prose
of Jeremy Taylor, and wept over Bowles's Sonnets, and studied Cowper's
blank verse, and betook himself to Thomson's Castle of Indolence, and
sported with the wits of Charles the Second's days and of Queen Anne, and
relished Swift's style and that of the John Bull (Arbuthnot's we mean, not
Mr. Croker's), and dallied with the British Essayists and Novelists, and
knew all qualities of more modern writers with a learned spirit, Johnson,
and Goldsmith, and Junius, and Burke, and Godwin, and the Sorrows of
Werter, and Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Voltaire, and Marivaux, and
Crebillon, and thousands more--now "laughed with Rabelais in his easy
chair" or pointed to Hogarth, or afterwards dwelt on Claude's classic
scenes, or spoke with rapture of Raphael, and compared the women at Rome
to figures that had walked out of his pictures, or visited the Oratory of
Pisa, and described the works of Giotto and Ghirlandaio and Massaccio, and
gave the moral of the picture of the Triumph of Death, where the beggars
and the wretched invoke his dreadful dart, but the rich and mighty of the
earth quail and shrink before it; and in that land of siren sights and
sounds, saw a dance of peasant girls, and was charmed with lutes and
gondolas,--or wandered into Germany and lost himself in the labyrinths of
the Hartz Forest and of the Kantean philosophy, and amongst the cabalistic
names of Fichte and Schelling and Lessing, and God knows who--this was
long after, but all the former while he had nerved his heart and filled
his eyes with tears, as he hailed the rising orb of liberty, since
quenched in darkness and in blood, and had kindled his affections at the
blaze of the French Revolution, and sang for joy when the towers of the
Bastile and the proud places of the insolent and the oppressor fell, and
would have floated his bark, freighted with fondest fancies, across the
Atlantic wave with Southey and others to seek for peace and freedom--

"In Philarmonia's undivided dale!"

Alas! "Frailty, thy name is _Genius_!"--What is become of all this mighty
heap of hope, of thought, of learning, and humanity? It has ended in
swallowing doses of oblivion and in writing paragraphs in the
_Courier_.--Such and so little is the mind of man!

It was not to be supposed that Mr. Coleridge could keep on at the rate he
set off; he could not realize all he knew or thought, and less could not
fix his desultory ambition; other stimulants supplied the place, and ke