HIS CONVERSATION, A NIMIETY OF IDEAS, NOT OF WORDS
There are two sorts of talkative fellows whom it would be injurious to confound, and I, S. T. Coleridge, am the latter. The first sort is of those who use five hundred words more than needs to express an idea—that is not my case. Few men, I will be bold to say, put more meaning into their words than I, or choose them more deliberately and discriminately. The second sort is of those who use five hundred more ideas, images, reasons, &c., than there is any need of to arrive at their object, till the only object arrived at is that the mind's eye of the bystander is dazzled with colours succeeding so rapidly as to leave one vague impression that there has been a great blaze of colours all about something. Now this is my case, and a grievous fault it is. My illustrations swallow up my thesis. I feel too intensely the omnipresence of all in each, platonically speaking; or, psychologically, my brain-fibres, or the spiritual light which abides in the brain-marrow, as visible light appears to do in sundry rotten mackerel and other smashy matters, is of too general an affinity with all things, and though it perceives the difference of things, yet is eternally pursuing the likenesses, or, rather, that which is common [between them]. Bring me two things that seem the very same, and then I am quick enough [not only] to show the difference, even to hair-splitting, but to go on from circle to circle till I break against the shore of my hearers' patience, or have my concentricals dashed to nothing by a snore. That is my ordinary mishap. At Malta, however, no one can charge me with one or the other. I have earned the general character of being a quiet well-meaning man, rather dull indeed! and who would have thought that he had been a poet! "O, a very wretched poetaster, ma'am! As to the reviews, 'tis well known he half-ruined himself in paying cleverer fellows than himself to write them," &c.
THE EMBRYONIC SOUL
How far might one imagine all the theory of association out of a system of growth, by applying to the brain and soul what we know of an embryo? One tiny particle combines with another its like, and, so, lengthens and thickens, and this is, at once, memory and increasing vividness of impression. One might make a very amusing allegory of an embryo soul up to birth! Try! it is promising! You have not above three hundred volumes to write before you come to it, and as you write, perhaps, a volume once in ten years, you have ample time.
My dear fellow! never be ashamed of scheming—you can't think of living less than 4000 years, and that would nearly suffice for your present schemes. To be sure, if they go on in the same ratio to the performance, then a small difficulty arises; but never mind! look at the bright side always and die in a dream! Oh!
OF A NEW HYPOTHESIS
The evil effect of a new hypothesis or even of a new nomenclature is, that many minds which had familiarised themselves to the old one, and were riding on the road of discovery accustomed to their horse, if put on a new animal, lose time in learning how to sit him; while the others, looking too stedfastly at a few facts which the jeweller Hypothesis had set in a perfectly beautiful whole, forget to dig for more, though inhabitants of a Golconda. However, it has its advantages too, and these have been ably pointed out. It excites contradiction, and is thence a stimulus to new experiments to support, and to a more severe repetition of these experiments and of other new ones to confute [arguments pro and con]. And, besides, one must alloy severe truth with a little fancy, in order to mint it into common coin.