Sadder lines than these were never perhaps written by any poet in description of his own feelings. And what gives them their peculiar sadness--as also, of course, their special biographical value--is that they are not, like Shelley's similarly entitled stanzas, the mere expression of a passing mood. They are the record of a life change, a veritable threnody over a spiritual death. For there can be no doubt--his whole subsequent history goes to show it--that Coleridge's "shaping spirit of Imagination" was in fact dead when these lines were written. To a man of stronger moral fibre a renascence of the poetical instinct in other forms might, as I have suggested above, been possible; but the poet of _Christabel_ and the _Ancient Mariner_ was dead. The metaphysician had taken his place, and was striving, in abstruse research, to live in forgetfulness of the loss. Little more, that is to say, than a twelvemonth after the composition of the second part of _Christabel_ the impulse which gave birth to it had passed away for ever. Opium-taking had doubtless begun by this time--may conceivably indeed have begun nearly a year before--and the mere _mood_ of the poem, the temporary phase of feeling which directed his mind inwards into deeper reflections on its permanent state, is no doubt strongly suggestive, in its excessive depression, of the terrible reaction which is known to follow upon opium-excitement. But, I confess, it seems to me improbable that even the habitual use of the stimulant for so comparatively short a time as twelve months could have produced so profound a change in Coleridge's intellectual nature. I cannot but think that De Quincey overstates the case in declaring that "opium killed Coleridge as a poet," though it may well be that, after the collapse of health, which appears to me to have been the real _causa causans_ in the matter, had killed the poet as we know him, opium prevented his resurrection in another and it may be but little inferior form. On the whole, in fact, the most probable account of this all-important era in Coleridge's life appears to me to be this: that in the course of 1801, as he was approaching his thirtieth year, a distinct change for the worse--precipitated possibly, as Mr. Gillman thinks, by the climate of his new place of abode--took place in his constitution; that his rheumatic habit of body, and the dyspeptic trouble by which it was accompanied became confirmed; and that the severe attacks of the acute form of the malady which he underwent produced such a permanent lowering of his vitality and animal spirits as, _first_, to extinguish the creative impulse, and _then_ to drive him to the physical anodyne of opium and to the mental stimulant of metaphysics.