some poor labourer, whose night's sleep has but imperfectly refreshed his
overwearied frame, I have sate in drowsy uneasiness, and doing nothing have
thought what a deal I have to do." His ideal, which he expressed in 1797 in
a letter to Thelwall, and, in 1813, almost word for word, in a poem called"
The Night-Scene," was, "like the Indian Vishnu, to float about along an
infinite ocean cradled in the flower of the Lotus, and wake once in a
million years for a few minutes just to know that I was going to sleep a
million years more." Observe the effect of the desire for the absolute,
reinforced by constitutional indolence, and only waiting for the
illuminating excuse of opium.

From these languors, and from their consequences, Coleridge found relief in
conversation, for which he was always ready, while he was far from always
ready for the more precise mental exertion of writing. "Oh, how I wish to
be talking, not writing," he cries in a letter to Southey in 1803, "for my
mind is so full, that my thoughts stifle and jam each other." And, in 1816,
in his first letter to Gillman, he writes, more significantly, "The
stimulus of conversation suspends the terror that haunts my mind; but when
I am alone, the horrors that I have suffered from laudanum, the
degradation, the blighted utility, almost overwhelm me." It was along one
avenue of this continual escape from himself that Coleridge found himself
driven (anywhere, away from action) towards what grew to be the main waste
of his life. Hartley Coleridge, in the preface to "Table-Talk," has told us
eloquently how, "throughout a long-drawn summer's day, would this man talk
to you in low, equable, but clear and musical tones, concerning things
human and divine"; we know that Carlyle found him "unprofitable, even
tedious," and wished "to worship him, and toss him in a blanket"; and we
have the vivid reporting of Keats, who tells us that, on his one meeting
with Coleridge, "I walked with him, at his alderman-after-dinner pace, for
near two miles, I suppose. In those two miles he broached a thousand