During all the rest of his career a tragic weakness of will takes possession of Coleridge, making it impossible for him, with all his genius and learning, to hold himself steadily to any one work or purpose.  He studied in Germany; worked as a private secretary, till the drudgery wore upon his free spirit; then he went to Rome and remained for two years, lost in study.  Later he started The Friend, a paper devoted to truth and liberty; lectured on poetry and the fine arts to enraptured audiences in London, until his frequent failures to meet his engagements scattered his hearers; was offered an excellent position and a half interest (amounting to some L2000) in the Morning Post and The Courier, but declined it, saying “that I would not give up the country and the lazy reading of old folios for two thousand times two thousand pounds,—­in short, that beyond L350 a year I considered money a real evil.”  His family, meanwhile, was almost entirely neglected; he lived apart, following his own way, and the wife and children were left in charge of his friend Southey.  Needing money, he was on the point of becoming a Unitarian minister, when a small pension from two friends enabled him to live for a few years without regular employment.

A terrible shadow in Coleridge’s life was the apparent cause of most of his dejection.  In early life he suffered from neuralgia, and to ease the pain began to use opiates.  The result on such a temperament was almost inevitable.  He became a slave to the drug habit; his naturally weak will lost all its directing and sustaining force, until, after fifteen years of pain and struggle and despair, he gave up and put himself in charge of a physician, one Mr. Gillman, of Highgate.  Carlyle, who visited him at this time, calls him “a king of men,” but records that “he gave you the idea of a life that had been full of sufferings, a life heavy-laden, half-vanquished, still swimming painfully in seas of manifold physical and other bewilderment.”

The shadow is dark indeed; but there are gleams of sunshine that occasionally break through the clouds.  One of these is his association with Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, in the Quantock hills, out of which came the famous Lyrical Ballads of 1798.  Another was his loyal devotion to poetry for its own sake.  With the exception of his tragedy Remorse, which through Byron’s influence was accepted at Drury Lane Theater, and for which he was paid L400, he received almost nothing for his poetry.  Indeed, he seems not to have desired it; for he says:  “Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has soothed my afflictions; it has multiplied and refined my enjoyments; it has endeared solitude, and it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and the beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.”  One can better understand his exquisite verse after such a declaration.  A third ray of sunlight came from the admiration of his contemporaries;