Our author’s mind is (as he himself might express it) tangential.  There is no subject on which he has not touched, none on which he has rested.  With an understanding fertile, subtle, expansive, “quick, forgetive, apprehensive,” beyond all living precedent, few traces of it will perhaps remain.  He lends himself to all impressions alike; he gives up his mind and liberty of thought to none.  He is a general lover of art and science, and wedded to no one in particular.  He pursues knowledge as a mistress, with outstretched hands and winged speed; but as he is about to embrace her, his Daphne turns—­alas! not to a laurel!  Hardly a speculation has been left on record from the earliest time, but it is loosely folded up in Mr. Coleridge’s memory, like a rich, but somewhat tattered piece of tapestry; we might add (with more seeming than real extravagance), that scarce a thought can pass through the mind of man, but its sound has at some time or other passed over his head with rustling pinions.  On whatever question or author you speak, he is prepared to take up the theme with advantage—­from Peter Abelard down to Thomas Moore, from the subtlest metaphysics to the politics of the Courier.  There is no man of genius, in whose praise he descants, but the critic seems to stand above the author, and “what in him is weak, to strengthen, what is low, to raise and support:”  nor is there any work of genius that does not come out of his hands like an Illuminated Missal, sparkling even in its defects.  If Mr. Coleridge had not been the most impressive talker of his age, he would probably have been the finest writer; but he lays down his pen to make sure of an auditor, and mortgages the admiration of posterity for the stare of an idler.  If he had not been a poet, he would have been a powerful logician; if he had not dipped his wing in the Unitarian controversy, he might have soared to the very summit of fancy.  But in writing verse, he is trying to subject the Muse to transcendental theories:  in his abstract reasoning, he misses his way by strewing it with flowers.  All that he has done of moment, he had done twenty years ago:  since then, he may be said to have lived on the sound of his own voice.  Mr. Coleridge is too rich in intellectual wealth, to need to task himself to any drudgery:  he has only to draw the sliders of his imagination, and a thousand subjects expand before him, startling him with their brilliancy, or losing themselves in endless obscurity—­

  “And by the force of blear illusion,
  They draw him on to his confusion.”

What is the little he could add to the stock, compared with the countless stores that lie about him, that he should stoop to pick up a name, or to polish an idle fancy?  He walks abroad in the majesty of an universal understanding, eyeing the “rich strond,” or golden sky above him, and “goes sounding on his way,” in eloquent accents, uncompelled and free!