In Lamb's letters it is easy to perceive that the writer soon became aware
of the foibles of his friend. "Cultivate simplicity, Coleridge," is his
admonition as early as 1796. In another place his remark is, "You have
been straining your faculties to bring together things infinitely distant
and unlike." Again, "I grieve from my very soul to observe you in your
plans of life veering about from this hope to the other, and settling
nowhere." Robert Southey, whose prose style was the perfection of
neatness, and who was intimate with Coleridge throughout his life, laments
that it is "extraordinary that he should write in so rambling and
inconclusive a manner;" his mind, which was undoubtedly very pliable and
subtle, "turning and winding, till you get weary of following his mazy
movements."

Charles Lamb, however, always sincerely admired and loved his old
schoolfellow, and grieved deeply when he died. The recollection of this
event, which happened many years afterwards (in 1834), never left Lamb
until his own death: he used perpetually to exclaim, "Coleridge is dead,
Coleridge is dead," in a low, musing, meditative voice. These exclamations
(addressed to no one) were, as Lamb was a most unaffected man, assuredly
involuntary, and showed that he could not get rid of the melancholy truth.

At this distance of time, many persons (judging by what he has left behind
him) wonder at the extent of admiration which possessed some of
Coleridge's contemporaries: Charles Lamb accorded to his genius something
scarcely short of absolute worship; Robert Southey considered his capacity
as exceeding that of almost all other writers; and Leigh Hunt, speaking of
Coleridge's personal appearance, says, "He had a mighty intellect put upon
a sensual body." Persons who were intimate with both have suggested that
even Wordsworth was indebted to him for some of his philosophy. As late as
1818, Lamb, when dedicating his works to him, says that Coleridge "first