and greater in Boswell than in real life.”  Coleridge’s conversation is not to the same extent a coloured expression of personality.  He speaks out of the solitude of an oracle rather than struts upon the stage of good company, a master of repartees.  At his best, he becomes the mouthpiece of universal wisdom, as when he says:  “To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the track it has passed.”  He can give us in a sentence the central truth of politics, reconciling what is good in Individualism with what is good in Socialism in a score or so of words: 

    That is the most excellent state of society in which the patriotism
    of the citizen ennobles, but does not merge, the individual energy
    of the man.

And he can give common sense as well as wisdom imaginative form, as in the sentence: 

    Truth is a good dog; but beware of barking too close to the heels
    of error, lest you get your brains knocked out.

“I am, by the law of my nature, a reasoner,” said Coleridge, and he explained that he did not mean by this “an arguer.”  He was a discoverer of order, of laws, of causes, not a controversialist.  He sought after principles, whether in politics or literature.  He quarrelled with Gibbon because his Decline and Fall was “little else but a disguised collection of ... splendid anecdotes” instead of a philosophic search for the ultimate causes of the ruin of the Roman Empire.  Coleridge himself formulated these causes in sentences that are worth remembering at a time when we are debating whether the world of the future is to be a vast boxing ring of empires or a community of independent nations.  He said: 

The true key to the declension of the Roman Empire—­which is not to be found in all Gibbon’s immense work—­may be stated in two words:  the imperial character overlaying, and finally destroying, the national character.  Rome under Trajan was an empire without a nation.

One must not claim too much for Coleridge, however.  He was a seer with his head among the stars, but he was also a human being with uneven gait, stumbling amid infirmities, prejudices, and unhappinesses.  He himself boasted in a delightful sentence: 

    For one mercy I owe thanks beyond all utterance—­that, with all my
    gastric and bowel distempers, my head hath ever been like the head
    of a mountain in blue air and sunshine.

It is to be feared that Coleridge’s “gastric and bowel distempers” had more effect on his head than he was aware of.  Like other men, he often spoke out of a heart full of grievances.  He uttered the bitterness of an unhappily married dyspeptic when he said:  “The most happy marriage I can picture or image to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.”  It is amusing to reflect that one of the many books which he wished to write was “a book on the duties of women, more especially to their husbands.”