more than a little damaged by the habit of laudanum; but even then Lamb wrote:  “His face, when he repeats his verses, hath its ancient glory.”  Most of Coleridge’s great contemporaries were aware of that glory.  Even those who were afterwards to be counted among his revilers, such as Hazlitt and De Quincey, had known what it was to be disciples at the feet of this inspired ruin.  They spoke not only of his mind, but even of his physical characteristics—­his voice and his hair—­as though these belonged to the one man of his time whose food was ambrosia.  Even as a boy at Christ’s Hospital, according to Lamb, he used to make the “casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, intranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the young Mirandola), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Iamblichus, or Plotinus ... or reciting Homer in the Greek, or Pindar—­while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the accents of the inspired charity-boy!”

It is exceedingly important that, as we read Coleridge, we should constantly remember what an archangel he was in the eyes of his contemporaries. Christabel and Kubla Kahn we could read, no doubt, in perfect enjoyment even if we did not know the author’s name.  For the rest, there is so much flagging of wing both in his verse and in his prose that, if we did not remind ourselves what flights he was born to take, we might persuade ourselves at times that there was little in his work but the dull flappings and slitherings of a penguin.  His genius is intermittent and comes arbitrarily to an end.  He is inspired only in fragments and aphorisms.  He was all but incapable of writing a complete book or a complete poem at a high level.  His irresponsibility as an author is described in that sentence in which he says:  “I have laid too many eggs in the hot sands of this wilderness, the world, with ostrich carelessness and ostrich oblivion.”  His literary plans had a ludicrous way of breaking down.  It was characteristic of him that, in 1817, when he projected a complete edition of his poems, under the title Sibylline Leaves, he omitted to publish Volume I. and published only Volume II.  He would announce a lecture on Milton, and then give his audience “a very eloquent and popular discourse on the general character of Shakespeare.”  His two finest poems he never finished.  He wrote not by an act of the will but according to the wind, and when the wind dropped he came to earth.  It was as though he could soar but was unable to fly.  It is this that differentiates him from other great poets or critics.  None of them has left such a record of unfulfilled purposes.  It is not that he did not get through an enormous amount of work, but that, like the revellers in Mr. Chesterton’s poem, he “went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head,” and in the end he did not get to Birmingham.  Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch gives an amusing account