Epilogue

Abstract

‘No one on earth has ever LOVED me’, a distraught Coleridge confided in his notebooks, in voluntary exile in Hudson’s Hotel after Basil Montagu had passed on a version of Wordsworth’s message about how insufferable Coleridge had been to live with (CAT III, 4006). He was wrong. No one had ever loved him enough to satisfy his insatiable needs, perhaps – ‘The whole craving of his moral being was for love’, wrote his disciple Thomas Allsop¹ – but Coleridge was almost universally admired and loved. Not at all times, by any means. Most of his friends found him – as Lamb found him – alternately enchanting and infuriating: ‘The rogue gives you Love Powders, and then a strong horse drench to bring ‘em off your stomach that they mayn’t hurt you’.² Thomas Middleton, Robert Southey, Tom Poole, Joseph Cottle, Josiah Wade, John Thelwall, Tom Wedgwood, Humphry Davy, William Godwin, Daniel Stuart, John Morgan, Henry Crabb Robinson – none of them would have expressed it in Lamb’s inimitable way, but every one of them knew the affection and frustration of being Coleridge’s friend. And for all of them, Wordsworth included, the affection survived the frustration. For Lamb especially, the poetry, too, came with love powders:

He is at present under the medical care of a Mr Gilman (Killman?) a Highgate Apothecary, where he plays at leaving off Laud[anu]m.—I think his essentials not touched, he is very bad, but then he wonderfully picks up another day, and his face when he repeats his verses hath its ancient glory, an Arch angel a little damaged. … [he recited ‘Kubla Khan’] so enchantingly that it irradiates & brings heaven & Elysian bowers into my parlour while he sings or says it.³