ur
From anxious self, life's cruel taskmaster!
And the warm wooings of this sunny day
Tremble along my frame and harmonise
The attempered organ, that even saddest thoughts
Mix with some sweet sensations, like harsh tunes
Played deftly on a sweet-toned instrument.

The expression of two opposed, yet allied, elements of sensibility in
these lines, is very true to Coleridge:--the grievous agitation, the
grievous listlessness, almost never entirely relieved, together with a
certain physical voluptuousness. He has spoken several times of the
scent of the bean-field in the air:--the tropical touches in a chilly
climate; his is a nature that will make the most of these, which finds
a sort of caress in such things. Kubla Khan, the fragment of a poem
actually composed in some certainly not quite healthy sleep, is perhaps
chiefly of interest as showing, by the mode of its composition, how
physical, how much of a diseased or valetudinarian temperament, in its
moments of relief, Coleridge's happiest gift really was; and side by
side with Kubla Khan should be read, as Coleridge placed it, the Pains
of Sleep, to illustrate that retarding physical burden in his
temperament, that "unimpassioned grief," the source of which lay so
near the source of those pleasures. Connected also with this, and
again in contrast with Wordsworth, is the limited quantity of his
poetical performance, as he himself [85] regrets so eloquently in the
lines addressed to Wordsworth after his recitation of The Prelude. It
is like some exotic plant, just managing to blossom a little in the
somewhat un-english air of Coleridge's own south-western birthplace,
but never quite well there.

In 1798 he joined Wordsworth in the composition of a volume of
poems--the Lyrical Ballads. What Wordsworth then wrote already
vibrates with that blithe impulse which carried him to final happiness
and self-possession. In Coleridge we feel already that faintness and
obscure dejection which clung like some contagious damp to all his
work. Wordsworth was to be distinguished by a joyful and penetrative
conviction of the existence of certain latent affinities between nature
and the human mind, which reciprocally gild the mind and nature with a
kind of "heavenly alchemy."

My voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual mind
(And the progressive powers, perhaps, no less
Of the whole species) to the external world
Is fitted; and how exquisitely, too,