to remain a few years among objects for whom I had no affection, I should
wholly lose the powers of intellect."

With this incessant, passionless sensibility, it was not unnatural that his
thirst for friendship was stronger than his need of love; that to him
friendship was hardly distinguishable from love. Throughout all his letters
there is a series of causeless explosions of emotion, which it is hardly
possible to take seriously, but which, far from being insincere, is really,
no doubt, the dribbling overflow of choked-up feelings, a sort of moral
leakage. It might be said of Coleridge, in the phrase which he used of
Nelson, that he was "heart-starved." Tied for life to a woman with whom he
had not one essential sympathy, the whole of his nature was put out of
focus; and perhaps nothing but "the joy of grief," and the terrible and
fettering power of luxuriating over his own sorrows, and tracing them to
first principles, outside himself or in the depths of his sub-
consciousness, gave him the courage to support that long, everpresent
divorce.

Both for his good and evil, he had never been able to endure emotion
without either diluting or intensifying it with thought, and with always
self-conscious thought. He uses identically the same words in writing his
last, deeply moved letter to Mary Evans, and in relating the matter to
Southey. He cannot get away from words; coming as near to sincerity as he
can, words are always between him and his emotion. Hence his over-emphasis,
his rhetoric of humility. In 1794 he writes to his brother George: "Mine
eyes gush out with tears, my heart is sick and languid with the weight of
unmerited kindness." Nine days later he writes to his brother James: "My
conduct towards you, and towards my other brothers, has displayed a strange
combination of madness, ingratitude, and dishonesty. But you forgive me.
May my Maker forgive me! May the time arrive when I shall have forgiven