d out of his
pictures, or visited the Oratory of Pisa, and described the works of
Giotto and Ghirlandaio and Massaccio, and gave the moral of the picture
of the Triumph of Death, where the beggars and the wretched invoke his
dreadful dart, but the rich and mighty of the earth quail and shrink
before it; and in that land of siren sights and sounds, saw a dance of
peasant girls, and was charmed with lutes and gondolas,--or wandered
into Germany and lost himself in the labyrinths of the Hartz Forest and
of the Kantean philosophy, and amongst the cabalistic names of Fichte
and Schelling and Lessing, and God knows who--this was long after, but
all the former while, he had nerved his heart and filled his eyes
with tears, as he hailed the rising orb of liberty, since quenched in
darkness and in blood, and had kindled his affections at the blaze of
the French Revolution, and sang for joy when the towers of the Bastile
and the proud places of the insolent and the oppressor fell, and would
have floated his bark, freighted with fondest fancies, across the
Atlantic wave with Southey and others to seek for peace and freedom--

"In Philarmonia's undivided dale!"

Alas! "Frailty, thy name is _Genius_!"--What is become of all this
mighty heap of hope, of thought, of learning, and humanity? It has
ended in swallowing doses of oblivion and in writing paragraphs in the
_Courier_.--Such, and so little is the mind of man!

It was not to be supposed that Mr. Coleridge could keep on at the rate
he set off; he could not realize all he knew or thought, and less could
not fix his desultory ambition; other stimulants supplied the place, and
kept up the intoxicating dream, the fever and the madness of his early
impressions. Liberty (the philosopher's and the poet's bride) had fallen
a victim, meanwhile, to the murderous practices of the hag, Legitimacy.
Proscribed by court-hirelings, too romantic for the herd of vulgar
politicians, our enthusiast stood at bay, and at last turned on the
pivot of a subtle casuistry to the _unclean side:_ but his discursive
reason would not let him trammel himself into a poet-laureate or
stamp-distributor, and he stopped, ere he had quite passed that
well-known "bourne from whence no traveller returns"--and so has sunk
into torpid, uneasy repose, tantalized by useless resources, haunted by
vain imaginings, his lips idly moving, but his heart forever still, or,
as the shattered chords vibrate of themselves, making