The Harvest on the Ground: Coleridge's Marginalia

In March 1820, when he was forty-seven years old, Coleridge wrote a long letter to his young friend Thomas Allsop to thank him for a generous gift of money. Allsop, a London business man twenty years younger than Coleridge, had attended the literary lectures in 1818, had fallen under Coleridge's spell, and was now a close friend. Coleridge now unfolded in some detail the work he had in progress and discussed the prospects of completing what he hoped to do, in the face of ill health, public neglect, and the interruptions forced on him by the need to meet his obligations to his hosts in Highgate and to his scattered family. He had five works in hand, he said: "The Characteristics of Shakespeare's Plays"; a philosophical analysis of the genius and works of Dante, Spenser, Milton, Cervantes, and Calderon, with shorter studies of Chaucer, Ariosto, Donne, and Rabelais; the history of philosophy (the "Philosophical Lectures" delivered between December 1818 and March 1819); letters on the Old and New Testament; and "my GREAT WORK, to the preparation of which more than twenty years of my life have been devoted" — the Opus Maximum — to which (he said) all his other writings, except the poems (and perhaps even those too) were preparatory. Altogether, not including the Opus Maximum, these would make about ten large volumes.