Charles Cowden Clarke, in his Recollections, spoke of Coleridge as “large-presenced, ample-countenanced, grand-foreheaded,” and said that “the upper part of his face was excessively fine. His eyes were large, light gray, prominent, and of a liquid brilliancy. The lower part of his face was somewhat dragged, indicating the presence of habitual pain; but his forehead was prodigious, and like a smooth slab of alabaster.” Leigh Hunt likened his brow to “a great piece of placid marble,” and added that even in his old age “there was something invincibly young in the look of his face.” “This boylike expression” he considered “very becoming in one who dreamed and speculated as Coleridge did when he was really a boy, and who passed his entire life apart from the rest of the world with a book and his flowers.”
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
Carlyle’s portrait of Coleridge is peculiarly in the Carlylian vein. “Figure a fat, flabby, incurvated personage, at once short, rotund, and relaxed; with a watery mouth; a snuffy nose; a pair of strange brown, timid, and yet earnest-looking eyes; a high tapering brow; and a great brush of gray hair—and you have some faint idea of Coleridge.”
Coleridge himself was not more flattering to Coleridge. In 1796 he wrote to John Thelwall: “My face, unless when animated by immediate eloquence, expresses great sloth, and great, indeed almost idiotic, good-nature. ’Tis a mere carcass of a face, fat, flabby, and expressive chiefly of inexpression. Yet I am told that my eyes, eyebrows, and forehead are physiognomically good.”
Mrs. Sara Coleridge, in her Memoir, gave a long account of Coleridge’s death and burial, in which she said that “his body was opened, according to his own urgent request;” but, as usual in such cases, she did not allude to the making of any cast of his face or head.
Mr. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, however, the son of Derwent Coleridge, who is preparing a Life of his illustrious grandfather, writes, in a private note: “My mother used to tell me that the bust in her possession was by Spurzheim, and was taken from a death-mask; but with regard to Spurzheim, she must have been in error, as he died before Coleridge. Lord Coleridge says that the bust in his possession is by Spurzheim, and was taken from a cast of the poet’s features; but whether he falls into the same error as my mother did, I cannot say. It is, of course, possible that Spurzheim took a life-cast from Coleridge’s face.”
Mr. Ernest Coleridge is inclined to accept the authenticity of the mask in my collection. It certainly bears a strong resemblance to the two busts of which he writes, as well as to the portrait by Allston, now in the National Portrait Gallery in London.