THE GROVE, HIGHGATE 



visiting the Grove in 1832, says in her autobiography, " He looked 

 old with his rounded shoulders, and drooping head, and excessively 

 thin limbs. His eyes were as wonderful as they were reported, 

 light grey and extremely prominent and actually glittering." Was 

 this a subconscious mental comparison of the creator with the 

 creation ? of Coleridge himself with the ancient mariner who 

 with his " long grey beard and glittering eye " willed men 

 involuntarily to halt and listen ? 



Others besides Carlyle have left on record Coleridge's peculiar 

 gait. Hazlitt remarked it long before the opium habit began. 

 In his later days at Highgate, his rough, black locks turned white, 

 his figure bent, " dressed all in black as he moved about the house 

 and garden," writes Alex. Gillman, " he might have been taken for 

 a clergyman ; he shared his breakfast with the birds, and his 

 knowledge with his friends." Among these friends he did not 

 always discriminate ; he sometimes wasted his conversational 

 powers, which were never greater than at this period of his life ; 

 and he often cast his pearls of wisdom before the young, or those 

 otherwise unfitted to appreciate them. 



One who bore witness to this was Lord Hatherley, then Mr. 

 William Page Wood ; who was a frequent visitor at the house of 

 Basil Montague, scholar and barrister of Bedford Square. 

 Thursday was the only day when Mr. and Mrs. Montague did 

 not receive that evening being always reserved for the Grove 

 whither the future Lord Chancellor frequently accompanied 

 them. He says that Coleridge " poured out all the riches of his 

 prodigious memory, and all the poetry of his brilliant imagination 

 to every listener. I was not only addressed myself, but I heard 

 the whole of the poet-philosopher's favourite system of Polarites, 

 the Thesis, the Menothesis, and Antithesis showered down on a 

 young lady of seventeen, with as much unction as he afterwards 

 expounded it to Edward Irving." 



Gillman's son, when a schoolboy, once asked him for help in 

 a school exercise, but never did so again, as the sage gave him a 

 lecture an hour long on the profoundest principles of the subject, 

 beginning with our first parents ! 



Audiences of older people, however, generally hung entranced 

 upon his words. Dr. Dibdin met him at a dinner-party " where 

 the orator rolled himself up as it were, in his chair," and talked 



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