Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill, in those years, looking down on London and its smoke-tumult, like a sage¹ escaped from the inanity² of life's battle; attracting towards him the thoughts of innumerable brave souls still engaged there. His express contributions to poetry, philosophy, or any specific province of human literature or enlightenment, had been small and sadly intermittent³; but he had, especially among young inquiring men, a higher than literary, a kind of prophetic or magician character. He was thought to hold, he alone in England, the key of German and other Transcendentalisms; knew the sublime⁴ secret of believing by "the reason" what "the understanding" had been obliged to fling out as incredible; and could still, after Hume and Voltaire had done their best and worst with him, profess⁵ himself an orthodox Christian⁶, and say and print to the Church of England, with its singular old rubrics and surplices at Allhallowtide, Esto perpetua. A sublime man; who, alone in those dark days, had saved his crown of spiritual manhood; escaping from the black materialisms, and revolutionary deluges⁹, with "God, Freedom, Immortality¹⁰" still his: a king of men. The practical intellects of the world did not much heed¹¹ him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer: but to the rising spirits of the young generation he had this dusky sublime character; and sat there as a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma¹²; his Dodona oak-grove (Mr. Gilman's house at Highgate) whispering strange things, uncertain whether

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