I remember his once saying to me, 'I have known many that might he called very _clever_ men, and a good many of real and vigorous _abilities_, but few of genius; and only one whom I should call "wonderful." That one was Coleridge.

At any hour of the day or night he would talk by the hour, if there chanced to be _any_ sympathetic listener, and talk better than the best page of his writings; for a pen half paralysed his genius.

A child would sit quietly at his feet and wonder, till the torrent had passed by.

The only man like Coleridge whom I have known is Sir William Hamilton, Astronomer Royal of Dublin.' I remember, however, that when I recited by his fireside Alfred Tennyson's two political poems, 'You ask me why, though ill at ease,' and 'Of old sat Freedom on the heights,' the old bard listened with a deepening attention, and when I had ended, said after a pause, 'I must acknowledge that those two poems are very solid and noble in thought.

Their diction also seems singularly stately.' He was a great admirer of _Philip van Artevelde_.