"Pray for me, my dear friend, that I may not pass such another night as the last. While I am awake and retain my reasoning powers the pang is gnawing, but I am, except for a fitful moment or two, tranquil; it is the howling wilderness of sleep that I dread." (July 31, 1820.)
From this _bodily_ slavery (for it was _bodily_) to a baneful drug he was never _entirely_ free, though the quantity was so greatly reduced as not materially to affect his health or spirits.
A good deal that is known respecting Coleridge's opium habits is derived from the published papers of De Quincey, whose opportunities for becoming fully informed on the subject are beyond question:
"I now gathered that procrastination in excess was, or had become, a marked feature in Coleridge's daily life. Nobody who knew him ever thought of depending on any appointment he might make. Spite of his uniformly honorable intentions, nobody attached any weight to his assurances _in re futura_. Those who asked him to dinner, or any other party, as a matter of course sent a carriage for him, and went personally or by proxy to fetch him; and as to letters, unless the address was in some female hand that commanded his affectionate esteem, he tossed them all into one general _dead-letter bureau_, and rarely, I believe, opened them at all. But all this, which I heard now for the first time and with much concern, was fully explained, for already he was under the full dominion of opium, as he himself revealed to me--with a deep expression of horror at the hideous bondage--in a private walk of some length which I took with him about sunset.
"At night he entered into a spontaneous explanation of this unhappy overclouding of his life, on occasion of my saying accidentally that a toothache had obliged me to take a few drops of laudanum. At what time or on what motive he had commenced the use of opium he did not say, but the peculiar emphasis of horror with which he warned me against forming a habit of the same kind, impressed upon my mind a feeling that he never hoped to liberate himself from the bondage.
"For some succeeding years he did certainly appear to me released from that load of despondency which oppressed him on my first introduction. Grave, indeed, he continued to be, and at times absorbed in gloom; nor did I ever see him in a state of perfectly natural cheerfulness. But as he strove in vain for many years to wean himself from his captivity to opium, a healthy state of spirits could not be much expected. Perhaps, indeed, where the liver and other organs had for so long a period in life been subject to a continual morbid stimulation, it may be impossible for the system ever to recover a natural action. Torpor, I suppose, must result from continued artificial excitement, and perhaps upon a scale of corresponding duration. Life, in such a case, may not offer a field of sufficient extent for unthreading the fatal links that have been wound about the machinery of health and have crippled its natural play.