supposed that he had lost himself. They continued to admire the separate beauty of the thoughts, but did not see their relations to the dominant theme. Had the conversation been thrown upon paper, it might have been easy to trace the continuity of the links; just as in Bishop_Berkeley's "Siris," ,"1 from a pedestal so low and abject, so culinary, as Tar Water, the method of preparing it, and its medicinal effects, the dissertation ascends, like Jacob's ladder, by just gradations, into the Heaven of Heavens and the thrones of the Trinity. But Heaven is there connected with earth by the Homeric chain of gold; and, being subject to steady examination, it is easy to trace the links; whereas, in conversation, the loss of a single word may cause the whole cohesion to disappear from view. However, I can assert, upon my long and intimate knowledge of Coleridge's mind, that logic the most severe was as inalienable from his modes of thinking as grammar from his language.

On the present occasion, the original theme, started by myself, was Hartley and the Hartleian theory. I had carried as a little present to Coleridge a scarce Latin pamphlet, "De Ideis," written by Hartley about 1746,—that is, about three years earlier than the publication of his great work. He had also preluded to this great work in a little English medical tract upon Joanna Stephens's medicine for the stone; for indeed Hartley was the person upon whose evidence the House of Commons had mainly relied in giving to that same Joanna a reward of £5000 for her idle medicines—an application of public money not without its use, in so far as it engaged men by selfish motives to cultivate the public service, and to attempt public problems of very difficult solution; but else, in that particular instance, perfectly idle, as the groans of three generations since Joanna's era have too feelingly established. It is known to most literary people that Coleridge was, in early life, so passionate an admirer of the Hartleian philosophy that "Hartley" was the sole baptismal name which he gave to his eldest child;

1 Seiris ought to have been the title-i.e. Zeipis, a chain. From this defect in the orthography, I did not in my boyish days perceive nor could obtain any light upon, its meaning.

and in an early poem, entitled “Religious Musings," he has characterized Hartley as

66 Him of mortal kind

Wisest, him first who mark'd the ideal tribes

Up the fine fibres through the sentient brain
Pass in fine surges."

But at present (August 1807) all this was a forgotten thing.
Coleridge was so profoundly ashamed of the shallow Uni-
tarianism of Hartley, and so disgusted to think that he
could at any time have countenanced that creed, that he
would scarcely allow to Hartley the reverence which is un-
doubtedly his due; for I must contend that, waiving all
question of the extent to which Hartley would have pushed
it (as though the law of association accounted not only for
our complex pleasures and pains, but also might be made to
explain the act of ratiocination),—waiving also the physical
substratum of nervous vibrations and miniature vibrations
to which he has chosen to marry his theory of association;
-all this apart, I must contend that the "Essay on Man,
his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations" stands forward
as a specimen almost unique of elaborate theorizing, and a
monument of absolute beauty in the impression left of its
architectural grace. In this respect it has, to my mind, the
spotless beauty and the ideal proportions of some Grecian
statue. However, I confess that, being myself, from my ear-
liest years, a reverential believer in the doctrine of the Trinity,
simply because I never attempted to bring all things within
the mechanic understanding, and because, like Sir Thomas
Browne, my mind almost demanded mysteries in so mysteri-
ous a system of relations as those which connect us with
another world, and also because the farther my under-
standing opened the more I perceived of dim analogies to
strengthen my creed, and because nature herself, mere
physical nature, has mysteries no less profound; for these,
and for many other "becauses," I could not reconcile with
my general reverence for Mr. Coleridge the fact, so often
reported to me, that he was a Unitarian. But, said some
Bristol people to me, not only is he a Unitarian-he is also
a Socinian. In that case, I replied, I cannot hold him a
Christian. I am a liberal man, and have no bigotry or

hostile feelings towards a Socinian; but I can never think that man a Christian who has blotted out of his scheme the very powers by which only the great offices and functions of Christianity can be sustained; neither can I think that any man, though he make himself a marvellously clever disputant, ever could tower upwards into a very great philosopher unless he should begin or should end with Christianity. Kant is a dubious exception. Not that I mean to question his august pretensions, so far as they went, and in his proper line. Within his own circle none durst tread but he. But that circle was limited. He was called, by one who weighed him well, the alles-zermalmender, the world-shattering Kant. He could destroy-his intellect was essentially destructive. He was the Gog and he was the Magog of Hunnish desolation to the existing schemes of Philosophy. He probed them; he showed the vanity of vanities which besieged their foundations- -the rottenness below, the hollowness above. But he had no instincts of creation or restoration within his Apollyon mind; for he had no love, no faith, no self-distrust, no humility, no childlike docility; all which qualities belonged essentially to Coleridge's mind, and waited only for manhood and for sorrow to bring them forward.

Who can read without indignation of Kant that, at his own table, in social sincerity and confidential talk, let him say what he would in his books, he exulted in the prospect of absolute and ultimate annihilation; that he planted his glory in the grave, and was ambitious of rotting for ever? The King of Prussia, though a personal friend of Kant's, found himself obliged to level his state thunders at some of his doctrines, and terrified him in his advance; else I am persuaded that Kant would have formally delivered Atheism from the professor's chair, and would have enthroned the horrid Ghoulish creed (which privately he professed) in the University of Königsberg. It required the artillery of a great king to make him pause: his menacing or warning letter to Kant is extant. The general notion is, that the royal logic applied so austerely to the public conduct of Kant in his professor's chair was of that kind which rests its strength "upon thirty legions." My own belief is that the king had private information of Kant's ultimate tend

encies as revealed in his table-talk. The fact is that, as the stomach has been known, by means of its own potent acid secretion, to attack not only whatsoever alien body is introduced within it, but also (as John Hunter first showed) sometimes to attack itself and its own organic structure, so, and with the same preternatural extension of instinct, did Kant carry forward his destroying functions, until he turned them upon his own hopes and the pledges of his own superiority to the dog, the ape, the worm. But "exoriare aliquis"—and some philosopher, I am persuaded, will arise; and 66 one sling of some victorious arm ("Paradise Lost," B. x.) will yet destroy the destroyer, in so far as he has applied himself to the destruction of Christian hope. For my faith is that, though a great man may, by a rare possibility, be an infidel, an intellect of the highest order must build upon Christianity. A very clever architect may choose to show his power by building with insufficient materials; but the supreme architect must require the very best, because the perfection of the forms cannot be shown but in the perfection of the matter.

On these accounts I took the liberty of doubting, as often as I heard the reports I have mentioned of Coleridge; and I now found that he disowned most solemnly (and I may say penitentially) whatever had been true in these reports. Coleridge told me that it had cost him a painful effort, but not a moment's hesitation, to abjure his Unitarianism, from the circumstance that he had amongst the Unitarians many friends, to some of whom he was greatly indebted for great kindness. In particular, he mentioned Mr. Estlin of Bristol, a distinguished Dissenting clergyman, as one whom it grieved him to grieve. But he would not dissemble his altered views. I will add, at the risk of appearing to dwell too long on religious topics, that, on this my first introduction to Coleridge, he reverted with strong compunction to a sentiment which he had expressed in earlier days upon prayer. In one of his youthful poems, speaking of God, he had said

"Of whose omniscient and all-spreading love
Aught to implore were impotence of mind."

This sentiment he now so utterly condemned that, on the contrary, he told me, as his own peculiar opinion, that the act of praying was the very highest energy of which the human heart was capable; praying, that is, with the total concentration of the faculties; and the great mass of worldly men, and of learned men, he pronounced absolutely incapable of prayer.

For about three hours he had continued to talk, and in the course of this performance he had delivered many most striking aphorisms, embalming more weight of truth, and separately more deserving to be themselves embalmed, than would easily be found in a month's course of select reading. In the midst of our conversation, if that can be called conversation which I so seldom sought to interrupt, and which did not often leave openings for contribution, the door opened, and a lady entered. She was in person full and rather below the common height; whilst her face showed to my eye some prettiness of rather a commonplace order. Coleridge paused upon her entrance; his features, however, announced no particular complacency, and did not relax into a smile. In a frigid tone he said, whilst turning to me, "Mrs. Coleridge"; in some slight way he then presented me to her: I bowed; and the lady almost immediately retired. From this short but ungenial scene, I gathered, what I afterward learned redundantly, that Coleridge's marriage had not been a very happy one. But let not the reader misunderstand me. Never was there a baser insinuation, viler in the motive, or more ignoble in the manner, than that passage in some lampoon of Lord Byron's, where, by way of vengeance on Mr. Southey (who was the sole delinquent), he described both him and Coleridge as having married "two milliners from Bath." Everybody knows what is meant to be conveyed in that expression, though it would be hard, indeed, if, even at Bath, there should be any class under such a fatal curse, condemned so irretrievably, and so hopelessly prejudged, that ignominy must, at any rate, attach, in virtue of a mere name or designation, to the mode by which they gained their daily bread, or possibly supported the declining years of a parent. However, in this case, the whole sting of the libel was a pure falsehood of