His fame as a poet grew as the world became acquainted with and learned to feel the peculiar charm of his poetry, and he was even more famous, for a while, as a literary critic and a moral philosopher.

But they were years of weak-willed wandering, of vast hazy plans and feeble performance, lighted only here and there by glimpses of fragmentary accomplishment, and that seldom in poetry.

Keats died at twenty-six, leaving behind him a body of poetry hardly less wonderful than Coleridge had fashioned at the same age; and another poet sang of him: "The bloom, whose petals, nipt before they blew, Died on the promise of the fruit, is waste." In Coleridge the poet died at nearly the same age, almost as completely as if the man himself had passed "within the twilight chamber ...

of white Death"; and "Dejection" is that poet's dirge.

The remaining years need therefore but few words.
Coleridge had taken opium, perhaps as early as his school-days, for relief from neuralgia.