Greta Hall, Keswick.
P.S.—What is a fair price—what might an author of reputation fairly ask from a bookseller, for one edition, of a thousand copies, of a five-shilling book?
[I congratulate you on the settlement of Davy in London. I hope that his enchanting manners will not draw too many idlers about him, to harass and vex his mornings.]
[Footnote: 1 This tragedy was entitled Abbas.]
PART II
THE PERMANENT
I will write for "The Permanent", or not at all." (Letter to Sir G. Beaumont, "Coleorton Memorials", ii, 162.) "Woe is me! that at 46 I am under the necessity of appearing as a lecturer, and obliged to regard every hour given to "The Permanent", whether as poet or philosopher, an hour stolen from others as well as from my own maintenance." (Letter to Mudford, Brandl's "Life of Coleridge", p. 359.)
* * * * *
The conventional view of Coleridge that opium killed the poet in him does not commend itself to the scientific consciousness. Opium has the tendency to stimulate rather than to deaden the poetic imagination, as the history of De Quincey can testify; and one of Coleridge's most imaginative pieces, "Kubla Khan", is said to have been occasioned by an overdose of the drug.
The poet in Coleridge was extinguished by a very different thing than opium. Coleridge's poetic faculty was suspended by the loss of hope and also by the growth of his intellect, by the development of his reasoning and philosophic powers, and by the multiplication of the interests which appealed to him, and the many problems which presented themselves for his solution. He was, constitutionally, the most comprehensive mind of a new age, and just because he was its greatest thinker he was perplexed and attracted by the majority of the problems which arose around him, and which he himself helped to raise. Poetry, the poetry of the Romantic Movement, in which he far excelled all his contemporaries, was no longer capable of grappling with the philosophic, theological, political and social questions now on the horizon or which Coleridge felt would soon, by the development of international affinities, be on the horizon of the English mind. Hence Coleridge's thirst for the new lore of the German philosophy, which seemed to him to supply a want in the Intellectualism of his native country.