poetry was the only thing of importance. Coleridge, when he was by himself,
was never sure of this; there was his _magnum opus_, the revelation of
all philosophy; and he sometimes has doubts of the worth of his own poetry.
Had Coleridge been able to live uninterruptedly in the company of the
Wordsworths, even with the unsympathetic wife at home, the opium in the
cupboard, and the _magnum opus_ on the desk, I am convinced that we
should have had for our reading to-day all those poems which went down with
him into silence.

What Coleridge lacked was what theologians call a "saving belief" in
Christianity, or else a strenuous intellectual immorality. He imagined
himself to believe in Christianity, but his belief never realized itself in
effective action, either in the mind or in conduct, while it frequently
clogged his energies by weak scruples and restrictions which were but so
many internal irritations. He calls upon the religion which he has never
firmly apprehended to support him under some misfortune of his own making;
it does not support him, but he finds excuses for his weakness in what seem
to him its promises of help. Coleridge was not strong enough to be a
Christian, and he was not strong enough to rely on the impulses of his own
nature, and to turn his failings into a very actual kind of success. When
Blake said, "If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise,"
he expressed a profound truth which Nietzsche and others have done little
more than amplify. There is nothing so hopeless as inert or inactive
virtue: it is a form of life grown putrid, and it turns into poisonous,
decaying matter in the soul. If Coleridge had been more callous towards
what he felt to be his duties, if he had not merely neglected them, as he
did, but justified himself for neglecting them, on any ground of
intellectual or physical necessity, or if he had merely let them slide
without thought or regret, he would have been more complete, more
effectual, as a man, and he might have achieved more finished work as an