advantage of his opponents, who are always bigoted and often irascible.
Coleridge is an enthusiast on many subjects, and must therefore appear
to many to possess faults, and no doubt he has faults, but he has a
good heart and a large mass of information with," as his fellow-student
condescendingly admits, "superior talents. The great fault which his
friends may lament is the variety of subjects which he adopts, and the
abstruse nature of his ordinary speculations, _extra homines podtas_.
They can easily," concludes the writer, rising here to the full
stateliness of youth's epistolary style, "they can easily excuse his
devoted attachment to his country, and his reasoning as to the means of
producing the greatest human happiness, but they do not universally
approve the mysticism of his metaphysics and the remoteness of his
topics from human comprehension."

In the month of May 1799 Coleridge set out with a party of his fellow-
students on a walking tour through the Harz Mountains, an excursion
productive of much oral philosophising on his part, and of the
composition of the _Lines on ascending the Brocken_, not one of the
happiest efforts of his muse. As to the philosophising, "he never," says
one of his companions on this trip, "appeared to tire of mental exercise;
talk seemed to him a perennial pastime, and his endeavours to inform and
amuse us ended only with the cravings of hunger or the fatigue of a long
march, from which neither his conversational powers nor his stoicism
could protect himself or us." It speaks highly for the matter of
Coleridge's allocutions that such incessant outpourings during a
mountaineering tramp appear to have left no lasting impression of
boredom behind them. The holiday seems to have been thoroughly enjoyed
by the whole party, and Coleridge, at any rate, had certainly earned
it. For once, and it is almost to be feared for the last time in his
life, he had resisted his besetting tendency to dispersiveness, and