In a note made in Malta on Christmas Day 1804 Coleridge calls himself a ‘talkative fellow’(CN ii. 2372). The table talk of ‘the Sage of Highgate’ becomes a work in itself, occupying two fat volumes of the Bollingen Collected Coleridge. Works such as the Theory of Life and Biographia Literaria were wholly or mostly dictated rather than written. In later life, then, Coleridge tends to give monologues rather than to engage in conversation and to interact in the margins of books with past writers rather than with a present audience. This at least is the implication of those descriptions of him as his own Mariner referred to in the Introduction.

The Mariner's ‘strange power of speech’ is a power over an audience of one, and contemporaries saw Coleridge as being like the Mariner in this sense. Caroline Fox recalled an exchange with his former schoolfellow Charles Lamb in which Coleridge asks ‘you have heard me preach I think?’, and Lamb replies, ‘I have never heard you do anything else.’ That anecdote is affectionate but, in accounts like those of Carlyle or Peacock quoted in the Introduction, Coleridge has become, like the Mariner, an obsessive talker whose power of speech may be all that perceptibly remains of an earlier literary and political promise. ‘All that he has done of moment, he had done twenty years ago,’ William Hazlitt wrote in The Spirit of the Age (1825), adding ‘since then he may be said to have lived on the sound of his own voice’.

In the note quoted at the start of this chapter Coleridge goes on to connect a style of speech to a habit of thought which is inclusive rather than exclusive, Platonic rather than Aristotelian, and derives from an ‘affinity’ with the things discussed which, ‘tho’ it perceives the difference of things, yet is eternally pursuing the likenesses, or rather that which is common’ (CN ii. 2372). We saw such a movement in The Ancient Mariner. The Mariner's redemption begins from the point at which he recognizes that he is not separate from the rest of animate creation. But an ‘affinity’ for ‘things’ is different from an affinity for people.