This joy within me dallied with distress,
And all misfortunes were but as the stuff
Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness:
For hope grew round me, like the twining vine,
And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine
But now afflictions bow me down to earth:
Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth;
But oh! 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."


Elsewhere, in personal poems like "Frost at Midnight," and "Fears in
Solitude," all the value of the poem comes from the delicate sensations of
natural things which mean so much more to us, whether or not they did to
him, than the strictly personal part of the matter. You feel that there he
is only using the quite awake part of himself, which is not the essential
one. He requires, first of all, to be disinterested, or at least not
overcome by emotion; to be without passion but that of abstract beauty, in
Nature, or in idea; and then to sink into a quiet lucid sleep, in which his
genius came to him like some attendant spirit.

In the life and art of Coleridge, the hours of sleep seem to have been