But composition is no voluntary business. The very necessity of doing it robs me of the power of doing it. Had I been possessed of a tolerable competency, I should have been a voluminous writer. But I cannot, as is feigned of the Nightingale, sing with my breast against a thorn. God bless you, S. T. COLERIDGE.[92] Saturday, Midnight. * * * * * To the first of these letters Cottle replied with a five-pound note; but he now believed that all Coleridge's earnings went to fill what he calls the "Circean chalice" (_Rem._, 391). He believed that Coleridge was spending £2 10_s._ a week on opium. It is as likely that Coleridge was now keeping the home of the Morgans going; although they oftener kept him than he kept them. We know that he gave them the money received for the _Christabel_ volume. From the first letter to Cottle it will be seen that Coleridge had been collecting his poems with a view to publication, afterwards given to the world as _Sibylline Leaves_. On 3rd April 1815, he writes to Lady Beaumont requesting a copy of the Poem to Wordsworth composed on hearing the Prelude (_Coleorton Mem._, ii, 175). Wordsworth had just published the _Excursion_, and on 30th May Coleridge wrote to Wordsworth criticising that poem (Knight's _Life of Wordsworth_, ii, 255) in a long letter, which, with other notes (_Anima Poetae_) of 1802, contained the germs of the Critique of the _Biographia Literaria_. The _Biographia_ was at first merely intended as an Introduction to the _Sibylline Leaves_; but in the writing it swelled so much that it had to be published as a separate work (see Dykes Campbell's _Life_, pp. 212-14).