Page:Mary Lamb (Gilchrist 1883).djvu/222

206 altogether would, probably, be equally fatal. He therefore found a medical man willing to undertake the care of him: to exercise absolute surveillance for a time and watch the results. It is an affecting letter in which he commits himself into Mr. Gillman's hands:—"You will never hear anything but truth from me, prior habits render it out of my power to tell an untruth, but unless carefully observed I dare not promise that I should not, with regard to this detested poison, be capable of acting one. For the first week I must not be permitted to leave your house, unless with you. Delicately or indelicately, this must be done, and both the servants and the assistant must receive absolute commands from you. The stimulus of conversation suspends the terror that haunts my mind; but when I am alone the horrors I have suffered from laudanum, the degradation, the blighted utility, almost overwhelm me. If (as I feel for the first time a soothing confidence it will prove) I should leave you restored to my moral and bodily health, it is not myself only that will love and honour you; every friend I have (and thank God! in spite of this wretched vice I have many and warm ones, who were friends of my youth and have never deserted me) will thank you with reverence." That confidence was justified, those thanks well earned. In the middle of April 1816 Coleridge took up his abode with the Gillmans at No. 3 The Grove, at Highgate, and found there a serene haven in which he anchored for the rest of life; freeing himself by slow degrees from the opium bondage, though too shattered in frame ever to recover sound health; too far spent, morally and mentally, by the long struggles and abasements he had gone through to renew the splendours of his youth. That "shaping spirit of