Yet the poet does still--from time to time wandering into country chapels--hammer at strange, irregular sermons, with a mixed metaphysics and poetry; and theologies of a dim vague sort which beat on ear and hearts, like sleet on slated roofs, and bring never a beam of that warming sunshine which lies in the lines I have quoted from the Mariner. One wonders how he lived in those times; with no moneys coming from books; only driblets from his preachments; and with not enough of {315} commercial aptitude in him to audit a grocer's bill. The Wedgewoods--so well known by their pottery--who have a quick eye for fine wares of all sorts--recognize his rare brain, and send him over to Germany, bestowing upon him an annuity, which enables him to forego his travelling priesthood, and gives him the means of visiting various cities of the continent. The Wordsworths make the trip with him; and after a stay of a twelve-month--mostly in Gottingen--Coleridge returns, with his translation of Wallenstein; but this counts for little. A year later, he finds his way to Keswick--to a beautiful, wooded bay, where Southey ultimately established his anchorage for life;[5] the Wordsworths were not far off, at Grasmere; and Coleridge plans that weekly paper--_The Friend_ (finding issue some years later) with wonderful things in it, which few people read then; and so fine-drawn, that few read them now. The damps of Keswick give him {316} rheumatic pains, for which he uses protective stimulants; good Dorothy Wordsworth has fears thereanent, and regards hopefully his appointment to some civil station at Malta. But his impracticabilities lose him the place after a very short incumbency; he crosses to Italy; sees Naples, Amain, and Vesuvius; sees, and knows well at Rome, our American painter, Washington Allston. There are bonds of sympathy we might have looked for between the author of _Monaldi_ and the author of _Christabel_. In England again, the fogs bring back old rheumatic pains; the alienation from his wife is declaring itself in more unmistakable ways; and then, or thereabout,[6] begins that terrible slavery to opium, whose chains he wore thenceforth, some twenty years, and was not entirely free until death broke his bonds. There is a dreary, yet touching pathos in this confession of his--"Alas, it is with a bitter smile, a laugh of gall and bitterness, that I recall that period of unsuspecting delusion, and how I first became aware of the {317} maelstrom, the fatal whirlpool to which I was drawing, just when the current was already beyond my strength to stem."