for though he wrote comparatively little, he was by his talents and learning a leader among literary men, and his conversations were as eagerly listened to as were those of Dr. Johnson.  Wordsworth says of him that, though other men of the age had done some wonderful things, Coleridge was the only wonderful man he had ever known.  Of his lectures on literature a contemporary says:  “His words seem to flow as from a person repeating with grace and energy some delightful poem.”  And of his conversation it is recorded:  “Throughout a long-drawn summer’s day would this man talk to you in low, equable but clear and musical tones, concerning things human and divine; marshalling all history, harmonizing all experiment, probing the depths of your consciousness, and revealing visions of glory and terror to the imagination.”

The last bright ray of sunlight comes from Coleridge’s own soul, from the gentle, kindly nature which made men love and respect him in spite of his weaknesses, and which caused Lamb to speak of him humorously as “an archangel a little damaged.”  The universal law of suffering seems to be that it refines and softens humanity; and Coleridge was no exception to the law.  In his poetry we find a note of human sympathy, more tender and profound than can be found in Wordsworth or, indeed, in any other of the great English poets.  Even in his later poems, when he has lost his first inspiration and something of the splendid imaginative power that makes his work equal to the best of Blake’s, we find a soul tender, triumphant, quiet, “in the stillness of a great peace.”  He died in 1834, and was buried in Highgate Church.  The last stanza of the boatman’s song, in Remorse, serves better to express the world’s judgment than any epitaph: 

    Hark! the cadence dies away
    On the quiet moon-lit sea;
    The boatmen rest their oars and say,
      Miserere Domini!

WORKS OF COLERIDGE.  The works of Coleridge naturally divide themselves into three classes,—­the poetic, the critical, and the philosophical, corresponding to the early, the middle, and the later periods of his career.  Of his poetry Stopford Brooke well says:  “All that he did excellently might be bound up in twenty pages, but it should be bound in pure gold.”  His early poems show the influence of Gray and Blake, especially of the latter.  When Coleridge begins his “Day Dream” with the line, “My eyes make pictures when they’re shut,” we recall instantly Blake’s haunting Songs of Innocence.  But there is this difference between the two poets,—­in Blake we have only a dreamer; in Coleridge we have the rare combination of the dreamer and the profound scholar.  The quality of this early poetry, with its strong suggestion of Blake, may be seen in such poems as “A Day Dream,” “The Devil’s Thoughts,” “The Suicide’s Argument,” and “The Wanderings of Cain.”  His later poems, wherein we see his imagination bridled by thought and study, but