The poems are of course full of observations of the natural world. Coleridge’s physical and aesthetic enjoyment of it is evident in many passages in the letters, in Anima Poetae, and in the ‘Satyrane Letters’ (reprinted from the 1809-10 Friend in the Biographia Literaria). It stemmed largely from his Devonshire childhood, and was developed through association with the Wordsworths in the brief Quantocks period, and later in the Lakes. Mr. Gordon Wordsworth said that his account of the ascent of Scafell (Item 186) ‘is by many years the earliest record of the pleasures of rock-scrambling, or of any ascent of the Scafell group for the mere love of the fells’. He combines a gift for minute observation with a large metaphysical sense of the universe as a whole.
His interest in natural phenomena had a strong scientific component, fostered by his friendship with Humphry Davy, Tom Wedgwood (the first photographer), Blumenbach and others; and the Theory of Life, posthumously published by Seth B. Watson in 1848, suggests some of his scientific bearings. The notebooks contain passages on chemistry lectures and chemical books, physiology, anthropology, galvanism and electricity, and medical subjects. A patient himself, as a result of his drug addiction and the physical and mental conditions in which it thrived, he was from Bristol days (1795) onwards always deeply interested in Dr. Crompton and Dr. James Currie and their circle; at Highgate in Joseph Henry Green, a surgeon at Guy’s Hospital, John Abernethy, and other leading surgeons and doctors of the time. Though the laboratory he once proposed setting up at Keswick came to nothing, a genuine scientific curiosity persisted to the last weeks of his life and kept him abreast of the latest scientific developments.