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Hazlitt, a bitter assailant of Coleridge's, and whose caustic remark that "his talk was excellent if you let him start from no premisses and come to no conclusion" is cited with approval by Carlyle, has elsewhere spoken of Coleridge as the only person from whom he ever learned anything, has said of him that though he talked on for ever you wished him to talk on for ever, that "his thoughts did not seem to come with labour and effort, but as if borne on the gusts of genius, and as if the wings of his imagination lifted him from his feet."
Coleridge's distinction that imagination drew possible pictures and fancy impossible ones, is itself, except as a classification, an impossible distinction to draw; for it is only the inconceivable that can never be. All else is purely a matter of relation. We may instance dreams which are usually considered to rank among the most fanciful creations of the mind.
These lectures, says Mr. Gillman, were from Coleridge's own account more profitable than any he had before given, though delivered in an unfavourable situation; a lecture-room in Flower de Luce Court, which, however, being near the Temple, secured to him the benefit if benefit it were of a considerable number of law students among his auditors.
Lamb entertained for Coleridge's genius the greatest respect, until death dissolved their friendship. It was at a very tender age that Charles Lamb entered the "work-a-day" world. His elder brother, John, had at that time a clerkship in the South Sea House, and Charles passed a short time there under his brother's care or control, and must thus have gained some knowledge of figures.
With such reflections as these Mrs. Coleridge's mind was no doubt sadly busy during the early years of her residence at the Lakes, and, since their causes did not diminish but rather increased in intensity as time went on, the estrangement between them or rather, to do Coleridge justice, her estrangement from her husband had, by 1806, no doubt become complete.
A 'Treatise on Miracles, written by John Henderson, your old tutor, for Coleridge's brother George, and given to me by a pupil of his, John May, a Lisbon acquaintance, and a very valuable one. John May is anxious for a full life of John Henderson. You should get Agutter's papers.
We have not often read a sentence falling from a wise man with astonishment so profound, as that particular one in a letter of Coleridge's to Mr. Gillman, which speaks of the effort to wean one's- self from opium as a trivial task. There are, we believe, several such passages.
He arrived at Greta Hall on 7th September 1803, and from time to time during the next six months his correspondence gives us occasional glimpses of Coleridge's melancholy state.
No subtlest hocus-pocus of "reason" versus "understanding" will avail for that feat; and it is terribly perilous to try it in these provinces! The truth is, I now see, Coleridge's talk and speculation was the emblem of himself: in it as in him, a ray of heavenly inspiration struggled, in a tragically ineffectual degree, with the weakness of flesh and blood.
Murray, who, in the following year, undertook the publication of Christabel the most successful, in the sense of the most popular, of all its author's productions in verse. With the coming of spring in the following year that dreary story of slow self-destruction, into which the narrative of Coleridge's life from the age of thirty to that of forty-five resolves itself, was brought to a close.
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