*Sterling’s own subsequent career was full of disappointments, and he died prematurely at the age of thirty-eight, the obscure curate of Herstmonceux, an allegory of Victorian promise unfulfilled. Hence Carlyle chose to write his Life (1851) and connect it to his view of Coleridge. In his last months, Sterling said that his own disillusion now included Coleridge, a man whom he now saw – for “all the imagery of Nature about him at his command” – as self-contradictory: a man who could not bear to live “without admiration and notoriety”. 60 (See Bibliography, John Beer.)
*The unfinished Opus Maximum has still not been published, but will eventually appear as Volume 15 of the great Bollingen Collected Coleridge. (See Bibliography.) The faithful Green, much taken up with his later duties for the Royal College of Surgeons, attempted to incorporate some of Coleridge’s ideas in his Hunterian Lectures; and in his Spiritual Philosophy: Founded on the Teaching of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published after his own death, in 1865. A strikingly affectionate and protective account of his old friend appears in a manuscript essay, “Introduction to the Philosophical Remains of S. T. Coleridge”, preserved by Derwent. “How often during the last years of his life have I found him languid, listless, with ‘drooping gait’ and heavy eye…till some question arose that roused his dormant intellectual powers, his bodily ails were then forgotten, his infirmities thrown off, the mind lived for itself, and…the fascinated auditor could not choose but hear!” (Shorter Works, II, p. 1526.)
*Coleridge’s epitaph can now be found gravely incised on a memorial flagstone in the nave of St Michael’s Church, Highgate, where it is regularly walked over by numerous schoolchildren, a circumstance which would have surely pleased him. It ends with two of the most wonderfully ambiguous lines he ever wrote:
“Mercy for praise – to be forgiven for fame
He asked, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same!”
But in a letter of 1833 he also put on his Devonshire yokel voice to bid farewell, and wrote this alternative version:
“In truth, he’s no beauty!’ – cried Moll, Poll and Tab,
But all of them owned – He’d the gift of the Gab.”
Coleridge- Darker Reflections Page 81
