But O! each visitation
Suspends what nature gave me at my birth,
My shaping spirit of Imagination.
For not to think of what I needs must feel,
But to be still and patient, all I can;
And haply by abstruse research to steal
From my own nature all the natural Man--
This was my sole resource, my only plan:
Till that which suits a part infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the habit of my Soul."

Sadder lines than these were never perhaps written by any poet in
description of his own feelings. And what gives them their peculiar
sadness--as also, of course, their special biographical value--is that
they are not, like Shelley's similarly entitled stanzas, the mere
expression of a passing mood. They are the record of a life change, a
veritable threnody over a spiritual death. For there can be no doubt--
his whole subsequent history goes to show it--that Coleridge's "shaping
spirit of Imagination" was in fact dead when these lines were written.
To a man of stronger moral fibre a renascence of the poetical instinct
in other forms might, as I have suggested above, been possible; but the
poet of _Christabel_ and the _Ancient Mariner_ was dead. The
metaphysician had taken his place, and was striving, in abstruse
research, to live in forgetfulness of the loss. Little more, that is to
say, than a twelvemonth after the composition of the second part of
_Christabel_ the impulse which gave birth to it had passed away
for ever. Opium-taking had doubtless begun by this time--may
conceivably indeed have begun nearly a year before--and the mere
_mood_ of the poem, the temporary phase of feeling which directed
his mind inwards into deeper reflections on its permanent state, is no