the time (April 1801) when he wrote the letter to Southey which has
been quoted above, and which, it will be remembered, contained "so
gloomy an account of his health." How painfully ailing he was at this
time we know from a variety of sources, from some of which we also
gather that he must have been a sufferer in more or less serious
forms from his boyhood upwards. Mr. Gillman, for instance, who speaks
on this point with the twofold authority of confidant and medical
expert, records a statement of Coleridge's to the effect that, as a
result of such schoolboy imprudences as "swimming over the New River
in my clothes and remaining in them, full half the time from seventeen
to eighteen was passed by me in the sick ward of Christ's Hospital,
afflicted with jaundice and rheumatic fever." From these
indiscretions and their consequences "may be dated," Mr. Gillman
thinks, "all his bodily sufferings in future life." That he was a
martyr to periodical attacks of rheumatism for some years before his
migration to Keswick is a conclusion resting upon something more than
conjecture. The _Ode to the Departing Year_ (1796) was written, as
he has himself told us, under a severe attack of rheumatism in the
head. In 1797 he describes himself in ill health, and as forced to
retire on that account to the "lonely farmhouse between Porlock and
London on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire," where
_Kubla Khan_ was written. [1]

Thus much is, moreover, certain,
that whatever were Coleridge's health and habits during the first two
years of his residence at Keswick, his career as a poet--that is to
say, as a poet of the first order--was closed some months before that
period had expired. The ode entitled _Dejection_, to which
reference has so often been made, was written on the 4th of April 1802,
and the evidential importance which attaches, in connection with the