They are the record of a life change, a
veritable threnody over a spiritual death. For there can be no doubt--
his whole subsequent history goes to show it--that Coleridge's "shaping
spirit of Imagination" was in fact dead when these lines were written.
To a man of stronger moral fibre a renascence of the poetical instinct
in other forms might, as I have suggested above, been possible; but the
poet of _Christabel_ and the _Ancient Mariner_ was dead. The
metaphysician had taken his place, and was striving, in abstruse
research, to live in forgetfulness of the loss. Little more, that is to
say, than a twelvemonth after the composition of the second part of
_Christabel_ the impulse which gave birth to it had passed away
for ever. Opium-taking had doubtless begun by this time--may
conceivably indeed have begun nearly a year before--and the mere
_mood_ of the poem, the temporary phase of feeling which directed
his mind inwards into deeper reflections on its permanent state, is no
doubt strongly suggestive, in its excessive depression, of the terrible
reaction which is known to follow upon opium-excitement. But, I
confess, it seems to me improbable that even the habitual use of the
stimulant for so comparatively short a time as twelve months could have
produced so profound a change in Coleridge's intellectual nature.
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