other with their eyes, at least so it would seem from the words of the old song

"Drink to me only with thine eyes," &c.

Nothing, in fact, could appear to exceed Coleridge's admiration of his friend Wordsworth. When we have sometimes spoken complimentarily to Coleridge of himself, he has said that he was nothing in comparison with him.

He likewise thought very highly of the metaphysical powers of Sir H. Davy, to whom he was introduced by his friend Mr. Cottle, at Bristol, after his return from Germany.* I have heard him in particular speak in terms of the greatest commendation of his poetical composition, "The Spinozist," hereafter to be noticed.

In the autumn of 1803, he met Sir Humphry at dinner at my lodgings in London, together with my

* Some years afterwards Mr. Cottle expressed his hopes to Coleridge that Davy, since his removal from Bristol to London, was not tinctured with the then prevailing scepticism. He assured him that he was not; that his heart and understanding were not the soil for infidelity. Upon remarking to Coleridge that he doubtless saw, during his residence in London, a great many of what are called "the cleverest men," and asking how he estimated Davy in comparison with them, "Why," said he, "Davy could eat them all! there is an energy, an elasticity in his mind, which enables him to seize on, and analyze all questions, pushing them to their legitimate consequences. Every subject in Davy's mind has the principle of vitality. Living thoughts spring up like the turf under his feet."-Appendix to "The Predictions," &c. By a Layman (Mr. Cottle).

friends

of Norwich.

Mr. Poole, and the late Dr. Reeve,

The conversation throughout the even

ing, a winter's evening, was extremely animated and interesting. Coleridge and Davy put forth all their strength, and it is not a little gratifying to me to be able to trace in my recollections of the conversation upon that occasion, some rudiments of those "Consolations in Travel," which the latter committed to the press so many years after.

The phenomena of dreams were freely discussed, and whoever is conversant with Coleridge's writings will be at no loss to imagine with what animation he would converse upon this subject. He has taken some trouble to show, in one of his numbers of "The Friend," how, when we are in certain abstract moods, even without the intervention of sleep, properly so called, the reason may be so led astray from her propriety, as to make a strange medley of the realities of life with the reflex operations of the mind, and the visions of fancy; and in this state of dreaming, with the eyes open, he supposes Luther to have been when

he had his celebrated tussel with the Evil One.

The story to which I here allude, as related by himself, only abridged, is as follows :—

"When Luther was confined in the Warteburg, a castle near Eisenach, he is said, upon some occasion, when deep in the writings which contributed so essentially to the Reformation, to have hurled his inkstand

at the devil who came to assail him, the black spot from which is still shown to visiters on the stone wall of the room in which he studied."

The fact Coleridge leaves it to others to settle, although, he adds, many circumstances incline him to give credit to it. "Some night, when sitting in his chamber in the Warteburg, with his midnight lamp before him, methinks, he says, I see him with the Hebrew Bible open, on which he gazes, his brow pressing on his palm, brooding over some obscure text, which he desires to make plain to the simple boor and to the humble artizan. And he himself does not understand it! Thick darkness lies on the original text; he counts the letters-calls up the roots of each separate word, and questions them as the familiar spirits of an oracle-in vain-thick darkness continues to cover it. He submits to the humiliation of consulting the Vulgate his old and sworn enemy, the treacherous confederate of the Roman-Antichristand finds some plausible interpretation in favour of the doctrine of purgatory, the intercession of saints, or the efficacy of prayers for the dead!

"Still there remains one auxiliary in reserve—the Septuagint. Here again his hopes are baffled. Disappointed, despondent, enraged, ceasing to think; yet continuing his brain on the stretch in solicitation of a thought, and gradually resigning himself to angry fancies, to recollections of past persecutions, to uneasy

fears, and inward defiances, and floating images of the Evil Being, their supposed personal author; he sinks, imperceptibly, into a trance, or slumber, during which his brain retains its waking energies, excepting that what would have been mere thoughts before, now (the action and counterweight of his outward senses and their impressions being withdrawn) shape and condense themselves into things, into realities! Repeatedly half wakening, and his eyelids as often reclosing, the objects which really surround him form the place and scenery of his dream. All at once he sees the arch-fiend coming forth on the wall of the room, from the very spot perhaps on which his eyes had been fixed vacantly during the perplexed moments of his former meditation; the ink-stand, which he had at the same time been using, becomes associated with it; and in that struggle of rage, which, in these distempered dreams, almost constantly precedes the helpless terror by the pain of which we are finally awakened, he imagines that he hurls it at the intruder, or, not improbably, in the first instant of awakening, while yet both his imagination and his eyes are possessed by the dream, he actually hurls it! Some weeks after, perhaps, during which interval he may have often mused on the incident, undetermined whether to deem it a visitation of Satan to him in the body or out of the body, he discovers, for the first time, the dark spot on the wall, and receives it as a

.

sign and pledge vouchsafed to him of the event having actually taken place.'

Sir Humphry very ingeniously suggested, in pursuance of what Coleridge had been saying, that a certain class of ghost stories might very naturally derive their verisimilitude from dreams. We have only to suppose that the scene, in which the dream occurs, corresponds with the circumstances of it, and there is at once a foundation laid for a ghost-story. Usually we are carried in our dreams to places remote from our bed-chamber, and engaged in scenes, and conversant with events, which are dissipated, by their incongruity, the moment we become fully awake. But suppose we dreamt that some departed friend came to the bottom of our bed, and there held conversation with us suitable to so momentous an occurrence, by the aid of what incongruity is the delusion to be dissipated on our awaking? Far more easy it to decide against the reality of those spectral appearances to which, under certain disordered conditions of the brain, individuals are known, when broad awake, and at noon-day, to have been liable; because they make their approach when the reason is on her guard, and not, as in dreams, at least half asleep. And here I shall be excused for again alluding to the "Consolations in Travel" of Sir H. Davy. The follow

is

# 66 Friend," p. 125.