th soul,
mind, and spirit.... At first I thought him very plain, that is for
about three minutes: he is pale, thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips, and
not very good teeth, longish, loose-growing, half-curling, rough black
hair. But if you hear him speak for five minutes you think no more of
them. His eye is large and full, and not very dark, but grey[2]--such an
eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest expression; but it
speaks every emotion of his animated mind; it has more of 'the poet's
eye in a fine frenzy rolling' than I ever witnessed. He has fine dark
eyebrows, and an overhanging forehead." The friendly and keen-sighted
woman gives a more sympathetic picture than the others; but there must
have been truth, too, in the view of the equally keen-sighted and less
friendly Hazlitt, whose description accords well with Coleridge's
self-portraiture, and in the last sarcastic item, too well, with the
remainder of the poet's career.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: "Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge," ed. by E.H.
Coleridge, Vol. I., p. 180, note.]

[Footnote 2: The uncertainty as to the color of his eyes is a tribute to
their expressiveness. Carlyle described him in 1824 as having "a pair of
strange brown, timid, yet earnest-looking eyes." Emerson visited him in
1833 and found him "with bright blue eyes and fine clear complexion."]

III. THE REST OF THE STORY

Coleridge lived for thirty-six years after he left Stowey for Germany in
1798. His fame as a poet grew as the world became acquainted with and
learned to feel the peculiar charm of his poetry, and he was even more
famous, for a while, as a literary critic and a moral philosopher. But
they were years of weak-willed wandering, of vast hazy plans and feeble
performance, lighted only here and there by glimpses of fragmentary
accomplishment, and that seldom in poetry. Keats died at twenty-six,
leaving behind him a body of poetry hardly less wonderful than Coleridge
had fashioned at the same age; and another poet sang of him:

"The bloom, whose petals, nipt before they blew,
Died on the promise of the fruit, is waste."

In Coleridge the poet died at nearly the same age, almost as completely
as if the man himself had passed "within the twilight chamber ... of
white Death"; and "Dejection" is that poet's dirge. The remaining years
need therefore but few words.

Coleridge had taken opium, perhaps as early as his school-days, for
relief from neuralgi