ading; but generally all topics led him, after a pass or two, into
the high seas of theosophic philosophy, the hazy infinitude of Kantean
transcendentalism, with its "sum-m-mjects" and "om-m-mjects." Sad
enough; for with such indolent impatience of the claims and ignorances
of others, he had not the least talent for explaining this or anything
unknown to them; and you swam and fluttered in the mistiest wide
unintelligible deluge of things, for most part in a rather profitless
uncomfortable manner.

Glorious islets, too, I have seen rise out of the haze; but they were
few, and soon swallowed in the general element again. Balmy sunny
islets, islets of the blest and the intelligible:--on which occasions
those secondary humming groups would all cease humming, and hang
breathless upon the eloquent words; till once your islet got wrapt in
the mist again, and they could recommence humming. Eloquent artistically
expressive words you always had; piercing radiances of a most subtle
insight came at intervals; tones of noble pious sympathy, recognizable
as pious though strangely colored, were never wanting long: but in
general you could not call this aimless, cloud-capt, cloud-based,
lawlessly meandering human discourse of reason by the name of "excellent
talk," but only of "surprising;" and were reminded bitterly of Hazlitt's
account of it: "Excellent talker, very,--if you let him start from no
premises and come to no conclusion." Coleridge was not without what
talkers call wit, and there were touches of prickly sarcasm in him,
contemptuous enough of the world and its idols and popular dignitaries;
he had traits even of poetic humor: but in general he seemed deficient
in laughter; or indeed in sympathy for concrete human things either on
the sunny or on the stormy side. One right peal of concrete laughter at
some convicted flesh-and-blood absurdity, one burst of noble indignation
at some injustice or depravity, rubbing elbows with us on this solid
Earth, how strange would it have been in that Kantean haze-world, and
how infinitely cheering amid its vacant air-castles and dim-melting
ghosts and shadows! None such ever came. His life had been an abstract
thinking and dreaming, idealistic, passed amid the ghosts of
defunct bodies and of unborn ones. The moaning singsong of that
theosophico-metaphysical monotony left on you, at last, a very dreary
feeling.

In close colloquy, flowing within narrower banks, I suppose he was more
defi