He talked divinely ("an archangel a little damaged," Lamb said), and both by his talk and his metaphysical writings profoundly influenced the literature and philosophy of the century, both in England and America; but the poet in him was dead.
"Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain, And genius given, and knowledge won in vain; And all which I had culled in woodwalks wild, And all which patient toil had reared, and all Commune with _thee_ had opened out--but flowers Strewed on my corse, and borne upon my bier, In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!"[1] It would be a mistake to ascribe the paralysis of Coleridge's powers of constructive imagination exclusively to laudanum.

Rather the resort to narcotics and the inability to control his creative faculty are alike symptoms of a temperamental malady which had its roots in his nature close to the seat of that special faculty.

Under a favorable conjunction of outward circumstance and inward state, imagination came; it possessed him, and he labored in it, happily.

Afterwards he could revise what he had shaped, analyze it philosophically, perfect some details of it, but he could not proceed in the creative act after the inspiration had left him.

His own description of his nature--"_indolence capable of energies_"-- is accurate as far as it goes.