it will perhaps
remain. He lends himself to all impressions alike; he gives up his mind
and liberty of thought to none. He is a general lover of art and science,
and wedded to no one in particular. He pursues knowledge as a mistress,
with outstretched hands and winged speed; but as he is about to embrace
her, his Daphne turns--alas! not to a laurel! Hardly a speculation has
been left on record from the earliest time, but it is loosely folded up in
Mr. Coleridge's memory, like a rich, but somewhat tattered piece of
tapestry: we might add (with more seeming than real extravagance), that
scarce a thought can pass through the mind of man, but its sound has at
some time or other passed over his head with rustling pinions. On whatever
question or author you speak, he is prepared to take up the theme with
advantage--from Peter Abelard down to Thomas Moore, from the subtlest
metaphysics to the politics of the _Courier_. There is no man of genius,
in whose praise he descants, but the critic seems to stand above the
author, and "what in him is weak, to strengthen, what is low, to raise and
support:" nor is there any work of genius that does not come out of his
hands like an illuminated Missal, sparkling even in its defects. If Mr.
Coleridge had not been the most impressive talker of his age, he would
probably have been the finest writer; but he lays down his pen to make
sure of an auditor, and mortgages the admiration of posterity for the
stare of an idler. If he had not been a poet, he would have been a
powerful logician; if he had not dipped his wing in the Unitarian
controversy, he might have soared to the very summit of fancy. But in
writing verse, he is trying to subject the Muse to _transcendental_
theories: in his abstract reasoning, he misses his way by strewing it with
flowers. All that he has done of moment, he had done twenty years ago:
since then, he may be said to have lived on the sound of his own voice.
Mr. Coleridge is too rich in intellectual wealth, to need to task himself
to any drudgery: he has only to draw the sliders of his imagination, and a
thousand subjects expand before him, startling him with their brilliancy,
or losing themselves in endless obscurity--

"And by the force of blear illusion,
They draw him on to his confusion."

What is the little he could add to the stock, compared with the countless
stores that lie about him, that he should stoop to pick up a name, or to
polish an idle fancy? He wa