122 Coleridge [CH.
the reach of the young poet and thinker. Southey, who had
gallantly shouldered the charge of the truant's wife and children,
was embittered, if not estranged. Even Wordsworth, by an un-
guarded utterance made with the best intentions, had caused a
breach which could never wholly be made up1. This was probably
the deepest sorrow of his life; * all else/ he says,' is as a flea-bite/
His family life, too—though this was from causes which, in the
first instance, at any rate, had little to do with opium—had been
entirely broken up. And, though a formal separation was avoided,
he never lived with his wife after 1810; and had, in fact, seen as
little as he could of her since 1804. The real secret of the estrange-
ment was that, by temperament, the two were ill sorted with each
other. But it is impossible not to feel the deepest sympathy with
a woman who battled bravely with the hardships of her lot; and
hard to check the suspicion that, but for opium, the difficulties
might have been smoothed over. In any case, the breach was a
worse thing for Coleridge than he was ever willing to acknowledge.
It robbed him of the steadying influences of home life, to which
he was by nature peculiarly open. And it left a sting in his con-
science which he may have ignored, but which, just for that reason,
was never healed.
The strangest thing is that, in the very height of the opium
fever, he should have been capable of efforts which, though
lamentably unequal, still gave evidence of powers which not one
of his contemporaries could have rivalled It was between 1808
and 1815 that he delivered the bulk of the critical lectures which
make an era in the history of English literary criticism; that he
composed The Friend, in its earlier and, doubtless, far inferior
version (1809); and, finally, that he wrote all save a few passages
of Biographia literaria (1815), the only one of his prose works
which can be said to survive to the present day. Even in the
depth of his debasement, he must have retained an amazing
spring, a power of throwing off weights which would have crushed
another man, of recovering something, at any rate, of the free flight
to which he was born. It was this boundless power of self-retrieval
that, at length, enabled him to cast off the yoke of opium. It was
this, even more than his genius, which drew men to him as a magnet
and never allowed him to forfeit the admiration, and even the
respect, of his friends,
1 The details of this misunderstanding are set forth in the MS of Kobinson's diary,
in the published version of 'which they are briefly summarised (vol. i, pp. 210—211).
See, also, Coleridge's Letters, vol. n, pp. 577—8, 586—595.