Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Opium eating : an autobiographical sketch / by an habituate. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
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![but his memory must have been gone on a wool-gather- ing '' at the time. Instead of gaining, Coleridge is the loser by adopting the language of Shelling in his treatise on the transcen- dental philosophy in the Biographia Literaria. Having made over to Shelling everything that resem- bled or coincided with the doctrines of the latter, he lost much of the most important labors of his life. He had studied metaphysics and philosophy for years, and not having shrank from the toil of thinking, he must have evolved much original matter; being a man, as De Quincey says, of most original genius. Shelling no doubt had gotten ahead of him in publication, but Coleridge had nevertheless undoubtedly thought out the transcendental system before meeting with the works of Shelling. He says himself emphatically, that all the fundamental ideas were born and matured in my own mind before I ever saw a page of the German philoso- pher. However, Coleridge says of the whole system of philosophy — the Dynamic System, as I understand the matter— that it is his conviction that it is no other than the system of Pythagoras and Plato revived and purified from impure mixtures. [The quotations in the above note are from memory, and though not given as exact, they carry the idea intended.] NOTE No. 5. —ON DE QUINCEY'S STYLE OF WRITING. As to De Quincey's style, I think it may be summarized about thus: Fine writing. Afflicted with ridiculous hyperbole. Too discursive. In his narrative pieces he is too rambling and digressive. I have read but one article of those](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21070969_0144.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
