To compare him with others of different powers who
accomplished more in one direction in the matter of literary output,
with Sir Walter Scott or Byron, for instance, is misleading. It is the
man of profound genius, who in his own time, is feeling on all sides
into the Future, who is least likely to give forth "finished
productions," as they are called, in which the subjects of which they
treat are often exhausted, and please the ear of the Present. Coleridge
is such a man of genius; nearly all his works are fragmentary,
unfinished, suggestive rather than "complete," just because they verge
upon that Transcendentalism which he was the first to make audible to
English ears in his day. Ill health, and opium in conjunction with ill
health, contributed no doubt to enfeeble his utterance; but to assert
that opium was the cause or the main cause of Coleridge's inability to
do what he wanted himself to do, or what his friends and contemporaries
expected him to do, is a gross perversion of the facts of the case.
Coleridge's inability arose from his multiplicity of motive, his
visionary faculty of seeing in the light of a new principle a host of
problems rise up on all sides, all claiming recognition and solution.
"That is the disease of my mind--it is comprehensive in its conceptions,
and wastes itself in the contemplations of the many things which it
might do.
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