidden well.

No clue has, as yet, been given to the person referred to in that poem. All that Wordsworth said to Miss Fenwick was that it was "composed at Townend, and suggested by a change in the manner of a friend." Now, we know all Wordsworth's friends of that period. He cannot have referred to any of his Grasmere neighbours; and the poem is far too intense, and the pain it records must have been too arrowy, for the cause of it to have been any common friend. The very pathos of The Complaint seems to lie in this, that "it was thou, mine own familiar friend." If it refers to Coleridge, it must, I think, be an echo from the years before his departure for Malta. Leaving this point undetermined-for in truth there are no means of settling it and returning to Coleridge, the wide chasm in intellectual sympathy which divided him from his wife ended in real domestic unhappiness. He said himself that he was "worse than homeless." Doubtless Mrs Coleridge knew about the opium-eating. She was a good woman, and an admirable mother, but quite incapable of being a fit lifecompanion to such a man as Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The companionship he missed in Keswick he found at Grasmere; and, in particular, in Mrs Wordsworth's sister, Sarah Hutchinson. To her he dictated The Friend, and she was the most willing of scribes. But when the truth began to be known at Grasmere as to Coleridge's habits, and when The Friend broke down, and Coleridge himself became so erratic and careless as to money obligations that

Southey remonstrated with him-when the feelings of the hour conquered "the reason," which it was the main object of Coleridge's philosophy to vindicate-it is not to be wondered at that Wordsworth should grow increasingly anxious as to his future, and even approve of his leaving Keswick (where he had no real home, and no definite work), since he might, at least, obtain the latter in the South, But it is with the facts of the case, and not with a criticism of them, that I have to do.

In the autumn of 1810, Coleridge left Grasmere, and journeyed up to London with Mr and Mrs Montagu. Dorothy Wordsworth travelled up to town at the same time, but they took different routes. After a few days' residence with the Montagus, he left them, and took up his abode with Mr John T. Morgan, an early Bristol friend, now living at Hammersmith. Wordsworth, supposing that Coleridge would stay for some time, if not permanently, in Montagu's house, thought it desirable and friendly to give Montagu some hint of Coleridge's habits, and of the cause of the difference that separated S. T. C. from his own family, as it had given acute pain and distress to his (Wordsworth's) household, including Miss Hutchinson. Montagu took Coleridge up to London in his carriage; and now we reach the precise cause of the future estrangement or difference between the friends. Wordsworth, in the kindest way, and from the best of motives, warned Montagu of what he might expect to find in S. T. C. But Montagu told Coleridge that Wordsworth had commissioned him to say that "he had no hope" of Coleridge, that he had been a nuisance in the Wordsworth family, and had contracted debts for gin in the public houses of Grasmere village. This is Coleridge's version of Montagu's story. Wordsworth denied that he had ever said so.

It is quite certain-and it is much to Wordsworth's

credit-that he gave Montagu a private warning of what he might have to meet, and deal with; but it is not certainnay, it is very doubtful, and, to my mind, highly improbable -that Montagu said all that Coleridge afterwards represented him as having said. I believe that Montagu exaggerated what Wordsworth said, and that Coleridge exaggerated what Montagu said. The fact that two years later, when Henry Crabb Robinson effected the reconciliation-Coleridge refused to meet Montagu along with Wordsworth, and would not consent that he and Montagu should together be cross-examined by Wordsworth, is to me conclusive proof that exaggerated statements were made both by Montagu and by Coleridge. The fact remains, however, that Coleridge and Wordsworth were for two years "estranged"; and that, although the breach was healed, and the misunderstanding removed, they never returned to the old familiar intimacy. But such a thing never returns, in human experience, when once it is overshadowed by cloud.

In the extraordinary letter which Coleridge wrote to his friend Allsop, dated Ramsgate, October 8, 1822*, he says:

"In the course of my past life I count four griping and grasping sorrows, each of which seemed to have my very heart in its hands, compressing or wringing. The first, when the Vision of a Happy Home sank for ever. . . The second commenced on the night of my arrival (from Grasmere) in town, with Mr and Mrs Montagu, when all the superstructure raised by my idolatrous fancy during an enthusiastic and self-sacrificing Friendship of fifteen years—the fifteen bright and ripe years, the strong summer of my Life-burst like a bubble.. My third sorrow was in some sort included in the second; what the former was to Friendship the latter

* See Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge (1836), vol. ii. p. 140.

was to a yet more inward bond." The fourth need not be referred to. It is to the second and the third that the interest chiefly turns; and there can be no doubt that the former refers to Wordsworth, and the latter to Sarah Hutchinson.

I must not anticipate the interest of other works by giving any details of Coleridge's life at this time, or of his subsequent work in London, in writing for The Courier and Morning Post, and lecturing on Shakespeare, Milton, &c.

The following extract, however, from a letter of Southey's to Sir George Beaumont, shows how he regarded the malady under which his friend and relative suffered :

"KESWICK, March 28, 1811.

"The more necessary it becomes for Coleridge to exert himself in providing means for meeting the growing demands of his children, the more incapable, by some strange and fatal infirmity, does he become of exertion. Knowing his prodigious powers, and that there is no bodily disease which incapacitates him, so that the mere effort of his own will would at any moment render him all that his friends and family wish him to be, it is impossible not to feel a hope that that effort will one day be made; yet this is hoping for an intellectual and moral conversion, a new birth produced by an operation of grace, of which there is no example to encourage us to hope for it."

What Southey adds may be given, as it bears upon Wordsworth, although it is a slight digression from the Coleridge incident.

"Wordsworth passed a few days with me lately. The enclosure of Skiddaw is likely to put him in possession of the eastern side of Applethwaite glen. We walked up it together in the character of surveyors, planning walks and plantations, and wishing it were but as easy to build houses