ers
by a group of these (inspiring and inspired) whose hearts, even then,
burnt within them as he talked, and where the sounds yet linger to mock
ELIA on his way, still turning pensive to the past! One of the finest
and rarest parts of Mr. Coleridge's conversation, is when he expatiates
on the Greek tragedians (not that he is not well acquainted, when he
pleases, with the epic poets, or the philosophers, or orators, or
historians of antiquity)--on the subtle reasonings and melting pathos
of Euripides, on the harmonious gracefulness of Sophocles, tuning his
love-laboured song, like sweetest warblings from a sacred grove; on the
high-wrought trumpet-tongued eloquence of Aeschylus, whose Prometheus,
above all, is like an Ode to Fate, and a pleading with Providence, his
thoughts being let loose as his body is chained on his solitary rock,
and his afflicted will (the emblem of mortality)

"Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny."

As the impassioned critic speaks and rises in his theme, you would think
you heard the voice of the Man hated by the Gods, contending with
the wild winds as they roar, and his eye glitters with the spirit of
Antiquity!

Next, he was engaged with Hartley's tribes of mind, "etherial braid,
thought-woven,"--and he busied himself for a year or two with
vibrations and vibratiuncles and the great law of association that binds
all things in its mystic chain, and the doctrine of Necessity (the
mild teacher of Charity) and the Millennium, anticipative of a life to
come--and he plunged deep into the controversy on Matter and Spirit,
and, as an escape from Dr. Priestley's Materialism, where he felt
himself imprisoned by the logician's spell, like Ariel in the
cloven pine-tree, he became suddenly enamoured of Bishop Berkeley's
fairy-world,[A] and used in all companies to build the universe, like
a brave poetical fiction, of fine words--and he was deep-read in
Malebranche, and in Cudworth's Intellectual System (a huge pile of
learning, unwieldy, enormous) and in Lord Brook's hieroglyphic theories,
and in Bishop Butler's Sermons, and in the Duchess of Newcastle's
fantastic folios, and in Clarke and South and Tillotson, and all the
fine thinkers and masculine reasoners of that age--and Leibnitz's
_Pre-established Harmony_ reared its arch above his head, like the
rainbow in the cloud, covenanting with the hopes of man--and then he
fell plump, ten thousand fathoms down (but his wings saved him harmless)
int