the Tuesday following, the half-inspired speaker came. I was called
down into the room where he was, and went half-hoping, half-afraid. He
received me very graciously, and I listened for a long time without
uttering a word. I did not suffer in his opinion by my silence. "For those
two hours," he afterwards was pleased to say, "he was conversing with W.
H.'s forehead!" His appearance was different from what I had anticipated
from seeing him before. At a distance, and in the dim light of the
chapel, there was to me a strange wildness in his aspect, a dusky
obscurity, and I thought him pitted with the small-pox. His complexion was
at that time clear, and even bright--

"As are the children of yon azure sheen."

His forehead was broad and high, light as if built of ivory, with large
projecting eyebrows, and his eyes rolling beneath them like a sea with
darkened lustre. "A certain tender bloom his face o'erspread," a purple
tinge as we see it in the pale thoughtful complexions of the Spanish
portrait-painters, Murillo and Velasquez. His mouth was gross, voluptuous,
open, eloquent; his chin good-humoured and round; but his nose, the rudder
of the face, the index of the will, was small, feeble, nothing--like what
he has done. It might seem that the genius of his face as from a height
surveyed and projected him (with sufficient capacity and huge aspiration)
into the world unknown of thought and imagination, with nothing to support
or guide his veering purpose, as if Columbus had launched his adventurous
course for the New World in a scallop, without oars or compass. So at
least I comment on it after the event. Coleridge in his person was rather
above the common size, inclining to the corpulent, or like Lord Hamlet,
"somewhat fat and pursy." His hair (now, alas! grey) was then black and
glossy as the raven's, and fell in smooth masses over his forehead. This
long pendulous hair is peculiar to enthusiasts, to those whose minds tend
heavenward; and is traditionally inseparable (though of a different
colour) from the pictures of Christ. It ought to belong, as a character,
to all who preach _Christ crucified_, and Coleridge was at that time one
of those!

It was curious to observe the contrast between him and my father, who was
a veteran in the cause, and then declining into the vale of years. He had
been a poor Irish lad, carefully brought up by his parents, and sent to
the University of Glasgow (where he studied under Adam Smi