his contemporaries; for though he wrote comparatively little, he was by
his talents and learning a leader among literary men, and his conversations
were as eagerly listened to as were those of Dr. Johnson. Wordsworth says
of him that, though other men of the age had done some wonderful things,
Coleridge was the only wonderful man he had ever known. Of his lectures on
literature a contemporary says: "His words seem to flow as from a person
repeating with grace and energy some delightful poem." And of his
conversation it is recorded: "Throughout a long-drawn summer's day would
this man talk to you in low, equable but clear and musical tones,
concerning things human and divine; marshalling all history, harmonizing
all experiment, probing the depths of your consciousness, and revealing
visions of glory and terror to the imagination."

The last bright ray of sunlight comes from Coleridge's own soul, from the
gentle, kindly nature which made men love and respect him in spite of his
weaknesses, and which caused Lamb to speak of him humorously as "an
archangel a little damaged." The universal law of suffering seems to be
that it refines and softens humanity; and Coleridge was no exception to the
law. In his poetry we find a note of human sympathy, more tender and
profound than can be found in Wordsworth or, indeed, in any other of the
great English poets. Even in his later poems, when he has lost his first
inspiration and something of the splendid imaginative power that makes his
work equal to the best of Blake's, we find a soul tender, triumphant,
quiet, "in the stillness of a great peace." He died in 1834, and was buried
in Highgate Church. The last stanza of the boatman's song, in _Remorse_,
serves better to express the world's judgment than any epitaph:

Hark! the cadence dies away
On the quiet moon-lit sea;
The boatmen rest their oars and say,
_Miserere Domini!_

WORKS OF COLERIDGE. The works of Coleridge naturally divide themselves into
three classes,--the poetic, the critical, and the philosophical,
corresponding to the early, the middle, and the later periods of his
career. Of his poetry Stopford Brooke well says: "All that he did
excellently might be bound up in twenty pages, but it should be bound in
pure gold." His early poems show the influence of Gray and Blake,
especially of the latter. When Coleridge begins his "Day Dream" with the
line, "My eyes make pictures when they're shut," we recall in