far from uniformly at his best. Fragmentary and obscure,
but often eloquent, and always at once earnest and ingenious, those
writings, supplementing his remarkable gift of conversation, were
directly and indirectly influential, even on some the furthest removed
from Coleridge's own masters; on John Stuart Mill, for instance, and
some of the earlier writers of the "high-church" school. Like his
verse, they display him also in two other characters--as a student of
words, and as a psychologist, that is, as a more minute observer or
student than other men of the phenomena of mind. To note the recondite
associations of words, old or new; to expound the logic, the reasonable
soul, of their various uses; to recover the interest of older writers
who had had a phraseology of their own--this was a vein of inquiry
allied to his undoubted gift of tracking out and analysing curious
modes of thought. A [83] quaint fragment of verse on Human Life might
serve to illustrate his study of the earlier English philosophical
poetry. The latter gift, that power of the "subtle-souled
psychologist," as Shelley calls him, seems to have been connected with
some tendency to disease in the physical temperament, something of a
morbid want of balance in those parts where the physical and
intellectual elements mix most closely together, with a kind of languid
visionariness, deep-seated in the very constitution of the "narcotist,"
who had quite a gift for "plucking the poisons of self-harm," and which
the actual habit of taking opium, accidentally acquired, did but
reinforce. This morbid languor of nature, connected both with his
fitfulness of purpose and his rich delicate dreaminess, qualifies
Coleridge's poetic composition even more than his prose; his verse,
with the exception of his avowedly political poems, being, unlike that
of the "Lake School," to which in some respects he belongs, singularly
unaffected by any moral, or professional, or personal effort or
ambition,--"written," as he says, "after the more violent emotions of
sorrow, to give him pleasure, when perhaps nothing else could;" but
coming thus, indeed, very close to his own most intimately personal
characteristics, and having a certain languidly soothing grace or
cadence, for its most fixed quality, from first to last. After some
Platonic soliloquy on a flower opening on a fine day in February, he
goes on-- [84]

Dim similitudes
Weaving in mortal strains, I've stolen one ho