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This chapter begins with a discussion of a range of Coleridge's early writings in which he explores his uncertain faith in his ability to read the handwriting of God in nature. It then turns to Coleridge's Lectures on Revealed Religion (1795), in which his early debts to post-Newtonian natural religion are made explicit. Coleridge's poem, Religious Musings, is discussed. The chapter continues with a detailed examination of three important ‘Conversation’ poems: Fears in Solitude, France: an Ode, and Frost at Midnight published together in 1798, which further reveal Coleridge's religious uncertainty, and its connection with his sense of being fallen. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the poem, Dejection: An Ode, in which a state of creative sterility is again linked by the poet with a sense of being fallen.

This chapter discusses the poetic imaginings of war in the 1790s, particularly those of Charlotte Smith and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Smith's reconception of the role of ‘fancy’ in her blank-verse poem The Emigrants, begun during peacetime but completed in April 1793, forcefully illustrates the way in which the outbreak of war led one of the most popular and influential writers of the closing decades of the 18th century to transform her ideas of the imagination and to reconceive her poetic role. In Fears in Solitude, Coleridge addresses a nation distant from the scene of conflict and ultimately offers his own imagining as a model for the nation. The imagining of war, then, plays a major role in the development of the romantic imagination.

Religion passes beyond the ken, the horizon, of reason, with faith its continuation, Coleridge tells us. Chapter 15 reflects on Coleridge’s illuminating metaphor of twilight, night, and the starry heavens to see how the experiential forms it draws on can affect our understanding of terms like ‘reason’ and ‘faith’. Tentatively suppressing those terms, it concentrates on the metaphor and the experience, to see where they lead without the leash of orthodox doctrine controlling the interpretation. Preserving ‘the Soul steady and concentered in its Trance of inward Adoration’ is the crucial experience. Twilight stealing into darkness and into night suggests progressing stillness, its associated concentration opening up a real prospect, the starry heavens, ordinarily concealed by the light of day and quotidian clamour. A reflection on Buddhist meditational traditions is included; concentration or samadhi as a condition of awakening, seeing things as they are, associated with ‘compassion’ or karuna.