I have read and digested most of the historic writers, but I do not _like_ history. Metaphysics and poetry and 'facts of the mind' (_i.e._, accounts of all the strange phantasms that ever possessed your philosophy-dreamers, from Thoth, the Egyptian, to Taylor, the English pagan) are my darling studies. In short, I seldom read except to amuse myself, and I am almost always reading. Of useful knowledge,--I am a so-so chemist, and I love chemistry--all else is blank--but I will be (please God) a horticulturist and farmer." What is to be done against such impregnable obstinacy? Coleridge's friends let him "gang his ain gait": and when _mauvais quarts d'heure_ threatened to drive him to despair, they came to the rescue with timely cheques: meanwhile, Tom Poole strove hard to educate him in potato culture, and Charles Lloyd paid down his twenty-five shillings a week. But to-day Charles Lloyd was looking ill-at-ease and sulky. He threw out hints about the general discomfort of things,--vague allusions to other people being made much of and himself contemned. He was in a disagreeable mood, and evidently dying to pick a quarrel. Half through breakfast, he took umbrage at some inoffensive jest, and flung himself out of the room. "What can ail the lad?" asked Coleridge, in amazement. "I suppose he has another fit coming on," observed the practical Sara. "I don't like sour looks and bitter words in our peaceful home," said the poet, rumpling his heavy black locks with a distracted air. "God forbid that he should take it into his head to go away," said Sara: and she got up with a very grave face and proceeded to clear the breakfast table. Coleridge betook himself to the garden and called over the back hedge to the neighbour for whose companionship he had taken this inefficient little cottage. Thomas Poole, his friend and benefactor, was a well-to-do tanner, well-educated and a devout student of literature: he discerned the potentialities of great things in Coleridge, and felt honoured by his acquaintanceship. For the poet had something of that peculiar fascination for more prosaic men, that magnetic charm of personality, which atones for so many minor defects,--which obviates weakness and ill-balance of mind,--which even endears him who is "impossible" from a worldly standpoint, to those of saner and robuster calibre. Coleridge could never be without a friend, without a listener: and a listener was a desideratum to him. This "noticeable man with large grey eyes" undoubtedly attracted to himself all that was best in other people: his culture allured them, his eloquence held them spell-bound, and his voice--that wonderful voice which was to Hazlitt "as a stream of rich distilled perfumes"--sank into every fibre of their being.