The reverse is equally true,—and judging from my own experience, I should say oftener true. [Illustration] 78. “La curiosité est si voisine à la perfidie qu’elle peut enlaidir les plus beaux visages.” [Illustration] 79. When I told Tieck of the death of Coleridge (I had just received the sad but not unexpected news in a letter from England), he exclaimed with emotion, “A great spirit has passed away from the earth, and has left no adequate memorial of its greatness.” Speaking of him afterwards he said, “Coleridge possessed the creative and inventive spirit of poetry, not the productive; he _thought_ too much to produce,—the analytical power interfered with the genius: Others with more active faculties seized and worked out his magnificent hints and ideas. Walter Scott and Lord Byron borrowed the first idea of the form and spirit of their narrative poems from Coleridge’s ‘Christabelle.’” This judgment of one great poet and critic passed on another seemed to me worth preserving. [Illustration] 80. Coleridge says, “In politics what begins in fear usually ends in folly.” He might have gone farther, and added: In morals what begins in fear usually ends in wickedness. In religion what begins in fear usually ends in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil. [Illustration] In another place he says,— “Talent lying in the understanding is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason and imagination, rarely or never.” There seems confusion here, for genius lies not in the amount of intellect—it is a quality of the intellect apart from quantity. And the distinction between talent and genius is definite. Talent combines and uses; genius combines and creates. [Illustration] Of Sara Coleridge, Mr. Kenyon said very truly and beautifully, “that like her father she had the controversial _intellect_ without the controversial _spirit_.” [Illustration] 81.