The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge / 1838

by James Gillman 1838
'... But some to higher hopes Were destined; some within a finer mould Were wrought, and temper'd with a purer flame: To these the Sire Omnipotent unfolds The world's harmonious volume, there to read The transcript of himself ....'
To Joseph Henry Green, F. R. S.
Professor of Anatomy of the Royal Academy, etc. etc.
The Honoured Faithful and Beloved Friend of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
These Volumes
Are Most Respectfully and Affectionately Inscribed.
The more frequently we read and contemplate the lives of those eminent men so beautifully traced by the amiable Izaak Walton, the more we are impressed with the sweetness and simplicity of the work. Walton was a man of genius — of simple calling and more simple habits, though best known perhaps by his book on Angling; yet in the scarcely less attractive pages of his biographies, like the flowing of the gentle stream on which he sometimes cast his line, to practise the all of treachery he ever learnt, he leads the delighted reader imperceptibly on, charmed with the natural beauty of his sentiments, and the unaffected ease and simplicity of his style.
In his preface to the Sermons of (that pious poet and divine,) Dr. Donne, so much may be found applicable to the great and good man whose life the author is now writing, that he hopes to be pardoned for quoting from one so much more able to delineate rare virtues and high endowments:
And if he shall now be demanded, as once Pompey's poor bondman was, who art thou that alone hast the honour to bury the body of Pompey the great?
so who is he who would thus erect a funeral pile to the memory of the honoured dead? ...