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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