exception of the _Lovers' Resolution_ and the "magnificent ode"
referred to, the pieces are of the shortest and slightest kind. Nor is
it accurate to say that the "political articles of the same period were
also numerous and important." On the contrary, it would appear from an
examination of Mrs. H. N. Coleridge's collection that her father's
contributions to the _Post_ between his departure from London and
the autumn of 1802 were few and intermittent, and in August 1803 the
proprietorship of that journal passed out of Mr. Stuart's hands. It is,
in short, I think, impossible to doubt that very shortly after his
migration to the Lake country he practically ceased not only to write
poetry but to produce any mentionable quantity of _complete_ work
in the prose form. His mind, no doubt, was incessantly active
throughout the whole of the deplorable period upon which we are now
entering; but it seems pretty certain that its activity was not poetic
nor even critical, but purely philosophical, and that the products of
that activity went exclusively to _marginalia_ and the pages of
note-books.

Yet unfortunately we have almost no evidence, personal or
other, from which we can with any certainty construct the
psychological--if one should not rather say the physiological, or
better still, perhaps, the pathological--history of this cardinal epoch
in Coleridge's life. Miss Wordsworth's diary is nearly silent about him
for the next few years; he was living indeed some dozen miles from her
brother at Grasmere, and they could not therefore have been in daily
intercourse. Southey did not come to the Lakes till 1803, and the
records of his correspondence only begin therefore from that date. Mr.
Cottle's _Reminiscences_ are here a blank; Charles Lamb's
correspondence yields little; and though De Quincey has plenty to say
about this period in his characteristic fashion, it must have been