His health and spirits, his will and habits, may
not have taken any unalterable bent for the worse until 1804, the year
of his departure for Malta--the date which I have thought it safest to
assign as the definitive close of the earlier and happier period of his
life; but undoubtedly the change had fully manifested itself more than
two years before. And a very great and painful one it assuredly was. We
know from the recorded evidence of Dr. Carrlyon and others that
Coleridge was full of hope and gaiety, full of confidence in himself
and of interest in life during his few months' residence in Germany.
The _annus mirabilis_ of his poetic life was but two years behind
him, and his achievements of 1797-98 seemed to him but a mere earnest
of what he was destined to accomplish. His powers of mental
concentration were undiminished, as his student days at G?¶ttingen
sufficiently proved; his conjugal and family affections, as Dr.
Carrlyon notes for us, were still unimpaired; his own verse gives signs
of a home-sickness and a yearning for his own fireside which were in
melancholy contrast with the restlessness of his later years. Nay, even
after his return to England, and during the six months of his regular
work on the _Morning Post_, the vigour of his political articles
entirely negatives the idea that any relaxation of intellectual energy
had as yet set in.
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