[Pyobjfs-users] lecturing and projec

[Bel C. <lo...@dv...>]

 addicted to opium, and he was never "capable of energies" at the call
of duty, but only at the call of his "shaping spirit," over whose coming
and going he had no control. Poetically it is perhaps as well. Had he
been like his friend Wordsworth in strength and steadiness of
purpose--which is to suppose him another nature than he was--his life
would have been happier and more edifying, but he would hardly have
given us anything better than "Christabel" and "The Ancient Mariner."
Romantic poetry of the higher type is essentially the creature of mood.
Even Wordsworth's long and conscientious labors produced but a small
bulk of poetry of this character, amid dreary reaches of uninspired
preaching. Coleridge waited--in despondency often, in self-upbraidings,
in the temporary deception of opium dreams with their consequent
misery--for the return of the spirit; and it did not come. FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: From the lines addressed to Wordsworth after hearing him
read "The Prelude," in 1807.] II. COLERIDGE'S POEMS. "THE ANCIENT
MARINER" "The Ancient Mariner" was first printed in the first edition of
"Lyrical Ballads," 1798, again with considerable changes in the second
edition, 1800, and without further significant change in the editions of
1802 and 1805. Its fifth appearance was in "Sibylline Leaves," 1817,
again with some important changes, and the addition of the Latin motto
and the marginal gloss. In the "Poetical Works," 1828, and again in the
"Poetical Works," 1829, the poem appeared in its final form as we now
have it,--differing very little from the form it had in "Sibylline
Leaves." One or two significant minor changes will be mentioned in the
notes. Coleridge's own account of the genesis of the poem, given in the
_Biographia Literaria_ nearly twenty years later, is interesting.
"During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our
conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry,
the power of exc