e are one or two which throw light
on the nature of Coleridge's imagination. We get an idea of one of the
chief differences between the poetry of Coleridge and the poetry of
Wordsworth when we read the confession:

I had the perception of individual images very strong, but a dim
one of the relation of place. I remember the man or the tree, but
where I saw them I mostly forget.

The nephew who collected Coleridge's talk declared that there was no man
whom he would more readily have chosen as a guide in morals, but "I would
not take him as a guide through streets or fields or earthly roads." The
author of _Kubla Khan_ asserted still more strongly on another occasion
his indifference to locality:

Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact but harmonious
opposites in this--that every old ruin, hill, river, or tree called
up in his mind a host of historical or biographical associations,
just as a bright pan of brass, when beaten, is said to attract the
swarming bees; whereas, for myself, notwithstanding Dr. Johnson, I
believe I should walk over the plain of Marathon without taking
more interest in it than in any other plain of similar features.
Yet I receive as much pleasure in reading the account of the
battle, in Herodotus, as anyone can. Charles Lamb wrote an essay on
a man who lived in past time: I thought of adding another to it on
one who lived not _in time_ at all, past, present, or future--but
beside or collaterally.

Some of Coleridge's other memories are of a more trifling and amusing
sort. He recalls, for instance, the occasion of his only flogging at
school. He had gone to a shoemaker and asked to be taken on as an
apprentice. The shoemaker, "being an honest man," had at once told the
boy's master:

Bowyer asked me why I had made myself such a fool? to which I
answered, that I had a great desire to be a shoemaker, and that I
hated the thought of being a clergyman. "Why so?" said he.
"Because, to tell you the truth, sir," said I, "I am an infidel!"
For this, without more ado, Bowyer flogged me--wisely, as I
think--soundly, as I know. Any whining or sermonizing would have
gratified my vanity, and confirmed me in my absurdity; as it was, I
laughed at, and got heartily ashamed of my folly.

Among the reminiscences of Coleridge no passage is more famous than that
in which he relates how, as he was walking in a lane nea