Quote #176

There is no method in his talk: he wanders like a man sailing among many currents, whithersoever his lazy mind directs him; and, what is more unpleasant, he preaches, or rather soliloquises:I reckon him a man of great and useless genius: a strange, not at all a great man.

More from Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  1. And Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing, But, like a hawk encumber'd with his hood, Explaining metaphysics to the nation - I wish he woul…
  2. The author of Biographia Literaria was already a ruined man. Sometimes, however, to be a 'ruined man' is itself a vocation.
  3. How many of our virtues originate in the fear of Death - & that while we flatter ourselves that we are melting in Christian Sensibility ove…
  4. He was the first poet I ever knew. His genius at that time had angelic wings, and fed on manna. He talked on for ever; and you wished him t…
  5. Nature is a wary wily long-breathed old Witch, tough-lived as a Turtle and divisible as the Polyp, repullulative in a thousand Snips and Cu…
  6. The genius of Coleridge is like a sunken treasure ship, and Coleridge a diver too timid and lazy to bring its riches to the surface.
  7. It is a flat'ning Thought, that the more we have seen, the less we have to say.
  8. His face when he repeats his verses hath its ancient glory, an Arch angel a little damaged:Coleridge is absent but 4 miles, & the neighbour…

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