COLERIDGE'S DRUG TAKING CONFESSIONS

As a treatise against the perils of drug addiction it can have few
equals. Written 186 years ago by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the most
celebrated addict in English literary history, its sentiments will be
familiar to modern-day addicts trying to kick the habit.

In a private, four-page letter about the horrors of his craving for
opium the Romantic poet tells his friend, J J Morgan, that he was
"crucified, dead and buried, descended into Hell".

The letter, which has surfaced at auction for the first time, is one
of Coleridge's most vivid statements about the "accursed poison" which
afflicted him from 1801, when he was 29, until his death in 1834.
Opium then could be bought cheaply over the counter.

In his 1814 missive to Morgan, Coleridge writes: "... It will be vain
to attempt to persuade Mrs Morgan ... that a man, whose moral
feelings, reason, understanding and senses are perfectly sane and
vigorous, may yet have been mad - and yet nothing is more true.

"By the long Habit of the accursed Poison, my Volition ... was
compleatly deranged, at times frenzied. ... But tho' there was no
prospect, no gleam of Light before, an indefinite indescribable Terror
as with a scourge of ever restless, ever coiling and uncoiling
Serpents, drove me on from behind ..."

Coleridge, who was ravaged by nightmares which caused him to wake up
screaming and in tears, expiates at length on the consequences of his
addiction - his barbarous mistreatment of those he most loved, his
lying and embarrassing indulgences.

He suffers agonies of remorse and writes of his deceits to obtain
laudanum - tincture of opium - and of his attempts to cut down.

The letter, which has had the signature cut out, is being offered for
sale privately at a Sotheby's manuscripts auction on February 24, when
it is expected to realise around pounds 3,000.