I cannot breathe through my nose, so my mouth, with sensual thick lips, is almost always open.

In conversation I am impassioned, and oppose what I deem error with an eagerness which is often mistaken for personal asperity; but I am ever so swallowed up in the _thing_ said that I forget my _opponent_.

Such am I." The Rev.Leapidge Smith, in his "Reminiscences of an Octogenarian," remembered him as "a tall, dark, handsome young man, with long, black, flowing hair; eyes not merely dark, but black, and keenly penetrating; a fine forehead, a deep-toned, harmonious voice; a manner never to be forgotten, full of life, vivacity, and kindness; dignified in person and, added to all these, exhibiting the elements of his future greatness."[1] Hazlitt, in "My First Acquaintance with Poets" (a paper that every student of Coleridge's life and poetry should read), describing him as he appeared on his visit to Hazlitt's father at Wem in 1798, says: "His complexion was at that time clear, and even bright.

His forehead was broad and high, light as if built of ivory, with large projecting eyebrows, and his eyes rolling beneath them like a sea with darkened lustre....

His mouth was gross, voluptuous, open, eloquent; his chin good-humored and round, but his nose, the rudder of the face, the index of the will, was small, feeble, nothing--like what he has done." And Dorothy Wordsworth (to close with a contemporary and sympathetic impression) set him down in her journal after their first meeting at Racedown thus: "He is a wonderful man.