There is a change—and I am poor;
Your love hath been, nor long ago,
A fountain at my fond heart's door,
Whose only business was to flow;
And flow it did; not taking
Of its own bounty, or my need.
What happy moments did I count!
Blest was I then all bliss above!
Now, for that consecrated
Of murmuring, sparkling, living love,
What have I? shall I dare to tell?
A comfortless and hidden well.
A well of love—it may be deep—I trust it is,—and never dry:
What matter? if the waters
In silence and obscurity.—Such change, and at the very
Of my fond heart, hath made me poor.1.
It seems certain that the changed friend was Coleridge.
Wordsworth saw him for the first time in almost three years late in October 1806, and then for several months in the winter when Coleridge visited the Wordsworths during their stay at Coleorton,
Sir George Beaumont's house in Leicestershire.
Coleridge's long residence abroad, mostly in Malta, had been in the hope of restoring his health which had been much impaired by his addiction to drugs.
The hope was not realized.
Dorothy Wordsworth wrote: "never never did I feel such a shock as at the first sight of him [in Oct. 1806].
We all felt exactly in the same way--as if he were different from what we had expected to see...." The difference was not merely in appearance and physical health.
All the members of the circle of old friends, including Coleridge, were unhappily aware of changes in feeling and relation.
