Lord Ward, like all or most men of intellect and taste,
liked to know all his contemporaries who were distinguished by their taste or genius.
Moving in the society to which he belonged, and being a frequent looker-in at John Murray’s, he of course knew all the literary
men who were worth knowing; but poor Coleridge for
many years of his life was very much of a recluse, being perched up on the Highgate fork of
the London bi-forked Parnassus, and him his lordship had never met. He expressed his regret
to Lord Dover, who arranged a meeting at a very quiet,
small dinner party, providing—a rather necessary provision—for
Coleridge’s descent to Whitehall, and for his return to
Highgate. The philosopher and bard arrived, with his laudanum bottle in his pocket, ate
very little dinner, sipped a glass or two of wine, took another glass suspected to have
been nearly all diluted laudanum, and then went off at score into a monologue which lasted
the remainder of the dinner, the whole of the dessert, and for nearly an hour after. Nobody
interrupted him, as nobody could have cut across his torrent of talk without being washed
away. Lord Dover, who had had former experience, seemed
| 50 | SAMUEL COLERIDGE | [CHAP. V |
I never could boast of a surplus stock of patience; I never could have understood the half of Coleridge’s ultra-German, transcendental philosophy, but I could find high poetry in it, and could have listened to it—in the winter season when nights are long—from sunset till midnight. I met him but seldom, and then not in his best days—far from that; but each time I was astonished and delighted while I was with him, and left him with a perhaps unpleasant bewilderment or swimming of the head, but with an innermost persuasion that I had been, not talking with, but hearing talk, a wondrous man. My friend G. L. Craik, who saw him more frequently, and who was incomparably more of a metaphysician than I, has told me that he always left Coleridge with the same impression. The awful thing was to hear a second or third hand repetition of Coleridge’s theories and splendid dreams. Those from poor, kind, thoroughly good—at least as far as regarded Coleridge—Mr. Gillman, the medical practitioner at Highgate, in whose house the philosopher and bard lived for so many years, and in whose house he died, were almost enough to make one jump out of the window, or to cry out, with Lord Ward, summum bore-em! Nor do I think that the matter came very much mended from the lips of Coleridge’s bosom friend, and for a long time my near neighbour, Joseph Green, the eminent surgeon and pre-eminent German scholar and metaphysician, and the man whom Coleridge appointed to be his chief literary executor.
I intend to return to the subject of the illustrious Coleridge—and illustrious he was in spite of every
drawback—but I have broken many an intention, and
| CHAP. V] | KINDNESS TO YOUNG MEN | 51 |
His discourse was best described by Stewart Rose, who called it “rapt talk.”
“And these ‘ribbed sands’ was Coleridge pleased to face, While ebbing seas have hummed a rolling bass To his rapt talk.” W. S. Rose:
Rhymes, 1837. |
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