and there was only the old Roman road where the Wishing-Gate is, or the
short cut by the quarries to arrive by from the South, instead of the
fine mail-road which now winds between the hills and the margin of
the lake. John Wordsworth guided his brother and Coleridge through
Grisedale, over a spur of Helvellyn, to see Ullswater; and Coleridge has
left a characteristic testimony of the effect of the scenery upon him.
It was "a day when light and darkness coexisted in contiguous masses,
and the earth and sky were but one. Nature lived for us in all her
wildest accidents." He tells how his eyes were dim with tears, and
how imagination and reality blended their objects and impressions.
Wordsworth's account of the same excursion is in as admirable contrast
with Coleridge's as their whole mode of life and expression was, from
first to last. With the carelessness of the popular mind in such cases,
the British public had already almost confounded the two men and their
works, as it soon after mixed up Southey with both; whereas they were
all as unlike each other as any three poets could well be.

Coleridge and Wordsworth were both contemplative, it is true, while
Southey was not: but the remarkable thing about Coleridge was the
exclusiveness of his contemplative tendencies, by which one set of
faculties ran riot in his mind and life, making havoc among his powers,
and a dismal wreck of his existence. The charm and marvel of his
discourse upset all judgments during his life, and for as long as his
voice remained in the ear of his enchanted hearers; but, apart from the
spell, it is clear to all sober and trained thinkers that Coleridge
wandered away from truth and reality in the midst of his vaticinations,
as the _clairvoyant_ does in the midst of his previsions, so as to
mislead and bewilder, while inspiring and intoxicating the hearer or
reader. He recorded, in regard to himself, that "history and particular
facts lost all interest" in his mind after his first launch into
metaphysics; and he remained through life incapable of discerning
reality from inborn images. Wordsworth took alarm at the first
experience of such a tendency in himself, and relates that he used to
catch at the trees and palings by the roadside to satisfy himself of
existences out of himself; but Coleridge encouraged this subjective
exclusiveness, to the destruction of the balance of his mind and the
_morale_ of his nature. He was himself a wild poem; and he d