In January 1805 Coleridge looked at his previous life and his immediate predicament (he was in Malta), in an attempt to explain the underlying motive of his sufferings. He wrote in his notebook: "It is a most instructive part of my Life the fact, that I have been always preyed on by some Dread, and perhaps all my faulty actions have been the consequence of some Dread or other on my mind / from fear of Pain, or Shame, not from prospect of Pleasure." (NB.ii.2398). Most of the instances he went on to list, showing the effects of dread, were concerned with sex or love. He mentioned his strange love for Mary Evans, his marriage, and now his fears over Sara Hutchinson. That, as he added, "the least languor expressed in a letter from S. H. drives me wild," suggests that in his dread what he most feared was a judgment against him; thus, and only thus, would he be subject to "Pain, or Shame." All his procrastinations were a way of warding off the judgments of those whose love he relied on -- judgments which were already persecuting him nightly in the self-judgments of the terrible dreams he mentions in the same note.

And yet the note, despite its searching analysis, failed to give a motive for the dread, even though it looked back to childhood. Although manifestly haunted by guilt in expectation of the pain of finding judgment against him, Coleridge could not explain the origin of the guilt which possessed him. Dread is indeed the appropriate term for such a generalized and motiveless sense of guilt. The repressed cause of Coleridge's dread is to be found in his childhood; by the evidence of the note, it is some previous failure of love in which judgment went against him.