Humboldt Library of Science Volume 52

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1884 Excerpt: ... has been cast, Mental Physiology, pp. 266-7. but, alas! without the after-restoration of the latter.' Dr. Carpenter then quotes the description of Coleridge given in Chapter VII. of Carlyle's Life of John Sterling Coleridge's whole figure and air, good and amiable, otherwise, might be called flabby and irresolute, expressive of weakness under possibility of strength. He hung loosely on his limbs, with knees bent and stooping attitude. In walking he rather shuffled than decisively stepped; and a lady once remarked he never could fix which side of the garden walk would suit him best, but continually shifted in corkscrew fashion and kept trying both. Nothing could be more copious than his talk; and furthermore it was always virtually or literally of the nature of a monologue; suffering no interruption however reverent: hastily putting aside all foreign additions, annotations or most ingenious desires for elucidation as well-meant superfluities which would never do. Besides it was talk not flowing any whither like a river, but spreading everywhither in inextricable currents and regurgitations like a lake or sea; terribly deficient in definite goal or aim, nay, often in logical intelligibility; what you were to believe or do on any earthly or heavenly thing, obstinately refusing to appear from it. So that most times you felt logically lost, swamped, near to drowning in this tide of ingenious vocables spreading out boundless as if to submerge the world. He began anywhere. You put some question to him, made some suggestive observation; instead of answering this or decidedly setting out toward answering it, he would accumulate formidable apparatus, logical swim-bladders, transcendental life-preservers and other pr...