ms,
'Love' and the 'Ancient Mariner,' but who for some unknown reason had
not fulfilled his apparent mission on earth. As it was, being most
genial and by his physical impulses most luxurious; yet, on the other
hand, by fiery aspirations of intellect and of spiritual heart being
coerced as if through torments of magical spells into rising heavenwards
for ever, into eternal commerce with the grander regions of his own
nature, he found this strife too much for his daily peace, too imperfect
was the ally which he found in his will; treachery there was in his own
nature, and almost by a necessity he yielded to the dark temptations of
opium. That 'graspless hand,' from which, as already in one of his early
poems (November, 1794) he had complained--

'Drop friendship's priceless pearls as hour-glass sands,'

was made much _more_ graspless, and in this way the very graces of his
moral nature ministered eventually the heaviest of his curses. Most
unworldly he was, most unmercenary, and (as somebody has remarked) even
to a disease, and, in such a degree as if an organ had been forgotten by
Nature in his composition, disregardful of self. But even in these
qualities lay the baits for his worldly ruin, which subsequently caused
or allowed so much of his misery. Partly from the introversion of his
mind, and its habitual sleep of reverie in relation to all external
interests, partly from his defect in all habits of prudential
forecasting, resting his head always on the pillow of the _present_--he
had been carried rapidly past all openings that offered towards the
creation of a fortune before he even heard of them, and he first awoke
to the knowledge that such openings had ever existed when he looked back
upon them from a distance, and found them already irrecoverable for
ever.

Such a case as this, as soon as it became known that the case stood
connected with so much power of intellect and so much of various
erudition, was the very ideal case that challenges aid from the public
purse. Mrs. Coleridge has feelingly noticed the philosophic fact. It was
the case of a man lame in the faculties which apply to the architecture
of a fortune, but lame through the very excess in some other faculties
that qualified him for a public teacher, or (which is even more
requisite) for a public stimulator of powers else dormant.

A perfect romance it is that settles upon three generations of these
Coleridges; a romance of beauty, of intellectu