The opium, resorted to often, no doubt, to quicken the dreams in his brain as well as to relieve his bodily suffering, helped to enfeeble his will; but the "indolence" was in him before he became addicted to opium, and he was never "capable of energies" at the call of duty, but only at the call of his "shaping spirit," over whose coming and going he had no control.
Poetically it is perhaps as well.

Had he been like his friend Wordsworth in strength and steadiness of purpose--which is to suppose him another nature than he was--his life would have been happier and more edifying, but he would hardly have given us anything better than "Christabel" and "The Ancient Mariner." Romantic poetry of the higher type is essentially the creature of mood.

Even Wordsworth's long and conscientious labors produced but a small bulk of poetry of this character, amid dreary reaches of uninspired preaching.

Coleridge waited--in despondency often, in self-upbraidings, in the temporary deception of opium dreams with their consequent misery--for the return of the spirit; and it did not come.
FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: From the lines addressed to Wordsworth after hearing him read "The Prelude," in 1807.] II.

COLERIDGE'S POEMS.
"THE ANCIENT MARINER" "The Ancient Mariner" was first printed in the first edition of "Lyrical Ballads," 1798, again with considerable changes in the second edition, 1800, and without further significant change in the editions of 1802 and 1805.