This was one, and the most common, shape of extinguished power from which Coleridge fled to the great city. But sometimes the same decay came back upon his heart in the more poignant shape of intimations and vanishing glimpses, recovered for one moment from the paradise of youth, and from fields of joy and power, over which, for him, too certainly, he felt that the cloud of night was settling for ever. Both modes of the same torment exiled him from nature; and for the same reasons he fled from poetry and all commerce with his own soul; burying himself in the profoundest abstractions from life and human sensibilities. "For not to think of what I needs must feel, But to be still and patient all I can; And haply _by abstruse research to steal_, _From my own nature, all the natural man_; This was my sole resource, my only plan; Till _that_, which suits a part, infects the whole, And now is almost grown the habit of my soul." Such were, doubtless, the true and radical causes which, for the final twenty-four years of Coleridge's life, drew him away from those scenes of natural beauty in which only, at an earlier stage of life, he found strength and restoration. These scenes still survived; but their power was gone, because _that_ had been derived from himself, and his ancient self had altered. Such were the _causes_; but the immediate _occasion_ of his departure from the Lakes, in the autumn of 1810, was the favourable opportunity then presented to him of migrating in a pleasant way. Mr. Basil Montagu, the Chancery barrister, happened at that time to be returning to London, with Mrs. Montagu, from a visit to the Lakes, or to Wordsworth.[81] His travelling carriage was roomy enough to allow of his offering Coleridge a seat in it; and his admiration of Coleridge was just then fervent enough to prompt a friendly wish for that sort of close connexion (viz. by domestication as a guest under Mr. Basil Montagu's roof) which is the most trying to friendship, and which in this instance led to a perpetual rupture of it. The domestic habits of eccentric men of genius, much more those of a man so irreclaimably irregular as Coleridge, can hardly be supposed to promise very auspiciously for any connexion so close as this. A very extensive house and household, together with the unlimited licence of action which belongs to the _ménage_ of some great Dons amongst the nobility, could alone have made Coleridge an inmate perfectly desirable. Probably many little jealousies and offences had been mutually suppressed; but the particular spark which at length fell amongst the combustible materials already prepared, and thus produced the final explosion, took the following shape:--Mr. Montagu had published a book against the use of wine and intoxicating liquors of every sort.[82] Not out of parsimony or under any suspicion of inhospitality, but in mere self-consistency and obedience to his own conscientious scruples, Mr.