Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill,in those years,looking down on London and its smoke-tumult,like a sage escaped from the inanity of life's battle;attracting towards him the thoughts of innumerable brave souls still engaged there.His express contributions to poetry,philosophy,or any specific province of human literature or enlightenment,had been small and sadly intermittent;but he had,especially among young inquiring men,a higher than literary,a kind of prophetic or magician character.He was thought to hold,he alone in England,the key of German and other Transcendentalisms;knew the sublime secret of believing by "the reason"what "the understanding"had been obliged to fling out as incredible;and could still,after Hume and Voltaire had done their best and worst with him,profess himself an orthodox Christian,and say and print to the Church of England,with its singular old rubrics and surplices at Allhallowtide,_Esto perpetua_.A sublime man;who,alone in those dark days,had saved his crown of spiritual manhood;escaping from the black materialisms,and revolutionary deluges,with "God,Freedom,Immortality"still his:a king of men.The practical intellects of the world did not much heed him,or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer:but to the rising spirits of the young generation he had this dusky sublime character;and sat there as a kind of _Magus_,girt in mystery and enigma;his Dodona oak-grove (Mr.
Gilman's house at Highgate)whispering strange things,uncertain whether oracles or jargon.
The Gilmans did not encourage much company,or excitation of any sort,round their sage;nevertheless access to him,if a youth did reverently wish it,was not difficult.He would stroll about the pleasant garden with you,sit in the pleasant rooms of the place,--perhaps take you to his own peculiar room,high up,with a rearward view,which was the chief view of all.A really charming outlook,in fine weather.Close at hand,wide sweep of flowery leafy gardens,their few houses mostly hidden,the very chimney-pots veiled under blossomy umbrage,flowed gloriously down hill;gloriously issuing in wide-tufted undulating plain-country,rich in all charms of field and town.Waving blooming country of the brightest green;dotted all over with handsome villas,handsome groves;crossed by roads and human traffic,here inaudible or heard only as a musical hum:and behind all swam,under olive-tinted haze,the illimitable limitary ocean of London,with its domes and steeples definite in the sun,big Paul's and the many memories attached to it hanging high over all.Nowhere,of its kind,could you see a grander prospect on a bright summer day,with the set of the air going southward,--southward,and so draping with the city-smoke not you but the city.Here for hours would Coleridge talk,concerning all conceivable or inconceivable things;and liked nothing better than to have an intelligent,or failing that,even a silent and patient human listener.He distinguished himself to all that ever heard him as at least the most surprising talker extant in this world,--and to some small minority,by no means to all,as the most excellent.
The good man,he was now getting old,towards sixty perhaps;and gave you the idea of a life that had been full of sufferings;a life heavy-laden,half-vanquished,still swimming painfully in seas of manifold physical and other bewilderment.Brow and head were round,and of massive weight,but the face was flabby and irresolute.The deep eyes,of a light hazel,were as full of sorrow as of inspiration;confused pain looked mildly from them,as in a kind of mild astonishment.The whole figure and air,good and amiable otherwise,might be called flabby and irresolute;expressive of weakness under possibility of strength.He hung loosely on his limbs,with knees bent,and stooping attitude;in walking,he rather shuffled than decisively steps;and a lady once remarked,he never could fix which side of the garden walk would suit him best,but continually shifted,in corkscrew fashion,and kept trying both.A heavy-laden,high-aspiring and surely much-suffering man.His voice,naturally soft and good,had contracted itself into a plaintive snuffle and singsong;he spoke as if preaching,--you would have said,preaching earnestly and also hopelessly the weightiest things.I still recollect his "object"and "subject,"terms of continual recurrence in the Kantean province;and how he sang and snuffled them into "om-m-mject"and "sum-m-mject,"with a kind of solemn shake or quaver,as he rolled along.No talk,in his century or in any other,could be more surprising.