Jasper County Democrat, Volume 21, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 April 1918 — Gifted Writers Indolent. [ARTICLE]

Gifted Writers Indolent.

De Quincey has called Coleridge “a man of infinite title pages,” and he says he heard Coleridge admit that a list of the books he meditated but never executed would fill a large volume. In this respect the two opium eaters were rivals. Perhaps their fer-1 tllity in projects was due, as Coleridge fancied, to an overactivity of thought, “modified by a constitutional Indolence,” and had nothing to do with opium. On the other hand, De Quincey believed that his opium eating prevented him from writing the book he intended to make his life work, the slow and elaborate result of years of toil, to which he had “presumed to give the title of an unfinished work of Spinoza’s, viz., ‘De Human! Intellectus.’ ” In a later mood he devised a “Prolegomena to All Future Systems of Political Economy,” and made arrangements with a provincial printer for its production, but its author never even got as far as the preface.