Mr. and Mrs. Wordsworth at dinner, along with our family party.  Mr. and Mrs. Price (from Rugby), two aunts of Mrs. P.’s, and her brother, Mr. Rose, a young clergyman (a devout admirer of Wordsworth), joined us at tea.  A circle was made as large as our little parlour could hold.  Mr. Price sat next to Mr. Wordsworth, and by design or fortunate accident, introduced some remark on the powers and the discourse of Coleridge.  Mr. Wordsworth entered heartily and largely on the subject.  He said that the liveliest and truest image he could give of Coleridge’s talk was ’that of a majestic river, the sound or sight of whose course you caught at intervals, which was sometimes concealed by forests, sometimes lost in sand, then came flashing out broad and distinct, then again took a turn which your eye could not follow, yet you knew and felt that it was the same river:  so,’ he said, ’there was always a train, a stream, in Coleridge’s discourse, always a connection between its parts in his own mind, though one not always perceptible to the minds of others.’  Mr. Wordsworth went on to say, that in his opinion Coleridge had been spoilt as a poet by going to Germany.  The bent of his mind, which was at all times very much to metaphysical theology, had there been fixed in that direction.  ‘If it had not been so,’ said Wordsworth, ’he would have been the greatest, the most abiding poet of his age.  His very faults would have made him popular (meaning his sententiousness and laboured strain), while he had enough of the essentials of a poet to make him deservedly popular in a higher sense.’

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Mr. Price soon after mentioned a statement of Coleridge’s respecting himself, recorded in his ‘Table Talk,’ namely, that a visit to the battle-field of Marathon would raise in him no kindling emotion, and asked Mr. Wordsworth whether this was true as a token of his mind.  At first Mr. Wordsworth said, ’Oh! that was a mere bravado, for the sake of astonishing his hearers!’ but then, correcting himself, he added, ’And yet it might in some sense be true, for Coleridge was not under the influence of external objects.  He had extraordinary powers of summoning up an image or series of images in his own mind, and he might mean that his idea of Marathon was so vivid, that no visible observation could make it more so.’  ‘A remarkable instance of this,’ added Mr. Wordsworth, ’is his poem, said to be “composed in the Vale of Chamouni.”  Now he never was at Chamouni, or near it, in his life.’  Mr. Wordsworth next gave a somewhat humorous account of the rise and progress of the ‘Ancient Mariner.’  ‘It arose,’ he said, ’out of the want of five pounds which Coleridge and I needed to make a tour together in Devonshire.  We agreed to write jointly a poem, the subject of which Coleridge took from a dream which a friend of his had once dreamt concerning a person suffering under a dire curse from the commission of some crime.’  ‘I,’ said Wordsworth, ’supplied the crime, the shooting