XIV. had commissioned commissaries to land on the English shore and
make a dash at his person." It must be remembered, however, that Mr.
Fox, to whose statement on such a point Napoleon would be likely to
attach especial weight, had declared in the House of Commons that the
rupture of the Peace of Amiens had been brought about by certain essays
in the _Morning Post_, and there is certainly no reason to believe
that a tyrant whose animosity against literary or quasi-literary
assailants ranged from Madame de Stael down to the bookseller Palm
would have regarded a man of Coleridge's reputation in letters as
beneath the stoop of his vengeance.

After an absence of two years and a half Coleridge arrived in England
in August 1806. That his then condition of mind and body was a
profoundly miserable one, and that he himself was acutely conscious
of it, will be seen later on in certain extracts from his correspondence;
but his own _Lines to William Wordsworth_--lines "composed on the
night after his recitation of a poem on the growth of an individual
mind"--contain an even more tragic expression of his state. It was
Wordsworth's pensive retrospect of their earlier years together which
awoke the bitterest pangs of self-reproach in his soul, and wrung from
it the cry which follows:--

"Ah! as I listened with a heart forlorn
The pulses of my being beat anew:
And even as life returns upon the drowned,
Life's joy rekindling roused a throng of pains--
Keen pangs of Love, awakening as a babe
Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart;
And fears self-willed, that shunned the eye of hope;
And hope that scarce would know itself from fear;