The 'Friend' soon falls dead, and Coleridge drifts back to London. There he makes efforts, pathetic in their impotence, to keep his head above water. He tries journalism again, but without the occasional triumphs which had formerly atoned for his irregularity. He lectures, and is heard with an interest which shows that, in spite of all impediments, his marvellous powers have at least roused the curiosity of all who claim to have an intellectual taste. He has a gleam of success, too, from the production of his old tragedy, 'Remorse,' written in the days of early vigour. But some undertow seems to be sucking him back, so that he can never get his feet planted on dry land. He retires to Bristol, and thence to Calne, where he seems to be sinking into utter obscurity. He has almost passed out of the knowledge of his friends, when a last despairing effort lands him at Highgate, and there a rather singular transformation, it may seem at first sight, enables him to become the oracle of youthful aspiration, wisdom, and virtue. Painfully, and imperfectly with their aid, he gathers together some fragments of actual achievement—enough to justify a great, but a most tantalising reputation. What was the secret of this painful history? Briefly, it was opium. Coleridge said so himself, and all his biographers have stated the facts. Without this statement the whole story would be unintelligible, and we could have done justice neither to Coleridge's intellectual powers nor even to some of his virtues. To tell the story of Coleridge without the opium is to tell the story of Hamlet without mentioning the Ghost. The tragedy of a life would become a mere string of incoherent accidents. Nor are the facts doubtful. Coleridge, I fear, composed, or invented, for the benefit of Gillman, a certain picturesque 'Kendal black drop'—a treacherous nostrum, it is suggested, which gave him relief in his sufferings at Keswick, and overpowered his will before he had recognised its nature. The truth is, as can be abundantly proved by his letters at the time, that he was taking laudanum in large quantities in 1796, that is when he was just twenty-four, under the pressure of illness, but certainly well knowing what he was taking. It was at Keswick, not that he first indulged, but that he first became aware of his almost hopeless enslavement.