es by the road-side, a sound was in my ears as of a Siren's
song; I was stunned, startled with it, as from deep sleep; but I had no
notion then that I should ever be able to express my admiration to others
in motley imagery or quaint allusion, till the light of his genius shone
into my soul, like the sun's rays glittering in the puddles of the road. I
was at that time dumb, inarticulate, helpless, like a worm by the
way-side, crushed, bleeding, lifeless; but now, bursting the deadly bands
that "bound them,

"With Styx nine times round them,"

my ideas float on winged words, and as they expand their plumes, catch the
golden light of other years. My soul has indeed remained in its original
bondage, dark, obscure, with longings infinite and unsatisfied; my heart,
shut up in the prison-house of this rude clay, has never found, nor will
it ever find, a heart to speak to; but that my understanding also did not
remain dumb and brutish, or at length found a language to express itself,
I owe to Coleridge. But this is not to my purpose.

My father lived ten miles from Shrewsbury, and was in the habit of
exchanging visits with Mr. Rowe, and with Mr. Jenkins of Whitchurch (nine
miles farther on) according to the custom of Dissenting Ministers in each
other's neighbourhood. A line of communication is thus established, by
which the flame of civil and religious liberty is kept alive, and
nourishes its smouldering fire unquenchable, like the fires in the
Agamemnon of AEschylus, placed at different stations, that waited for ten
long years to announce with their blazing pyramids the destruction of
Troy. Coleridge had agreed to come over to see my father, according to the
courtesy of the country, as Mr. Rowe's probable successor; but in the
meantime I had gone to hear him preach the Sunday after his arrival. A
poet and a philosopher getting up into a Unitarian pulpit to preach the
Gospel, was a romance in these degenerate days, a sort of revival of the
primitive spirit of Christianity, which was not to be resisted.

It was in January, 1798, that I rose one morning before day-light, to walk
ten miles in the mud, and went to hear this celebrated person preach.
Never, the longest day I have to live, shall I have such another walk as
this cold, raw, comfortless one, in the winter of the year 1798.--_Il y a
des impressions que ni le tems ni les circonstances peuvent effacer.
Dusse-je vivre des siecles entiers, le doux tems de ma jeunesse n