“Gillman,” said Coleridge, “I am sick and helpless—­look at me!”

“Why don’t you come to my house and live with me?” asked the kind friend.

“Gillman,” said the poor man, “Gillman, I am on my way there!”

So Gillman brought him to his house up at Highgate and took care of him as a child.  And there he remained, the pride and pet of a group of brave, thinking men and women.

He lived on for thirty years, under the kindly, skilful care of his friend, but all the real work of his life was done before he was thirty.  Occasionally the old fire would flash forth, and the wit and insight of his youth would shine out.  Keats, Shelley, Lord Byron, and others strong and great sought him out to hold converse with him.  And so he existed, a sort of oracle, amiable, kind and generous—­wreck of a man that was—­protected and defended by loving friends; while up at Keswick, Southey cared for his wife and educated his children as though they were his own.

“I am dying,” said Coleridge to Gillman in July, Eighteen Hundred Thirty-four; “dying, but I should have died, like Keats, in youth and not have made myself a burden to you—­do you forgive me?” We can guess the answer.

The dust of Coleridge rests in Highgate Cemetery, just a step from where he lived all those years.  He, himself, selected the place and wrote his epitaph.  The simple monument that marks the spot was paid for by kind friends who remembered him and loved him and who pardoned him for all that he was not, in memory of what he once had been.

* * * * *

To a young man from the country, who makes his way up, no greater shock ever comes than the discovery that rich people are, for the most part, woefully ignorant.  He has always imagined that material splendor and spiritual gifts go hand in hand; and now if he is wise he discovers that millionaires are too busy making money, and too anxious about what they have made, and their families are too intent on spending it, ever to acquire a calm, judicial mental attitude.

The rich are not the leisure class, and they need education no less than the poor.  Lord, enlighten thou our enemies, should be the prayer of every man who works for progress:  give clearness to their mental perceptions, awaken in them the receptive spirit, soften their callous hearts, and arouse their powers of reason.

Danger lies in their folly, not in their wisdom; their weakness is to be feared, not their strength.

That the wealthy and influential class should fear change, and cling stubbornly to conservatism, is certainly to be expected.

To convince this class that spiritual and temporal good can be improved upon by a more liberal policy has been a task a thousand times greater than the exciting of the poor to riot.  It is easy to fire the discontented, but to arouse the rich and carry truth home to the blindly prejudiced is a different matter.  Too often the reformer has been one who caused the rich to band themselves against the poor.