As they stood on the margin of Grasmere, the scene was more like what Gray saw than what is seen at this day.  The churchyard was bare of the yews which now distinguish it,—­for Sir George Beaumont had them planted at a later time; and where the group of kindred and friends—­the Wordsworths and their relatives—­now lie, the turf was level and untouched.  The iron rails and indefensible monuments, which Wordsworth so reprobated half a century later, did not exist.  The villas which stud the slopes, the great inns which bring a great public, were uncreated; and there was only the old Roman road where the Wishing-Gate is, or the short cut by the quarries to arrive by from the South, instead of the fine mail-road which now winds between the hills and the margin of the lake.  John Wordsworth guided his brother and Coleridge through Grisedale, over a spur of Helvellyn, to see Ullswater; and Coleridge has left a characteristic testimony of the effect of the scenery upon him.  It was “a day when light and darkness coexisted in contiguous masses, and the earth and sky were but one.  Nature lived for us in all her wildest accidents.”  He tells how his eyes were dim with tears, and how imagination and reality blended their objects and impressions.  Wordsworth’s account of the same excursion is in as admirable contrast with Coleridge’s as their whole mode of life and expression was, from first to last.  With the carelessness of the popular mind in such cases, the British public had already almost confounded the two men and their works, as it soon after mixed up Southey with both; whereas they were all as unlike each other as any three poets could well be.

Coleridge and Wordsworth were both contemplative, it is true, while Southey was not:  but the remarkable thing about Coleridge was the exclusiveness of his contemplative tendencies, by which one set of faculties ran riot in his mind and life, making havoc among his powers, and a dismal wreck of his existence.  The charm and marvel of his discourse upset all judgments during his life, and for as long as his voice remained in the ear of his enchanted hearers; but, apart from the spell, it is clear to all sober and trained thinkers that Coleridge wandered away from truth and reality in the midst of his vaticinations, as the clairvoyant does in the midst of his previsions, so as to mislead and bewilder, while inspiring and intoxicating the hearer or reader.  He recorded, in regard to himself, that “history and particular facts lost all interest” in his mind after his first launch into metaphysics; and he remained through life incapable of discerning reality from inborn images.  Wordsworth took alarm at the first experience of such a tendency in himself, and relates that he used to catch at the trees and palings by the roadside to satisfy himself of existences out of himself; but Coleridge encouraged this subjective exclusiveness, to the destruction of the balance of his mind and the morale of