could not be comfortable in your house, and with your family, I should deserve to be miserable. If you could make it convenient, I should wish to be with you by Monday evening, as it would prevent the necessity of taking fresh lodgings in town. With respectful compliments to Mrs. Gillman and her sister, I remain, dear sir, Your much obliged, S. T. COLERIDGE.[95] The Gillmans felt spellbound by Coleridge's talk, and consented to receive him into their household, where he remained for the last eighteen years of his life. It was at Highgate that Coleridge sat looking down upon the "illimitable limitary ocean of London," as Carlyle finely puts it. He had still his ambitions to do something for the Permanent; but the world of England was not yet ripe for Transcendentalism, and the fine distinctions between the Reason and the Understanding, Imagination and Fancy, the Person and the Thing, and all the other subtle analysings of the Human Intellect; but he still had his lore on Shakespeare to fall back on, and he could re-churn it into a new series of Lectures. His ninth course he delivered in 1818, 27th January to 13th March. The course was delivered at "Flower de Luce" Court (Fleur-de-Lis Court). The notes of these lectures occupy about a half of the Bohn Library volume of the _Lectures on Shakespeare_. They are often, like the rest of Coleridge's prose writing, a series of brilliant digressions from the main point, but like De Quincey's similar wanderings, they often come wonderfully round to the subject in hand. H. Crabb Robinson attended only four of the course, and he does not give a very favourable account of them. Gillman says: "He lectured from notes, yet it was obvious that his audience was more delighted when, putting his notes aside, he spoke extempore. He was brilliant, fluid, and rapid; his words seemed to flow from a person repeating with grace and energy some delightful poem. If, however, he sometimes paused, it was not for the want of words, but that he was seeking the most appropriate, or their most logical arrangement." The following letters, given by Gillman in his _Life of Coleridge_, are supposed to belong to this period. LETTER 167. TO ---- (-- 1816?) In a copy of verses, entitled _A Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni_, I describe myself under the influence of strong devotional feelings, gazing on the mountain, till as if it had been a shape emanating from and sensibly representing her own essence, my soul had become diffused through the mighty vision: and there, As in her natural form, swell'd vast to Heaven.