The next few years determined not only his destiny
as a writer but his life as a man. Between his arrival at Keswick in
the summer of 1800 and his departure for Malta in the spring of 1804
that fatal change of constitution, temperament, and habits which
governed the whole of his subsequent history had fully established
itself. Between these two dates he was transformed from the Coleridge
of whom his young fellow-students in Germany have left us so pleasing a
picture into the Coleridge whom distressed kinsmen, alienated friends,
and a disappointed public were to have before them for the remainder of
his days. Here, then, at Keswick, and in these first two or three years
of the century--here or nowhere is the key to the melancholy mystery to
be found.
It is probable that only those who have gone with some
minuteness into the facts of this singular life are aware how great was
the change effected during this very short period of time. When
Coleridge left London for the Lake country he had not completed his
eight-and-twentieth year. Before he was thirty he wrote that _Ode to
Dejection_ in which his spiritual and moral losses are so
pathetically bewailed.
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