CHAPTER VI

Stay at Malta--Its injurious effects--Return to England--Meeting
with De Quincey--Residence in London--First series of lectures.

[1806-1809.]


Never was human being destined so sadly and signally to illustrate the
_coelum non animum_ aphorism as the unhappy passenger on the
_Speedwell_. Southey shall describe his condition when he left
England; and his own pathetic lines to William Wordsworth will picture
him to us on his return. "You are in great measure right about
Coleridge," writes the former to his friend Rickman, "he is worse in
body than you seem to believe; but the main cause lies in his own
management of himself, or rather want of management. His mind is in a
perpetual St. Vitus's dance--eternal activity without action. At times
he feels mortified that he should have done so little, but this feeling
never produces any exertion. 'I will begin to-morrow,' he says, and
thus he has been all his lifelong letting to-day slip. He has had no
heavy calamities in life, and so contrives to be miserable about
trifles. Poor fellow, there is no one thing which gives me so much pain
as the witnessing such a waste of unequalled powers." Then, after
recalling the case of a highly promising schoolfellow, who had made
shipwreck of his life, and whom "a few individuals only remember with a
sort of horror and affection, which just serves to make them melancholy
whenever they think of him or mention his name," he adds: "This will
not be the case with Coleridge; the _disjecta membra_ will be
found if he does not die early: but having so much to do, so many
errors to weed out of the world which he is capable of eradicating, if