ss of a somewhat
inferior theological literature.

"I was driven from life in motion to life in thought and sensation:" so
Coleridge sums up his childhood, with its delicacy, its sensitiveness,
and passion. But at twenty-five he was exercising a wonderful charm,
and had already defined for himself his peculiar line of intellectual
activity. He had an odd, attractive gift of conversation, or rather of
monologue, as Madame de Stael observed of him, full of bizarreries,
with the rapid alternations of a dream, and here or there an unexpected
summons into a world [71] strange to the hearer, abounding in images
drawn from a sort of divided imperfect life, the consciousness of the
opium-eater, as of one to whom the external world penetrated only in
part, and, blent with all this, passages of deep obscurity, precious,
if at all, only for their musical cadence, echoes in Coleridge of the
eloquence of those older English writers of whom he was so ardent a
lover. And all through this brilliant early manhood we may discern the
power of the "Asiatic" temperament, of that voluptuousness, which is
connected perhaps with his appreciation of the intimacy, the almost
mystical communion of touch, between nature and man. "I am much
better," he writes, "and my new and tender health is all over me like a
voluptuous feeling." And whatever fame, or charm, or life-inspiring
gift he has had as a speculative thinker, is the vibration of the
interest he excited then, the propulsion into years which clouded his
early promise of that first buoyant, irresistible, self-assertion. So
great is even the indirect power of a sincere effort towards the ideal
life, of even a temporary escape of the spirit from routine.

In 1798 he visited Germany, then, the only half-known, "promised land,"
of the metaphysical, the "absolute," philosophy. A beautiful fragment
of this period remains, describing a spring excursion to the Brocken.
His excitement still vibrates in it. Love, all joyful states [72] of
mind, are self-expressive: they loosen the tongue, they fill the
thoughts with sensuous images, they harmonise one with the world of
sight. We hear of the "rich graciousness and courtesy" of Coleridge's
manner, of the white and delicate skin, the abundant black hair, the
full, almost animal lips--that whole physiognomy of the dreamer,
already touched with narcotism. One says, of the beginning of one of
his Unitarian sermons: "His voice rose like a stream of