myself!" Here we see both what he calls his "gangrened sensibility" and a
complete abandonment to the feelings of the moment. It is always a self-
conscious abandonment, during which he watches himself with approval, and
seems to be saying: "Now that is truly 'feeling'!" He can never concentrate
himself on any emotion; he swims about in floods of his own tears. With so
little sense of reality in anything, he has no sense of the reality of
direct emotion, but is preoccupied, from the moment of the first shock, in
exploring it for its universal principle, and then nourishes it almost in
triumph at what he has discovered. This is not insincerity; it is the
metaphysical, analytical, and parenthetic mind in action. "I have
endeavoured to feel what I ought to feel," he once significantly writes.

Coleridge had many friends, to some of whom, as to Lamb, his friendship was
the most priceless thing in life; but the friendship which meant most to
him, not only as a man, but as a poet, was the friendship with Wordsworth
and with Dorothy Wordsworth. "There is a sense of the word Love," he wrote
to Wordsworth in 1812, "in which I never felt it but to you and one of your
household." After his quarrel in that year he has "an agony of weeping."
"After fifteen years of such religious, almost superstitious idolatry and
self-sacrifice!" he laments. Now it was during his first, daily
companionship with the Wordsworths that he wrote almost all his greatest
work. "The Ancient Mariner" and "Christabel" were both written in a kind of
rivalry with Wordsworth; and the "Ode on Dejection" was written after four
months' absence from him, in the first glow and encouragement of a return
to that one inspiring comradeship. Wordsworth was the only poet among his
friends whom he wholly admired, and Wordsworth was more exclusively a poet,
more wholly absorbed in thinking poetry and thinking about poetry, and in a
thoroughly practical way, than almost any poet who has ever lived. It was
not only for his solace in life that Coleridge required sympathy; he needed
the galvanizing of continual intercourse with a poet, and with one to whom