of higher powers than their own all around them; but that is a part of superstition, not religion. The personality of the Deity is the great thing. The ancients were Spinozists they could not help seeing an energy in nature. This was the anima mundi sine centro of the philosophers. The people, of course, changed it into all the forms that their imagination could supply. The religion. of the philosophers was Pantheism, that of the people. Polytheism. They knew nothing of a creative power: at first there was Chaos and Night; and what produced the universe they could not tell. The gods were merely the first birth of Chaos. This is very evident also in the notion of the Stoics, that after ten thousand years the gods required to be formed again. Even Plato, who alone of them all had any idea of God, says that it is very hard to discover, and impossible to communicate it. And I have no doubt that the first great apostasy, the building of the Tower of Babel, consisted in erecting a temple to the heavens, to the universe. The first sovereigns of all countries were priests, and after them warriors. This is clear from the Northern traditions of Odin, the Sagas, and so forth. When the families of the priests intermarried with the children of the more ignorant people, their offspring applied their superior intelligence and knowledge to the purposes of conquest; hence the great conquests recorded of old. We never hear of such conquests by savage nations when they are not directed by the wisdom of a priesthood."- Mr. Coleridge is not tall, and rather stout: his features, though not regular, are by no means disagreeable; the hair quite gray; the eye and forehead very fine. His appearance is rather old-fashioned; and he looks as if he belonged not so much to this, or to any age, as to history. His manner and address struck me as being rather formally courteous. He always speaks in the tone and in the gesture of common conversation, and laughs a good deal, but gently. Hist emphasis, though not declamatory, is placed with remarkable propriety. He speaks perhaps rather slowly, but never stops, and seldom ever hesitates. There is the strongest appearance of conviction, without any violence in his manner. His language is sometimes harsh, sometimes careless, often quaint, almost always, I think, drawn from the fresh delicious fountains of our elder eloquence. I have no doubt that the diction of much that I have reported is different from Coleridge's, and always, of course, vastly inferior. I have treasured up as many of his phrases as I could; they will easily be recognized. On one occasion he quoted a line of his own poetry, saying, "If I may quote a verse of mine written when I was a very young man. It was something to this effect: 'They kill too slow for men to call it murder."" He happened to mention several books in the course of his remarks; and he always seemed inclined to mention them goodnaturedly. — I was in his company about three hours; and of that time he spoke during two and three quarters. It would have been delightful to listen as attentively, and certainly easy for him to speak just as well for the next forty-eight hours. On the whole his conversation, or rather monologue, is by far the most interesting I ever heard or heard of. Dr. Johnson's talk, with which it is obvious to compare it, seems to me immeasurably inferior. It is better balanced and scrubbed, and more ponderous with epithets; but the spirit and flavor and fragrance, the knowledge and the genius are all wanting. The one is a house of brick, the other a quarry of jasper. It is painful to observe in Coleridge that, with all the kindness and glorious far-seeing intelligence of his eye, there is a glare in it, a light half unearthly, half morbid. It is the glittering eye of the Ancient Mariner. His cheek too shows a flush of over-excitement, the red of a storm-cloud at sunset. When he dies, another, and one of the greatest of their race, will rejoin the few Immor tals, the ill-understood and ill-requited, who have walked this earth. PROFESSOR WILSON. If there be any man of great and original genius alive at this moment, in Europe, it is S. T. Coleridge. Nothing can surpass the melodious richness of words, which he heaps around his images; images that are not glaring in themselves, but which are always affecting to the verge of tears, because they have all been formed and nourished in the recesses of one of the most deeply musing spirits that ever breathed forth its inspiration, in the majestic language of England. . . . Let the dullest clod that ever vegetated, provided only he be alive and hear, be shut up in a room with Coleridge, or in a wood, and be subjected for a few minutes to the ethereal influence of that wonderful man's monologue, and he will begin to believe himself a Poet. The barren wilderness may not blossom like the rose, but it will seem, or rather feel to do so, under the lustre of an imagination exhaustless as the sun. . . . It is easy to talk not very difficult to speechify - hard to speak; but to "discourse" is a gift rarely bestowed by Heaven on mortal man. Coleridge has it in perfection. While he is discoursing the world loses all its commonplaces, and you and your wife imagine yourself Adam and Eve listening to the affable Archangel Raphael in the Garden of Eden. You would no more dream of wishing him to be mute for a while, than you would a river that "imposes silence with a stilly sound." Whether you understood two consecutive sentences, we shall not stop too curiously to inquire; but you do something better, you feel the whole just like any other divine music. And 't is your own fault if you do not ... "A wiser and a better man arise to-morrow's morn." Nor are we now using any exaggeration; for if you will but think how unutterably dull are all the ordinary sayings and doings of this life, spent as it is with ordinary people, you may imagine how in sweet delirium you may be robbed of yourself by a seraphic tongue that has fed since first it lisped on "honey-dew," and by lips that have "breathed the air of Paradise," and learned a seraphic language, which, all the while that it is English, it is as grand as Greek and as soft as Italian. We only know this, that Coleridge is the alchemist that in his crucible melts down hours to moments and lo! diamonds sprinkled on a plate of gold. DR. DIBDIN. I shall never forget the effect his conversation made upon me at the first meeting, at a dinnerparty. It struck me as something not only quite out of the ordinary course of things, but an intellectual exhibition altogether matchless. The viands were unusually costly, and the banquet was at once rich and varied; but there seemed to be no dish like Coleridge's conversation to feed upon and no information so instructive, as his own. The orator rolled himself up as it were in his chair, and gave the most unrestrained indulgence to his speech; and how fraught with acuteness and originality was that speech, and in what copious and eloquent periods did it flow! The audience seemed to be wrapped in wonder and delight, as one conversation, more profound, or clothed in more forcible language than another, fell from his tongue. He spoke nearly for two hours with unhesitating and uninterrupted fluency. TALFOURD. Instead, like Wordsworth, of seeking the sources of sublimity and beauty in the simplest elements of humanity, he ranges through all history and science, investigating all that has really existed, and all that has had foundation only in the wildest and strangest minds, combining, condensing, developing, and multiplying the rich products of his research with marvelous facility and skill; now pondering fondly over some piece of exquisite loveliness, brought from an unknown recess, now tracing out the hidden germ of the eldest and most barbaric theories, and now calling fantastic spirits from the vasty deep, where they have slept since the dawn of reason. The term "myriad-minded," which he has happily applied to Shakespeare, is truly descriptive of himself. . . . There is nothing more wonderful than the facile majesty of his images, or rather of his world of imagery, which, whether in his poetry or his prose, start up before us selfraised, and all perfect, like the palace of Aladdin. He ascends to the sublimest truths by a winding track of sparkling glory, which can only be described in his own language: "The spirit's ladder That from the gross and visible world of dust, The central sun from every narrowing orbit." The riches of his mind were developed, not in writing, but in his speech - conversation I can scarcely call it — which no one who once heard can ever forget. Unable to work in solitude, he sought the gentle stimulus of social admiration, and under its influence poured forth, without stint, the marvelous resources of a mind rich in the spoils of time richer - richer far in its own glorious imagination and delicate fancy! There was a noble prodigality in these outpourings; a generous disdain of self; an earnest desire to scatter abroad the seeds of wisdom and beauty, to take root wherever they might fall, and spring up without bearing his name or impress, which might remind the listener of the first days of poetry before it became individualized by the press, when the Homeric rhapsodist wandered through new-born cities and scattered hovels, flashing upon the minds of the wondering audience the bright train of heroic shapes, the series of godlike exploits, and sought no record more enduring |