pany about three hours, and of that time he spoke during two and
three-quarters. It would have been delightful to listen as attentively,
and certainly as easy for him to speak just as well, for the next
forty-eight hours. On the whole, his conversation, or rather monologue,
is by far the most interesting I ever read or heard of. Dr. Johnson's
talk, with which it is obvious to compare it, seems to me immeasurably
inferior. It is better balanced and squared, and more ponderous with
epithets, but the spirit and flavour and fragrance, the knowledge and the
genius, are all wanting. The one is a house of brick, the other a quarry
of jasper. It is painful to observe in Coleridge, that with all the
kindness and glorious far-seeing intelligence of his eye, there is a
glare in it, a light half-unearthly and morbid. It is the glittering eye
of the Ancient Mariner. His cheek too shows a flush of over-excitement,
the ridge of a storm-cloud at sunset. When he dies, another, and the
greatest of their race, will rejoin the few immortals, the ill-understood
and ill-requited, who have walked this earth." Had Coleridge ever a more
genial visitant than the farmer-looking, but eloquent and philanthropic
Chalmers, who in 1839 came from Scotland to London, and of course clomb
up Highgate Hill to pay a visit to Coleridge, he says--"Half-an-hour with
Coleridge was filled up without intermission by one continuous flow of
eloquent discourse from that prince of talkers. He began, in answer to
the common inquiries as to his health, by telling of a fit of
insensibility in which, three weeks before, he had lain for thirty-five
minutes. As sensibility returned, and before he had opened his eyes, he
uttered a sentence about the fugacious nature of consciousness, from
which he passed to a discussion of the singular relations between the
soul and the body. Asking for Mr. Irving, but waiting for no reply, he
poured out an eloquent tribute of his regard, mourning pathetically that
such a man should be throwing himself away. Mr. Irving's book on the
'Human Nature of Christ' in his analysis was minute to absurdity; one
would imagine that the pickling and preserving were to follow, it was so
like a cookery-book. Unfolding then his own scheme of the
Apocalypse--talking of the mighty contrast between its Christ and the
Christ of the Gospel narrative, Mr. Coleridge said that Jesus did not
come now as before, meek and gentle, healing the sick and feed