Young men used to flock to him in his old age to draw on his copious stores of knowledge and especially to hear him talk about German philosophy.  Carlyle visited him for this purpose and speaks of the “glorious, balmy, sunny islets, islets of the blest and the intelligible,” which occasionally emerged from the mist of German metaphysics.  He spent the last eighteen years of his life in Highgate with his kind friend, Dr. Gillman, who succeeded in regulating and decreasing the amount of opium which Coleridge took.  He died there in 1834 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery.  Westminster Abbey does not have the honor of the grave of a single one of the great poets of this romantic age.

Poetry.—­The Ancient Mariner (1798) is Coleridge’s poetical masterpiece.  It is also one of the world’s masterpieces.  The supernatural sphere into which it introduces the reader is a remarkable creation, with its curse, its polar spirit, the phantom ship, the seraph band, and the magic breeze.  The mechanism of the poem is a triumph of romantic genius.  The meter, the rhythm, and the music have well-nigh magical effect.  Almost every stanza shows not only exquisite harmony, but also the easy mastery of genius in dealing with those weird scenes which romanticists love.

The moral interest of the poem is not inferior to its other charms.  The Mariner killed the innocent Albatross, and we listen to the same kind of lesson as Wordsworth teaches in his Hart-Leap Well:—­

  “The spirit who bideth by himself
    In the land of mist and snow,
  He loved the bird that loved the man
    Who shat him with his bow.’”

The noble conclusion of the poem has for more than a hundred years continued to influence human conduct:—­

  “He prayeth best who loveth best
     All things both great and small;
  For the dear God who loveth us,
     He made and loveth all.”

His next greatest poem is the unfinished Christabel (1816).  A lovely maiden falls under the enchantments of a mysterious Lady Geraldine; but the fragment closes while this malevolent influence continues.  We miss the interest of a finished story, which draws so many readers to The Ancient Mariner, although Christabel is thickly sown with gems.  Lines like these are filled with the airiness of nature:—­

  “There is not wind enough to twirl
  The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
  That dances as often as dance it can,
  Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
  On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.”

In all literature there has been no finer passage written on the wounds caused by broken friendship than the lines in Christabel relating to the estrangement of Roland and Sir Leoline.  After reading this poem and Kubla Khan, an unfinished dream fragment of fifty-four lines, we feel that the closing lines of Kubla Khan are peculiarly applicable to Coleridge:—­