uttered had been written down": but
he does not quote a single sentence of all the poet said;[G] and a
writer in the "Quarterly Review" expresses his belief that "nothing is
too high for the grasp of his conversation, nothing too low: it glanced
from earth to heaven, from heaven to earth, with a speed and a splendor,
an ease and a power, that almost seemed inspired." (Nor did I ever find
him incoherent, as some have pretended; but I agree with De Quincey,
that he had the largest and most spacious intellect, the subtilest and
the most comprehensive that has yet existed among men.) Of Coleridge,
Shelley writes,--

"All things he seemed to understand,
Of old or new, at sea or land,
Save his own soul, which was a mist."

I have listened to him more than once for above an hour, of course
without putting in a single word: I would as soon have bellowed a loose
song while a nightingale was singing. There was rarely much change of
countenance; his face was at that time (it is said from his habit of
opium-eating) overladen with flesh, and its expression impaired; yet to
me it was so tender and gentle and gracious and loving, that I could
have knelt at the old man's feet almost in adoration. My own hair is
white now; yet I have much the same feeling as I had then, whenever the
form of the venerable man rises in memory before me. I cannot recall
now, and I believe could not recall at the time, so as to preserve, as a
cherished thing in my remembrance, a single sentence of the many
sentences I heard him utter; yet in his "Table-Talk" there is a world of
wisdom,--and that is only a collection of scraps, chance-gathered. If
any left his presence unsatisfied, it resulted rather from the
superabundance than the paucity of the feast.[H]

I can recall many evening rambles with him over the high lands that look
down on London; but the memory I cherish most is linked with a crowded
street, where the clumsy and the coarse jostled the old man eloquent, as
if he had been earthly, of the earth. It was in the Strand: he pointed
out to me the window of a room in the office of the "Morning Post,"
where he had consumed much midnight oil; and then for half an hour he
talked of the sorrowful joy he had often felt, when, leaving the office
as day was dawning, he heard the song of a caged lark that sang his
orisons from the lattice of an artisan, who was rising to begin his
labor as the poet was pacing homewards to rest after his work a