p "dejection," as the result of drinking, "at the
house of a neighbouring clergyman, ... so much wine, that I found some
effort and dexterity requisite to balance myself on the hither edge of
sobriety." On the whole, it seems probable that "Christabel" owes little
to the forced efforts of his first year in the Lake country. Like most
of the other poems in this volume, it is a product of the great year at
Stowey. He himself told a friend in later years: "I had the whole of the
two cantos in my mind before I began it," adding very truly, "certainly
the first canto is more perfect, has more of the true wild weird spirit
than the last."

Down to the close of his life he dreamed of finishing this work. He
amused his listeners at Highgate with a continuation of the plot; and
in 1833 he declared that if he "were perfectly free from vexation and
were in the _ad libitum_ hearing of fine music" he could yet finish
"Christabel," "for I have, as I always had, the whole plan entire from
beginning to end in my mind; but I fear I could not carry on with equal
success the execution of the idea." Wordsworth had a different
recollection. He told Coleridge's nephew in 1836 that he did not think
Coleridge "had ever conceived, in his own mind, any definite plan for
it; that the poem had been composed while they were in habits of daily
intercourse, and almost in his presence, and when there was the most
unreserved intercourse between them as to all their literary projects
and productions, and he had never heard from him any plan for finishing
it"; and added, what is fully borne out by a study of Coleridge's life:
"schemes of this sort passed rapidly and vividly through his mind, and
so impressed him, that he often fancied he had arranged things, which
really, and upon trial, proved to be mere embryos."

"The unfinished window in Aladdin's tower
Unfinished must remain,"

wrote Longfellow, alluding to "The Dolliver Romance" that Hawthorne left
incomplete at his death. There is strong kinship, moral and artistic,
between Coleridge and Hawthorne; both believed that the heart is more
than the head, and neither could force his imagination to work under
unfavorable conditions. But Hawthorne's failure of imagination came at
the end of a fruitful and consistent career, and his life failed with
it; in Coleridge the poet died half a lifetime before the man, and left
the man--the preacher and philosopher--to lament his loss.

Whether or not Co