I at any time taken the flattering poison as a stimulus or for any craving after pleasurable sensation." The "effusion" in question has parted company with the autobiographical note, and the author of the prefatory memoir above quoted conjectures it to have been a little poem entitled the _Visionary Hope_; but I am myself of opinion, after a careful study of both pieces, that it is more probably the _Pains of Sleep_, which moreover is known to have been written in 1803. But whichever it be, its date is fixed in that year by the statement in the autobiographical note of 1826 that the stanzas referred to in it were written "twenty-three years ago." Thus, then, we have the two facts established, that the opium-taking habit had its origin in a bodily ailment, and that at some time in 1803 that habit had become confirmed. The disastrous experiment in amateur therapeutics, which was the means of implanting it, could not have taken place, according to the autobiographical note, until at least six months after Coleridge's arrival at Keswick, and perhaps not for some months later yet. At any rate, it seems tolerably certain that it was not till the spring of 1801, when the climate of the Lake country first began to tell unfavourably on his health, that the "Kendal Black Drop" was taken. Possibly it may have been about the time (April 1801) when he wrote the letter to Southey which has been quoted above, and which, it will be remembered, contained "so gloomy an account of his health." How painfully ailing he was at this time we know from a variety of sources, from some of which we also gather that he must have been a sufferer in more or less serious forms from his boyhood upwards. Mr. Gillman, for instance, who speaks on this point with the twofold authority of confidant and medical expert, records a statement of Coleridge's to the effect that, as a result of such schoolboy imprudences as "swimming over the New River in my clothes and remaining in them, full half the time from seventeen to eighteen was passed by me in the sick ward of Christ's Hospital, afflicted with jaundice and rheumatic fever." From these indiscretions and their consequences "may be dated," Mr. Gillman thinks, "all his bodily sufferings in future life." That he was a martyr to periodical attacks of rheumatism for some years before his migration to Keswick is a conclusion resting upon something more than conjecture. The _Ode to the Departing Year_ (1796) was written, as he has himself told us, under a severe attack of rheumatism in the head. In 1797 he describes himself in ill health, and as forced to retire on that account to the "lonely farmhouse between Porlock and London on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire," where _Kubla Khan_ was written. [1]