ing men, a higher than literary, a kind
of prophetic or magician character. He was thought to hold, he alone
in England, the key of German and other Transcendentalisms; knew the
sublime secret of believing by "the reason" what "the understanding" had
been obliged to fling out as incredible; and could still, after Hume
and Voltaire had done their best and worst with him, profess himself an
orthodox Christian, and say and print to the Church of England, with its
singular old rubrics and surplices at Allhallowtide, _Esto perpetua_.
A sublime man; who, alone in those dark days, had saved his crown
of spiritual manhood; escaping from the black materialisms, and
revolutionary deluges, with "God, Freedom, Immortality" still his: a
king of men. The practical intellects of the world did not much heed
him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer: but to the
rising spirits of the young generation he had this dusky sublime
character; and sat there as a kind of _Magus_, girt in mystery and
enigma; his Dodona oak-grove (Mr. Gilman's house at Highgate) whispering
strange things, uncertain whether oracles or jargon.

The Gilmans did not encourage much company, or excitation of any sort,
round their sage; nevertheless access to him, if a youth did reverently
wish it, was not difficult. He would stroll about the pleasant garden
with you, sit in the pleasant rooms of the place,--perhaps take you
to his own peculiar room, high up, with a rearward view, which was the
chief view of all. A really charming outlook, in fine weather. Close
at hand, wide sweep of flowery leafy gardens, their few houses mostly
hidden, the very chimney-pots veiled under blossomy umbrage, flowed
gloriously down hill; gloriously issuing in wide-tufted undulating
plain-country, rich in all charms of field and town. Waving blooming
country of the brightest green; dotted all over with handsome villas,
handsome groves; crossed by roads and human traffic, here inaudible or
heard only as a musical hum: and behind all swam, under olive-tinted
haze, the illimitable limitary ocean of London, with its domes and
steeples definite in the sun, big Paul's and the many memories attached
to it hanging high over all. Nowhere, of its kind, could you see a
grander prospect on a bright summer day, with the set of the air going
southward,--southward, and so draping with the city-smoke not you
but the city. Here for hours would Coleridge talk, concerning all
conceivable or incon