Coleridge was an explorer of self-consciousness, but an explorer bogged down in a morass of his own making. His loneliness, his prodigious curiosity, and his voracious reading led him to keep journals as a virtual necessity. Beyond offering a means of probing his experience, his notebooks gave him the chance to fix a habit of speculative thinking whose momentum might fuel itself, to sustain him over stretches of creative frustration. They fulfilled in part his need for companionship, and for selfanalysis. Accommodating the insights of the moment, journal-keeping became his way to make connections otherwise unavailable, and to produce what he hoped might deliver him from lethargy and self-doubt.

But if Coleridge's works record a mind fascinated by both the generalizing power of science and the sensuous minutiae of lived experience, they also record the strains inherent in these means of approaching experience. They testify to the conflicts of a mind driven at times to moralize, yet painfully conscious of private dissipations. If he strove for the ideal, he was tortured by the real. He benefited by crossbreeding his ideas, by adapting concepts from widely varying sources, yet the magnitude of conceptual possibilities, sources of metaphor, and disciplines of knowledge often paralyzed his ability to shape ideas into literary forms. The record (some might say wreckage) of his plans, his literary schemes, his publications, marginalia, and notebooks show that writing was for him endlessly speculative. He could not carry enough of his ideas to completion; he was always beginning some new production. It was as if thinking or writing – about anything – was an end in itself.