Yet within six months of his leaving London for
Keswick there begins a progressive decline in Coleridge's literary
activity in every form. The second part of _Christabel_, beautiful
but inferior to the first, was composed in the autumn of 1800, and for
the next two years, so far as the higher forms of literature are
concerned, "the rest is silence." The author of the prefatory memoir in
the edition of Coleridge's _Poetical and Dramatic Works_ (1880),
enumerates some half-dozen slight pieces contributed to the _Morning
Post_ in 1801, but declares that Coleridge's poetical contributions
to this paper during 1802 were "very rich and varied, and included the
magnificent ode entitled _Dejection_." Only the latter clause of
this statement is entitled, I think, to command our assent. Varied
though the list may be, it is hardly to be described as "rich." It
covers only about seven weeks in the autumn of 1802, and, with the
exception of the _Lovers' Resolution_ and the "magnificent ode"
referred to, the pieces are of the shortest and slightest kind. Nor is
it accurate to say that the "political articles of the same period were
also numerous and important." On the contrary, it would appear from an
examination of Mrs.
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