Samuel Taylor Coleridge [III] [November 1834]

AT the Lakes, and summoned abroad by scenery so exquisite—living, too, in the bosom of a family endeared to him by long friendship and by sympathy the closest with all his propensities and tastes—Coleridge could not sequester himself so profoundly as at the Courier1 Office within his own shell, or shut himself out so completely from that large dominion of eye and ear amongst the hills, the fields, and the woods, which once he had exercised so pleasantly to himself, and with a participation so immortal, through his exquisite poems, to all generations. Coleridge, it was hardly possible, could reverence a man like this:—ordinary men might, because they were told that he had defended Christianity against the vile blasphemers and impotent theomichrists of the day. The philosophy of ancient Greece, through all its schools, the philosophy of the Schoolmen, technically so called, church history, &c., Coleridge had within his call.