that love which he afterwards records in the Genevieve when he says,

"All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of love,
And feed his sacred flame."

First love, so seldom the mature love of future days, is a flower of
premature growth and developement, on which fancy exercises itself in
castle-building, and is in unison with that age when youth flings his
limbs about in the air, as an exercise to rid himself of the superfluous
volition, the accumulation of which gives him a sensation of uneasiness;
and these simple and unreserved accounts of Coleridge's infidelity, and
also of his first love-fit, should be put down merely as mental
exercises. The lines above quoted, belong, I have said, to the maturer
mind; they are thoughts which, unlike the sportive dace on the surface
of some calm lake, may rather be compared to the inhabitants of the deep
waters beneath.

"How often will the loving heart and imaginative spirit of a young man
mistake the projected creature of his own moral yearning, seen in the
reflecting surface of the first not repulsive or vulgar female who
treats him affectionately, for the realization of his idea. Reversing
the order of the Genesis, he believes the female the original, and the
outward reality and impressment of the self-constructed 'image', of
the ideal! He most sincerely supposes himself in love--even in cases
where the mistake might have been suspected by one curious fact--that
his strongest emotions on love, were when absent from the imagined
object. But the time comes, or may come, when the same feeling exists
equally in presence and absence, in health and in sickness; when he