sought him out to hold converse with him. And so he existed, a
sort of oracle, amiable, kind and generous--wreck of a man that
was--protected and defended by loving friends; while up at Keswick,
Southey cared for his wife and educated his children as though they were
his own.

"I am dying," said Coleridge to Gillman in July, Eighteen Hundred
Thirty-four; "dying, but I should have died, like Keats, in youth and not
have made myself a burden to you--do you forgive me?" We can guess the
answer.

The dust of Coleridge rests in Highgate Cemetery, just a step from where
he lived all those years. He, himself, selected the place and wrote his
epitaph. The simple monument that marks the spot was paid for by kind
friends who remembered him and loved him and who pardoned him for all that
he was not, in memory of what he once had been.

* * * * *

To a young man from the country, who makes his way up, no greater shock
ever comes than the discovery that rich people are, for the most part,
woefully ignorant. He has always imagined that material splendor and
spiritual gifts go hand in hand; and now if he is wise he discovers that
millionaires are too busy making money, and too anxious about what they
have made, and their families are too intent on spending it, ever to
acquire a calm, judicial mental attitude.

The rich are not the leisure class, and they need education no less than
the poor. Lord, enlighten thou our enemies, should be the prayer of every
man who works for progress: give clearness to their mental perceptions,
awaken in them the receptive spirit, soften their callous hearts, and
arouse their powers of reason.

Danger lies in their folly, not in their wisdom; their weakness is to be
feared, not their strength.

That the wealthy and influential class should fear change, and cling
stubbornly to conservatism, is certainly to be expected.

To convince this class that spiritual and temporal good can be improved
upon by a more liberal policy has been a task a thousand times greater
than the exciting of the poor to riot. It is easy to fire the
discontented, but to arouse the rich and carry truth home to the blindly
prejudiced is a different matter. Too often the reformer has been one who
caused the rich to band themselves against the poor.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a Tory who defended the existing order on the
plea of its usefulness.

He approached the vital issue from the inside, t