The Smoking Torch of Hymen

This fertile playfulness of life and verse—joyance, buoyancy, pleasure—might have gone on forever. Who does not lament the series of steps—day by day, hour by hour—that led to the caging of this free and gallant spirit? Who does not feel the encroachment of Robert Southey’s small, hard, prudential will as it bore down on Coleridge, forcing him to take his own leavings and breaking his spirit?