rich, distilled
perfumes;" another, "He talks like an angel, and does--nothing!"

The Aids to Reflection, The Friend, The Biographia Literaria: those
books came from one whose vocation was in the world of the imagination,
the theory and practice of poetry. And yet, perhaps, of all books that
have been influential in modern times, they are furthest from artistic
form--bundles of notes; the original matter inseparably mixed up with
that borrowed from others; the whole, just that mere preparation for an
artistic effect which the finished literary artist would be careful one
day to destroy. Here, again, we have a trait profoundly characteristic
of Coleridge. He sometimes attempts to reduce a phase of thought,
subtle and exquisite, to conditions too rough for it. He uses a purely
speculative gift for direct moral edification. Scientific truth is a
thing fugitive, relative, full of fine gradations: he tries to fix it
in absolute formulas. The Aids to Reflection, The Friend, are [73]
efforts to propagate the volatile spirit of conversation into the less
ethereal fabric of a written book; and it is only here or there that
the poorer matter becomes vibrant, is really lifted by the spirit.

De Quincey said of him that "he wanted better bread than can be made
with wheat:" Lamb, that from childhood he had "hungered for eternity."
Yet the faintness, the continuous dissolution, whatever its cause,
which soon supplanted the buoyancy of his first wonderful years, had
its own consumptive refinements, and even brought, as to the "Beautiful
Soul" in Wilhelm Meister, a faint religious ecstasy--that "singing in
the sails" which is not of the breeze. Here again is one of his
occasional notes:--

"In looking at objects of nature while I am thinking, as at yonder
moon, dim-glimmering through the window-pane, I seem rather to be
seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical language for something within
me, that already and for ever exists, than observing anything new.
Even when the latter is the case, yet still I have always an obscure
feeling, as if that new phenomenon were the dim awaking of a forgotten
or hidden truth of my inner nature. While I was preparing the pen to
make this remark, I lost the train of thought which had led me to it."

What a distemper of the eye of the mind! What an almost bodily
distemper there is in that!

Coleridge's intellectual sorrows were many; [74] but he had one
singular intellectual happiness. Wit