He spoke of with affection. “There is a single line,” he added, “in one of his father’s poems, which I consider explains the after life of the son. He is speaking of his own confinement in London, and then says,—
‘But thou, my child, shalt wander like a breeze.’
“He thought highly also of some of Hartley’s sonnets.
Southey—
He said had outlived his faculties. His mind he thought had been wrecked by long watching by the sick bed of his wife, who had lingered for years in a very distressing state.
Coleridge—
He said the liveliest and truest image he could give of Coleridge’s talk was that of “a mystic river, the sound or sight of whose course you caught at intervals, which was sometimes concealed by forests, sometimes lost in sand, and 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....[M] Coleridge had been spoilt as a poet by going to Germany. The bent of his mind, at all times very much inclined to metaphysical theology, had there been fixed in that direction.”
Lord Byron—
“Has spoken severely of my compositions. However faulty they may be, I do not think I ever could have prevailed with myself to print such lines as he has done, for instance—
‘I stood at Venice on the Bridge of Sighs,
A palace and a prison on each hand.’