The years 1797 and 1798 are generally and justly regarded as the blossoming-time of Coleridge's poetic genius. It would be scarcely an exaggeration to say that they were even more than this, and that within the brief period covered by them is included not only the development of the poet's powers to their full maturity but the untimely beginnings of their decline. For to pass from the poems written by Coleridge within these two years to those of later origin is like passing from among the green wealth of summer foliage into the well-nigh naked woods of later autumn. During 1797 and 1798 the _Ancient Mariner_, the first part of _Christabel_, the fine ode to France, the _Fears in Solitude_, the beautiful lines entitled _Frost at Midnight_, the _Nightingale_, the _Circassian Love-Chant_, the piece known as _Love_ from the poem of the _Dark Ladie_, and that strange fragment _Kubla Khan_, were all of them written and nearly all of them published; while between the last composed of these and that swan-song of his dying Muse, the _Dejection_, of 1802, there is but one piece to be added to the list of his greater works. This therefore, the second part of _Christabel_ (1800), may almost be described by the picturesque image in the first part of the same poem as "The one red leaf, the last of its clan, Hanging so light and hanging so high, On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky." The first to fail him of his sources of inspiration was his revolutionary enthusiasm; and the ode to France--the _Recantation_, as it was styled on its first appearance in the _Morning Post_--is the record of a reaction which, as has been said, was as much speedier in Coleridge's case than in that of the other ardent young minds which had come under the spell of the Revolution as his enthusiasm had been more passionate than theirs. In the winter of 1797-98 the Directory had plunged France into an unnatural conflict with her sister Republic of Switzerland, and Coleridge, who could pardon and had pardoned her fierce animosity against a country which he considered not so much his own as Pitt's, was unable to forgive her this. In the _Recantation_ he casts her off for ever; he perceives at last that true liberty is not to be obtained through political, but only through spiritual emancipation; that-- "The sensual and the dark rebel in vain, Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game They burst their manacles, and wear the name Of Freedom graven on a heavier chain";