of a poet. Mr. Coleridge talks of himself, without
being an egotist, for in him the individual is always merged in the
abstract and general. He distinguished himself at school and at the
University by his knowledge of the classics, and gained several prizes for
Greek epigrams. How many men are there (great scholars, celebrated names
in literature) who having done the same thing in their youth, have no
other idea all the rest of their lives but of this achievement, of a
fellowship and dinner, and who, installed in academic honours, would look
down on our author as a mere strolling bard! At Christ's Hospital, where
he was brought up, he was the idol of those among his schoolfellows, who
mingled with their bookish studies the music of thought and of humanity;
and he was usually attended round the cloisters by a group of these
(inspiring and inspired) whose hearts, even then, burnt within them as he
talked, and where the sounds yet linger to mock ELIA on his way, still
turning pensive to the past! One of the finest and rarest parts of Mr.
Coleridge's conversation, is when he expatiates on the Greek tragedians
(not that he is not well acquainted, when he pleases, with the epic poets,
or the philosophers, or orators, or historians of antiquity)--on the
subtle reasonings and melting pathos of Euripides, on the harmonious
gracefulness of Sophocles, tuning his love-laboured song, like sweetest
warblings from a sacred grove; on the high-wrought, trumpet-tongued
eloquence of AEschylus, whose Prometheus, above all, is like an Ode to
Fate, and a pleading with Providence, his thoughts being let loose as his
body is chained on his solitary rock, and his afflicted will (the emblem
of mortality)

"Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny."

As the impassioned critic speaks and rises in his theme, you would think
you heard the voice of the Man hated by the Gods, contending with the wild
winds as they roar, and his eye glitters with the spirit of Antiquity!

Next, he was engaged with Hartley's tribes of mind, "etherial braid,
thought-woven,"--and he busied himself for a year or two with vibrations
and vibratiuncles, and the great law of association that binds all things
in its mystic chain, and the doctrine of Necessity (the mild teacher of
Charity) and the Millennium, anticipative of a life to come--and he
plunged deep into the controversy on Matter and Spirit, and, as an escape
from Dr. Priestley's Materialism, where he felt himself