Confessions is a text from Coleridge's later life. After twenty years of turbulence, he was living at Highgate, to the north of London, in the house of the surgeon, James Gillman. Surrounded by his books and with his opium addiction kept within bounds, he was a venerable figure who read, wrote, annotated and conversed – all widely and wonderfully. He hoped that his immense stores of learning and experience – not least experience – could be unified in the frame of Christian theism. Christianity, as no modern writer knew more vividly and richly than Coleridge, is a universal religion. Therefore its truth, in which he believed more ardently than ever before, could only be realised on this big scale. And its truth meant that such a project must be possible. His unequalled knowledge of the things that had to be unified – philosophy, theology, history, poetry, science, politics – equipped him to do it. It was never written, unless the unpublished scientific treatise called (not by him) ‘opus maximum’ is it or its prototype. But plentiful hors d'oeuvres survive, and Confessions is the best of them. The Statesman's Manual peters out, and Aids to Reflection, though so influential and popular in the nineteenth century, seems to modern readers to go on and on. In Confessions he hit on the right genre. Its short letters are near to his genius as a talker. They contain urgent passion and sustain practical concern.