piled, mere indolence and infirmity of purpose-may have the effect of silencing for ever the voice which had once given birth to such bold and hopeful melody.

The name of Coleridge is amongst the most distinguished of those who, in our days, have obtained a wide and early celebrity; and he retained, for many years afterwards, a dubious reputation as a poet, moralist, and metaphysician, rather in posse than in actual and public notoriety. Beautiful as his early poetical essays were, and much as his readers have regretted that they are so few and so brief, yet all of them have the same purposeless and fragmentary character, which is equally perceptible in his prose compositions. In all, the writer appears, as was probably the case, to have had some distant and indistinct principle in view, which he sought to illustrate rather by the projection of dark hints and allusions, always approaching, but never wholly realizing the production of a distinct and finite idea. During all his life he had great and noble aims to compass. The science of psychology, its connexion with religion, poetry, and the social life of man, was the chief object of his contemplation, which he sought to reduce into a complete system. But he never appeared to advance beyond a few steps in a straight direction towards his object. All his latter years were spent, for the most part, in that purposeless and hopeless exertion depicted in his own melancholy lines.

All nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair :
The bees are stirring-birds upon the wing-
And winter, slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of spring.
And I, the while, the sole unbusied thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

Yet well I ken the haunts where amaranths blow-
Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow:
Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may !
For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away:
With lip unbrighten'd, wreathless brow, I stroll:
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?
Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,

And hope without an object cannot live.'

It was in this habitually dejected frame of mind, and under the pressure of severe bodily infirmities, that he began to acquire that celebrity as a converser, or rather a discourser, which rendered him, during the latter years of his life, again an object of public curiosity and interest. The unfixed, excursive character

of mind, which grew wearied and impatient under the trammels of composition, found scope enough for its wanderings in the freedom of unrestrained discussion. Those who were admitted to the small society in which he lived, spread every where the fame of his extraordinary fluency and variety of conversation, and that eccentric bias of mind which gave a peculiar flavour and zest even to the most ordinary topics, when illustrated by his fancy. Thus it became a sort of fashion, to attend occasionally at the evening reunions which took place at his retired dwelling. Many were attracted by his eloquent expositions of metaphysical theory; and discovered, or imagined that they discovered, some links of that connected system of philosophy which he was always announcing as about to be given to the world; but of which these Platonic fragments furnished the only specimen. Those who took less interest in these exalted speculations, or who candidly confessed their inability to comprehend them, found nevertheless much delight and instruction, when the course of his hurrying thoughts led him to touch on subjects of more general attraction; -on history, literature (in which his critical tact was of the most exquisite character), or on a thousand topics of every day discussion. Conversation, in the ordinary sense of the word, was not to be met with in his company. His visitors came only for the purpose of hearing the dissertations of a lecturer. Mr Coleridge's manner, on first entering a room, previous to one of these exhibitions of his discursive genius, forcibly recalled to us the description given of Madame de Staël, by her biographer, Madame de Necker-Saussure. Lorsque Madame de Staël entrait ⚫ dans un salon, sa démarche était assez grave et solennelle : un peu de timidité l'obligeoit à recueillir sérieusement ses forces, quand elle allait attirer les regards. Et comme cette nuance 'd'embarras ne lui avait permis de rien distinguer d'abord, il ⚫ semblait que son visage s'illuminaît à mesure qu'elle reconnassait les personnes. On pouvait juger que tous les noms étaient inscrits chez elle avec bienveillance.' This expression of courteous benevolence of manner was peculiarly characteristic of him; and a few sentences of remark or enquiry, addressed as if casually to the youngest and least known of his guests, sufficed to place the visitor on a footing of unconscious self-confidence, and remove all the embarrassment which the presence of so singular and gifted a man was wont to create. But his hesitation was

not produced, like hers, by the real or affected timidity of a person about to make a display. It was the éblouissement of a hermit, brought suddenly from his cell into a circle of devout admirers. There was no mauvaise honte in his manner,' says a

powerful describer, but simple perplexity, and an apparent difficulty in recovering his position among daylight realities.' But the difficulty, from whatever source arising, soon vanished as he grew reconciled to his change of atmosphere. A few casual remarks on the occurrences or books of the day were, perhaps, hazarded by some member of the company; as soon as any of these had thrown his mind into its peculiar track, or connected itself by association with the course of ideas which had accumulated in his brain during the day, his mysterious grey eye seemed to light up, his countenance to expand into an expression of eagerness, as if labouring to communicate more than his utterance was able to embody; and the whole contents of his fancy were then poured out in one uninterrupted flow of eloquence, in which the transitions from one subject to another were scarcely marked, even by a difference of tone or cadence. Those who were most frequently in his company, and most accustomed to his peculiarities of thought and expression, were seldom able to follow the tortuous ramifications of his discourse. It was amusing to see the field of listeners, if we may so express ourselves, successively distanced some, unaccustomed to such exhibitions, thrown out at once, and content to gaze with a comic expression of mixed admiration and perplexity ;-others maintaining their attention, and some few their argument, for a shorter or longer period, with occasional remarks dwindling at last to an inarticulate signification of assent, until their faculties were fairly bewildered by the strange succession of ideas thus forced upon them. But all were held alike by an inexplicable fascination of voice and manner, which seemed, while the display continued, to influence them as if they were in the presence of actual inspiration; although upon reflection they might not unfrequently conclude, that they had been deceived into imagining a transcendental meaning, where the speaker was in fact carried out of the sphere of meaning altogether by the force and rapidity of his own conceptions.

This was more particularly the case, when from any other of the miscellaneous subjects which his fertile fancy was wont to illustrate, or his reason to discuss, he retreated into his own favourite region that half explored, but singularly attractive province, which lies on the intermediate confine between physiological science and metaphysical speculation; which connects the philosophy of matter with the philosophy of the spirit; and in which the phenomena of experience (whether observed in natural history, or in the common occurrences of life) are illustrated by the laws imposed a priori on the human mind. The theory of

dreams and apparitions; the doctrines of phrenology, animal magnetism, and similar semi-medical questions; the singular forms in which enthusiasm or other disturbing causes has influenced the passive faculties of the mind ;—all these topics, so attractive from their mysterious character, so much inviting and yet defying investigation, afforded a frequent exercise to his wandering fancy. On such subjects, and on the Platonic, or Kantian theory of the mind, to which they invariably led him, he would hold forth to his audience, mazed and half entranced, forgetting time, place, and company, in his eagerness to unburden himself of the strange contents of his imagination, until his physical powers were exhausted, and his hearers dismissed at last through the ivory gate of his philosophical limbo.

Undoubtedly there were interspersed in Mr Coleridge's conversation numberless fragments of value as well as beauty, and which, from their independent excellence, well deserved to be recorded, and would lose little by being committed to writing. But still the general tone of his discourse was so tinctured, first with the peculiarities of his system of philosophy, and next with those of his singular life and character, that we should scarcely have expected to find, in volumes professing to give a report of his Table Talk,' any thing to satisfy the ideas which his occasional hearers might entertain of such a composition. We do not deny, that the editor of these volumes has acquitted himself in a manner highly creditable. We do not quarrel with the affectionate feelings of a relative and a disciple, although occasionally vented in unnecessary eulogy. And his notes display a variety of literary attainment, which render him well able to follow and to illustrate the excursions of his hero's oratory. But it appears to us, that he has sacrificed too much to the object of making his book easy and popular; by clearing the speaker's opinions from those peculiarities of thought and manner which so generally accompanied their delivery. He has endeavoured to reduce to the form of aphorisms the sayings of one of the most eloquent, but least concise and definite of reasoners; and has extracted in this manner, in unconnected fragments, much which was evidently wrapt up in the texture of some fine-spun but continuous theory. And many of these sentences, when thus presented in the form of ordinary language, are so little remarkable for point or originality, that the uninformed reader would be at a loss to conjecture the source of their utterer's reputation. In fact, the qualities which most attracted and captivated the attention of Mr Coleridge's hearers, were not such as would furnish matter for a compiler of his conversation. There was nothing dramatic in his mode of conveying instruction. He was fond of argument ;

but that sort of argument only in which he could display the vast resources of his own erratic talent. He overflowed far too much with metaphor and illustration, to be a disputant. He sought out, indeed, singular associates, and had a predilection for people of an extraordinary cast of opinion, especially if their sentiments widely differed from his own; but we suspect that this was rather for the sake of conveying his own notions on their peculiar doctrines, than in order to confront them in logical controversy. These pages, like those of the Biographia Literaria,' contain some ludicrous anecdotes of his various essays in the way of discussion with Jews, infidels, and heretics of every description. 'He told me,' says the editor of these volumes, that he had for ' a long time been amusing himself with a clandestine attempt upon the faith of three or four persons whom he was in the habit of seeing occasionally. I think he was undermining, at the time he mentioned this to me, a Jew, a Swedenborgian, a Roman Catholic, and a New Jerusalemite, or by whatever ' name the members of that somewhat small, but very respectable, church, planted in the neighbourhood of Lincoln's Inn Fields, delight to be known. He said he had made most way 'with the disciple of Swedenborg, who might be considered as a 'convert; that he had perplexed the Jew, and put the Roman Catholic into a bad humour; but that upon the New Jerusa'lemite he had made no more impression than if he had been 'arguing with the man in the moon.' It was odd to remark the contrast between the philosopher himself, with his magniloquent rhetoric and his unconscious simplicity of address, and the halfinformed beings into whose company he was fond of throwing himself. It was something of the same propensity which made him at one time select the late Mr Irving as a favourite,-partly from his strange religious opinions, partly from his imitations of the old English divines, with whom Coleridge himself was so conversant. And although he appears to speak slightingly in these volumes of that unfortunate man, and to complain that he only visited the philosopher's retreat at Highgate for the purpose of picking up hints for sermons, he certainly felt at one time the blindest veneration for the preacher: witness the noble lines in which Irving is addressed in the Aids to Reflection.' But, in general, no one was less dependent on others for materials of conversation. Place, or company, seemed to make little or no difference to him. There was nothing of local or temporary peculiarity, no apropos or mere conversation of the day, in the circle in which he presided. He almost realized the character of his own imaginary hero of an intended romance—' a man