Southey never really mixed in the wealth of beauty that covers this beautiful corner of earth.  He was learned and profound, and he took himself and the Church and the State seriously.  He felt himself a part of an indestructible institution, whereas man and all his works are no more peculiar, no more wonderful than an ant-hill—­and last only a day longer.  He never realized that he was a part of the great whole that made up mountain, lake, globe, wooded glen and tireless river.  He differentiated.  He considered himself a man, an educated man, and therefore a little better, and a little above, and a little outside of it all—­otherwise how could he have withered at the top at the early age of sixty-seven?

This question White Pigeon asked as we sat in the dim quiet of Crosthwaite Church, down in the village.  I did not attempt to reply—­people do not ask questions expecting, necessarily, to have them answered.  We ask questions in order to clarify our own minds.

The warning blast of the coach-horn was heard, and we went out into the sunshine.  I bade my three friends good-by (first placing my autograph on Grace’s and Myrtle’s fans), and they climbed to the top of the coach.  I sat on the stone wall and watched them until they disappeared around the bend of the road, waving handkerchiefs.  That night I made my way over to Penreith on the way to Carlisle.  It had been a day brimming with thought and feeling, and beauty expressed and unexpressed, and the kindness of kind friends who understand.  That night as I dozed off into deep, calm sleep I said to myself:  “They were great men, those Lake Poets, and the world is better because they lived.  But there will come other men and they will be greater than those gone—­the best is yet to be.”

SAMUEL T. COLERIDGE

Beneath the blaze of a tropical sun the mountain peaks are the
Thrones of Frost, this through the absence of objects to reflect
the rays.

What no one with us shares, seems scarce our own—­we need another
to reflect our thoughts.
—­Samuel Taylor Coleridge

[Illustration:  SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE]

Samuel T. Coleridge was a thinker, and thinkers are so rarely found that the world must take note of them.  John Stuart Mill, writing in Eighteen Hundred Forty, assigned first place among English philosophers to Jeremy Bentham, incidentally mentioning that Samuel Taylor Coleridge was Bentham’s only rival.

In philosophy there is an apostolic succession.  We build on the past, and all the centuries of turmoil and travail which have gone before have made this moment possible.  There has never been any such thing as “the fall of man”; for the march of the race has been a continual climb—­a movement onward and upward.  Were it not for Coleridge and Bentham, we could not have had Buckle, Wallace and Spencer, for the minds of men would not have been