life; but undoubtedly the change had fully manifested itself more than
two years before. And a very great and painful one it assuredly was. We
know from the recorded evidence of Dr. Carrlyon and others that
Coleridge was full of hope and gaiety, full of confidence in himself
and of interest in life during his few months' residence in Germany.
The _annus mirabilis_ of his poetic life was but two years behind
him, and his achievements of 1797-98 seemed to him but a mere earnest
of what he was destined to accomplish. His powers of mental
concentration were undiminished, as his student days at Gottingen
sufficiently proved; his conjugal and family affections, as Dr.
Carrlyon notes for us, were still unimpaired; his own verse gives signs
of a home-sickness and a yearning for his own fireside which were in
melancholy contrast with the restlessness of his later years. Nay, even
after his return to England, and during the six months of his regular
work on the _Morning Post_, the vigour of his political articles
entirely negatives the idea that any relaxation of intellectual energy
had as yet set in. Yet within six months of his leaving London for
Keswick there begins a progressive decline in Coleridge's literary
activity in every form. The second part of _Christabel_, beautiful
but inferior to the first, was composed in the autumn of 1800, and for
the next two years, so far as the higher forms of literature are
concerned, "the rest is silence." The author of the prefatory memoir in
the edition of Coleridge's _Poetical and Dramatic Works_ (1880),
enumerates some half-dozen slight pieces contributed to the _Morning
Post_ in 1801, but declares that Coleridge's poetical contributions
to this paper during 1802 were "very rich and varied, and included the
magnificent ode entitled _Dejection_." Only the latter clause of
this statement is entitled, I think, to command our assent. Varied
though the list may be, it is hardly to be described as "rich." It
covers only about seven weeks in the autumn of 1802, and, with the