the community the reputed weaker subject, and continue to receive him who has wronged her. He agreed with me, that that question will never be adjusted but by the women themselves. Justice will continue in abeyance so long as they visit with severity the errors of their own sex and tolerate those of ours. He then diverged to the great mysteries of life and death, and branched away to the sublime question the immortality of the soul. Here he spread the sail-broad vans of his wonderful imagination, and soared away with an eagle-flight, and with an eagle eye, too, compassing the effulgence of his great argument, ever and anon stooping within my own sparrow's range, and then glancing away again, and careering through the trackless fields of ethereal metaphysics. And this he continued for an hour and a half, never pausing for an instant except to catch his breath (which, in the heat of his teeming mind, he did like a school-boy repeating by rote his task,) and gave utterance to some of the grandest thoughts I ever heard from the mouth of man. His ideas, embodied in words of purest eloquence, flew about my ears like drifts of snow. He was like a cataract filling and rushing over my penny-phial capacity. I would only gasp, and bow my head in acknowledgment. He required from me nothing more than the simple recognition of his discourse; and so he went on like a steam-engine I keeping the machine oiled with my looks of pleasure, while he supplied the fuel: and that upon the same theme, too, would have lasted till now. What would I have given for a short-hand report of that speech! And such was the habit of this wonderful man. Like the old peripatetic philosophers, he walked about, prodigally scattering wisdom, and leaving it to the winds. of chance to waft the seeds into a genial soil. — My first suspicion of his being in Ramsgate had arisen from my mother observing that she had heard an elderly gentleman in the public library, who looked like a dissenting

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minister, talking as she never heard man talk. Like his own Ancient Mariner, when he had once fixed your eye he held you spell-bound, and you were constrained to listen to his tale; you must have been more powerful than he to have broken the charm; and I know no man worthy to do that. He did, indeed, answer to my conception of a man of genius, for his mind flowed on like the Pontick sea," that "ne'er feels retiring ebb." It was always ready for action; like the hare, it slept with its eyes open. He would at any given moment range from the subtlest and most abstruse question in metaphysics to the architectural beauty in contrivance of a flower of the fields; and the gorgeousness of his imagery would increase, and dilate, and flash forth such coruscations of similes and startling theories that one was in a perpetual aurora borealis of fancy. As Hazlitt once said of him, "He would talk on forever, and you wished him to talk on forever. His thoughts never seemed to come with labor or effort, but as if borne on the gusts of genius, and as if the wings of his imagination lifted him off his feet." This is truly as poetically described. He would not only illustrate a theory or an argument with a sustained and superb figure, but in pursuing the current of his thought he would bubble up with a sparkle of fancy so fleet and brilliant that the attention, though startled and arrested, was not broken. He would throw these into the stream of his argument, as waifs and strays. Notwithstanding his wealth of language and prodigious power in amplification, no one, I think, (unless it were Shakespeare or Bacon,) possessed with himself equal power of condensation. He would frequently comprise the elements of a noble theorem in two or three words; and like the genial offspring of a poet's brain, it always came forth in a golden halo. I remember once, in discoursing upon the architecture of the Middle Ages, he reduced the Gothic structure into a magnificent abstrac

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and in two words. "A Gothic cathedral," he said, "is like a petrified religion."

THOMAS CARLYLE. Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill, in those years, looking down on London and its smoke-tumult, like a sage escaped from the inanity of life's battles; attracting towards him the thoughts of innumerable brave souls still engaged there. . . . A sublime man; who, alone in those dark days, had saved his crown of spiritual manhood; escaping from the black. materialisms, and revolutionary deluges, with "God, Freedom, Immortality" still his: a king of men. The practical intellects of the world did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer; but to the rising spirits of the young generation he had this dusky sublime character; and sat there as a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma; his Dodona oak grove (Mr. Gillman's house at Highgate) whispering strange things, uncertain whether oracles or jargon. . . . Here for hours would Coleridge talk, concerning all conceivable or inconceivable things; and liked nothing better than to have an intelligent, or failing that, even a silent and patient human listener. He distinguished himself to all that ever heard him as at least the most surprising talker extant in this world, and to some small minority, by no means at all, as the most excellent. — The good man, he was now getting old, towards sixty, perhaps ; and gave you the idea of a life that had been full of sufferings; a life heavy-laden, half-vanquished, still swimming painfully in seas of manifold physical and other bewilderment. Brow and head were round, and of massive weight, but the face was flabby and irresolute; expressive of weakness under possibility of strength. He hung loosely on his limbs, with knees bent, and stooping attitude; in walking, he rather shuffled than decisively stept; and a lady once remarked, he never could fix which side of the garden walk would suit him best, but

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continually shifted, in corkscrew fashion, and kept trying A heavy-laden, half-aspiring, and surely much suffering man. His voice, naturally soft and good, had contracted itself into a plaintive snuffle and singsong; he spoke as if preaching, — you would have said, preaching earnestly and also hopelessly the weightiest things. I still recollect his "object" and "subject," terms of continual recurrence in the Kantean province; and how he sung and snuffled them into "om-m-mject,” and “ summ-mject,” with a kind of a solemn shake or quaver, as he rolled along. No talk in his century, or in any other, could be more surprising. "Our interview [said Sterling in his record of his first interview with Coleridge] lasted for three hours, during which he talked two hours and three quarters." Nothing could be more copious than his talk; and furthermore, it was always virtually or literally, of the nature of a monologue; suffering no interruption, however reverent; hastily putting aside all foreign additions, annotations, or most ingenuous desires for elucidation, as well-meant superfluities which would never do. Besides, it was talk not flowing anywhither like a river, but spreading everywhither in inextricable currents and regurgitations like a lake or sea; terribly deficient in definite goal and aim, nay often in logical intelligibility; what you were to believe or do, or any earthly or heavenly thing, obstinately refusing to appear from. it. So that, most times, you felt logically lost; swamped near to drowning in this tide of ingenious vocables, spreading out boundless as if to submerge the world. . I have heard Coleridge talk, with eager musical energy, two stricken hours, his face radiant and moist, and communicate no meaning whatsoever to any individual of his hearers, certain of whom, I for one, still kept eagerly listening in hope; the most had long before given up, and formed (if the room were large enough) secondary humming groups of their own. He

began any where you put some question to him, made some suggestive observation; instead of answering this, or decidedly setting out towards answering it, he would accumulate formidable apparatus, logical swim-bladders, transcendental life-preservers, and other precautionary and vehiculatory gear, for setting out; perhaps did at last get under way, but was swiftly solicited, turned aside. by the glance of some radiant new game on this hand or that, into new courses; and ever into new; and before long into all the universe, where it was uncertain what game you would catch, or whether any. His talk, alas, was distinguished, like himself, by irresolution it disliked to be troubled with conditions, abstinences, definite fulfillments; loved to wander at its own sweet will, and make its auditor and his claims and humble wishes a mere passive bucket for itself. He had knowledge about many things and topics, much curious reading; but generally all topics led him, after a pass or two, into the high seas of theosophic philosophy, the hazy infinitude of Kantean. transcendentalism, with its “sum-m-mjects" and "omm-mjects." Sad enough; for with such indolent impatience of the claims and ignorances of others, he had not the least talent for explaining this or any thing unknown to them; and you swam and fluttered in the mistiest wide unintelligible deluge of things, for the most part, in a rather profitless, uncomfortable manner. Glorious islets, too, I have seen rise out of the haze; but they were few, and soon swallowed in the general element again. Balmy, sunny islets, islets of the blest and the intelligible; on which occasion those secondary humming groups would all cease humming, and hang breathless upon the eloquent words; till once your islet got wrapped in the mist again, and they could recommence humming. Eloquent artistically expressive words you always had; piercing radiances of a most subtle insight came at intervals; tones of noble, pious sympathy, recognizable as pious,