Coleridge paid his last visit to the Lake District in the spring of 1812, 23rd February to 26th March (_Letters_, 575). He quitted his wife on cordial enough terms, and wrote an agreeable letter to her from London (_Letters_, 579), of date 21st April. But he never returned to Keswick. That mysterious gulf which he has described so wonderfully and weirdly in _Christabel_ which separates sundered hearts, widened with the years; and
[44] [See also _Eolian Harp_, and _Lines written on having left a place of Retirement_.]
[45] [After 1812 the pension was reduced by half.]
By what I _have_ effected, am I to be judged by my fellow-men; what I _could_ have done is a question for my own conscience.--S. T. C.
As the _Biographia Literaria_ does not mention all Mr. Coleridge's writings, it will be proper to give some account of them here.
The Poetical Works in three volumes include the _Juvenile Poems_, _Sibylline Leaves_, _Ancient Mariner_, _Christabel_, _Remorse_, _Zapolya_, and _Wallenstein_.
The first volume of _Juvenile Poems_ was published in the Spring of 1796. It contains three sonnets by Charles Lamb, and a poetical Epistle which he called "Sara's," but of which my Mother told me she wrote but little. Indeed it is not very like some simple affecting verses, which were wholly by herself, on the death of her beautiful infant, Berkeley, in 1799. In May, 1797, Mr. C. put forth a collection of poems, containing all that were in his first edition, with the exception of twenty pieces and the addition of ten new ones and a considerable number by his friends, Lloyd and Lamb. _The Ancient Mariner_, _Love_,[47] _The Nightingale_, _The Foster Mother's Tale_ first appeared with the _Lyrical Ballads_ of Mr. Wordsworth in the summer of 1798. There was a third edition of the _Juvenile Poems_ by themselves in 1803, with the original motto from Statius, _Felix curarum_, etc. _Silo. Lib._ iv. A spirit of almost child-like sociability seemed to reign among these young poets--they were fond of joint publications.
_Wallenstein_, a Play translated from the German of Schiller, appeared in 1800. _Christabel_ was not published till April 1816, but written, the first part at Stowey in 1797, the second at Keswick in 1800. It went into a third edition in the first year. The fragment called _Kubla Khan_, composed in 1797,[48] and the _Pains of Sleep_, which was annexed to the former by way of contrast, were published with the first edition of _Christabel_, in 1816.