to the possibilities of truth when caught from
an angular and not a central station. There is even a pleasure as from a
gorgeous display, and a use as from a fulness of unity, in reading a
grand or even pompous laudatory oration upon a man like Leibnitz, or
Newton, which neglects all his errors or blemishes. This abstracting
view I could myself adopt as to a man whom I had learned to know from
books, but not as to one whom I knew also from personal intercourse. His
faults and his greatness are then too much intertwisted. There is still
something unreal in the knowledge of men through books; with which is
compatible a greater flexibility of estimate. But the absolute realities
of life acting upon any mind of deep sincerity do not leave the same
liberty of suppression or concealment. In that case, the reader may
perhaps say, and wherever the relations of the writer to a deceased man
prescribe many restraints of tenderness or delicacy, would it not be
better to forbear speaking at all? Certainly; and I go on therefore to
say that my own relations to Coleridge were not of that nature. I had
the greatest admiration for his intellectual powers, which in one
direction I thought and think absolutely unrivalled on earth; I had also
that sort of love for him which arises naturally as a rebound from
intense admiration, even where there is little of social congeniality.
But, in any stricter sense of the word, _friends_ we were not. For years
we met at intervals in society; never once estranged by any the
slightest shadow of a quarrel or a coolness. But there were reasons,
arising out of original differences in our dispositions and habits,
which would probably have forever prevented us, certainly _did_ prevent
us, from being confidential friends. Yet, if we had been such, even the
more for that reason the sincerity of my nature would oblige me to speak
freely if I spoke at all of anything which I might regard as amongst his
errors. For the perfection of genial homage, one may say, in the
expression of Petronius Arbiter, _Praecipitandus est liber spiritus_, the
freedom of the human spirit must be thrown headlong through the whole
realities of the subject, without picking or choosing, without garbling
or disguising. It yet remains as a work of the highest interest, to
estimate (but for that to display) Coleridge in his character of great
philosophic thinker, in which character he united perfections that never
_were_ united but in three