any one who was so utterly regardless of the reputation of the mere author as Mr. Coleridge—­one so lavish and indiscriminate in the exhibition of his own intellectual wealth before any and every person, no matter who—­one so reckless who might reap where he had most prodigally sown and watered.  “God knows,”—­as we once heard him exclaim upon the subject of his unpublished system of philosophy,—­“God knows, I have no author’s vanity about it.  I should be absolutely glad if I could hear that the thing had been done before me.”  It is somewhere told of Virgil, that he took more pleasure in the good verses of Varius and Horace than in his own.  We would not answer for that; but the story has always occurred to us, when we have seen Mr. Coleridge criticising and amending the work of a contemporary author with much more zeal and hilarity than we ever perceived him to display about anything of his own.

Perhaps our readers may have heard repeated a saying of Mr. Wordsworth, that many men of this age had done wonderful things, as Davy, Scott, Cuvier, &c.; but that Coleridge was the only wonderful man he ever knew.  Something, of course, must be allowed in this as in all other such cases for the antithesis; but we believe the fact really to be, that the greater part of those who have occasionally visited Mr. Coleridge have left him with a feeling akin to the judgment indicated in the above remark.  They admire the man more than his works, or they forget the works in the absorbing impression made by the living author.  And no wonder.  Those who remember him in his more vigorous days can bear witness to the peculiarity and transcendant power of his conversational eloquence.  It was unlike anything that could be heard elsewhere; the kind was different, the degree was different, the manner was different.  The boundless range of scientific knowledge, the brilliancy and exquisite nicety of illustration, the deep and ready reasoning, the strangeness and immensity of bookish lore—­were not all; the dramatic story, the joke, the pun, the festivity, must be added—­and with these the clerical-looking dress, the thick waving silver hair, the youthful-coloured cheek, the indefinable mouth and lips, the quick yet steady and penetrating greenish grey eye, the slow and continuous enunciation, and the everlasting music of his tones,—­all went to make up the image and constitute the living presence of the man.  He is now no longer young, and bodily infirmities, we regret to know, have pressed heavily upon him.  His natural force is indeed abated; but his eye is not dim, neither is his mind yet enfeebled.  “O youth!” he says in one of the most exquisitely finished of his later poems—­

  O youth! for years so many and sweet,
  ’Tis known that thou and I were one,
  I’ll think it but a fond conceit—­
  It cannot be that thou art gone! 
  Thy vesper bell hath not yet tolled:—­
  And thou wert aye a masker bold! 
  What strange disguise hast now put on,
  To make believe that thou art gone? 
  I see these locks in silvery slips,
  This drooping gait, this altered size;—­
  But springtide blossoms on thy lips,
  And tears take sunshine from thine eyes! 
  Life is but thought:  so think I will
  That Youth and I are house-mates still.