s 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.

Mr. Coleridge's conversation, it is true, has not now all the brilliant
versatility of his former years; yet we know not whether the contrast
between his bodily weakness and his mental power does not leave a deeper
and more solemnly affecting impression, than his most triumphant
displays in youth could ever have done. To see the pain-stricken
countenance relax, and the contracted frame dilate under the kindling of
intellectual fire alone--to watch the infirmities of the flesh shrinking
out of sight, or glorified and transfigured in the brightness of the
awakening spirit--is an awful object of contemplation; and in no other
person did we ever witness such a distinction,--nay, alienation of mind
from body,--such a mastery of the purely intellectual over the purely
corporeal, as in the i