things. Let me see if I can give you a list--nightingales--poetry--on
poetical sensation--metaphysics--different genera and species of dreams--
nightmare--a dream accompanied with a sense of touch--single and double
touch--a dream related--first and second consciousness--the difference
explained between will and volition--so say metaphysicians from a want of
smoking the second consciousness--monsters--the Kraken--mermaids--Southey
believes in them--Southey's belief too much diluted--a ghost story--Good-
morning--I heard his voice as he came towards me--I heard it as he moved
away--I had heard it all the interval--if it may be called so." It may be
that we have had no more wonderful talker, and, no doubt, the talk had its
reverential listeners, its disciples; but to cultivate or permit disciples
is itself a kind of waste, a kind of weakness; it requires a very fixed and
energetic indolence to become, as Coleridge became, a vocal utterance,
talking for talking's sake.

But beside talking, there was lecturing, with Coleridge a scarcely
different form of talk; and it is to this consequence of a readiness to
speak and a reluctance to write that we owe much of his finest criticism,
in the imperfectly recorded "Lectures on Shakespeare." Coleridge as a
critic is not easily to be summed up. What may first surprise us, when we
begin to look into his critical opinions, is the uncertainty of his
judgments in regard to his own work, and to the work of his friends; the
curious bias which a feeling or an idea, affection or a philosophical
theory, could give to his mind. His admiration for Southey, his
consideration for Sotheby, perhaps in a less degree his unconquerable
esteem for Bowles, together with something very like adulation of
Wordsworth, are all instances of a certain loss of the sense of proportion.
He has left us no penetrating criticisms of Byron, of Shelley, or of Keats;
and in a very interesting letter about Blake, written in 1818, he is unable
to take the poems merely as poems, and chooses among them with a scrupulous