f-way to
meet me. I was not less surprised than the shepherd-boy (this simile is to
be found in Cassandra) when he sees a thunderbolt fall close at his feet.
I stammered out my acknowledgments and acceptance of this offer (I thought
Mr. Wedgwood's annuity a trifle to it) as well as I could; and this mighty
business being settled, the poet-preacher took leave, and I accompanied
him six miles on the road. It was a fine morning in the middle of winter,
and he talked the whole way. The scholar in Chaucer is described as going

----"Sounding on his way."

So Coleridge went on his. In digressing, in dilating, in passing from
subject to subject, he appeared to me to float in air, to slide on ice. He
told me in confidence (going along) that he should have preached two
sermons before he accepted the situation at Shrewsbury, one on Infant
Baptism, the other on the Lord's Supper, shewing that he could not
administer either, which would have effectually disqualified him for the
object in view. I observed that he continually crossed me on the way by
shifting from one side of the foot-path to the other. This struck me as an
odd movement; but I did not at that time connect it with any instability
of purpose or involuntary change of principle, as I have done since. He
seemed unable to keep on in a strait line. He spoke slightingly of Hume
(whose Essay on Miracles he said was stolen from an objection started in
one of South's sermons--_Credat Judaeus Appella_!) I was not very much
pleased at this account of Hume, for I had just been reading, with
infinite relish, that completest of all metaphysical _choke-pears_, his
_Treatise on Human Nature_, to which the _Essays_, in point of scholastic
subtlety and close reasoning, are mere elegant trifling, light
summer-reading. Coleridge even denied the excellence of Hume's general
style, which I think betrayed a want of taste or candour. He however made
me amends by the manner in which he spoke of Berkeley. He dwelt
particularly on his _Essay on Vision_ as a masterpiece of analytical
reasoning. So it undoubtedly is. He was exceedingly angry with Dr. Johnson
for striking the stone with his foot, in allusion to this author's Theory
of Matter and Spirit, and saying, "Thus I confute him, Sir." Coleridge
drew a parallel (I don't know how he brought about the connection) between
Bishop Berkeley and Tom Paine. He said the one was an instance of a
subtle, the other of an acute mind, than which no two t