These lines are worth quoting merely as a definite indication of the change in spirits that had come over the poet. Doubtless, for all the angry de Quincey has written to the contrary, Coleridge was in a comparatively healthy condition both mentally and physically in these closing years, nor could he have made the favourable impression upon the illuminati of Bonn had he been still addicted to excess of opium. An easier mind prompted him to take further holiday during the year, for we have a record of a week with Charles and Mary Lamb, who were then at Enfield Chase, and a month at Ramsgate towards the beginning of the winter. In the following year his well-beloved daughter Sara married her cousin Henry Nelson Coleridge, who, in the spring of 1830, resumed the Table Talk records that do so much to show us the extent, variety, and penetration of the poet's comments upon men and things. In this year Coleridge published, through the London firm of Hurst, Chance & Co., his remarkable essay "On the Constitution of the Church and State, according to the idea of each," a publication said to have been the foundation of the famous Oxford Movement.
This year saw the death of George IV, and of the pensions of the Associates of the Royal Literary Society. King William IV pleaded that his very reduced income made it impossible for him to continue the grants of his predecessor, but a strong private representation to Lord Brougham led to the offer of a private grant of £200 to Coleridge, who declined to receive it. Hookham Frere undertook to pay the pension annually as long as Coleridge lived, and the Treasury compounded with King William's conscience by paying a sum of £300 in settlement of further liabilities.
It is well that there were friends at hand in these latter days, for the star of Coleridge had set; he was to publish nothing more. His mind retained its pristine vigour, but his body was failing fast. Wordsworth, Lamb, Crabb Robinson, Walter Savage Landor, Harriet Martineau, Emerson and Poole were among the visitors to Highgate, where the poet, now seldom able to leave the house, waited with patience and resignation for the hour to come when "the dust returns to earth as it was, and the spirit unto God who gave it." He rallied sufficiently to attend the baptism of his granddaughter Edith, and in 1833 he went to the meeting of the British Association at Cambridge, the return to his old haunts being the occasion of great emotion. Too weak to rise betimes, he received old friend and new in his bedchamber. Then he returned to Highgate, never again to leave the Gillmans' hospitable house. In May 1834 his old and faithful comrade Thomas Poole, the man our memory loves to dwell upon, visited him, and Coleridge remarked that all the incidents of his life were now seen by him in a clear light "reconciled and harmonised." A bad attack of weakness in the last days of July was the signal of the end. In his last hours he communicated to his pupil J. H. Green a statement of his religious philosophy, and tired by the supreme effort passed peacefully from the lesser to the greater sleep. He was buried on August 2, in the Churchyard at Highgate. He had written his own epitaph not a year before he died, and no excuse is needed for its quotation here. There are several versions, differing but slightly from each other:
"Stop, Christian Passer-by! Stop, Child of God!
And read with gentle heart. Beneath this sod
There lies a Poet: or what once was He,
O lift thy soul in prayer for S. T. C.
That He who many a year with toil of breath
Found death in life, may here find life in death.
Mercy for praise, to be forgiven for fame