How did he appeal to his contemporaries? Criticism was generally undiscerning and hostile, but those who came within the charmed circle were, with rare exception, delighted. The secret of his appeal passed with him; there are still some who wonder how it has come about that, the limits of ordered achievement being so marked, Coleridge stands where he does. Poet, critic, and metaphysician, in each capacity he had attracted the interest and retained the regard of a great majority of his most notable contemporaries. His inspiration came by fits and starts, but, when it did come, would find expression in felicitous phrases revealing some aspects of truth that captured the imagination. At the end of a long unhappy and often ill-spent life, he could command the unstinted admiration of such a sour-tongued old critic as Thomas Carlyle. Hear him in his _Life of Sterling_: "Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill in those years looking down on London and its smoke tumult like a sage escaped from the inanity of life's battle, attracting towards him the thoughts of innumerable brave souls still engaged there.... A sublime man, who alone in those dark days had saved his crown of spiritual manhood, escaping from the black materialism and revolutionary deluges with 'God, Freedom, Immortality' still his; a king of men." And later he describes him with the true Carlyle touch as that "heavy laden, high aspiring, and surely much suffering man." Wordsworth said that Coleridge was the only wonderful man he had ever met; Nelson Coleridge said that a day spent with Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a "sabbath past expression, deep, tranquil, and serene." Find him at the right time and in happy mood, he was capable of great feats. For example, he was invited one morning to lecture before the London Philosophical Society. He went with Gillman to the secretary to inquire the subject chosen, but the secretary was out. In the evening Coleridge and Gillman went to the Society's rooms, and heard the announcement made that Mr. Coleridge would deliver an address on "The Growth of the Individual Mind." He spoke extempore for over an hour and a half, holding a critical audience enthralled. Joseph Henry Green, whose two posthumous volumes entitled _Spiritual Philosophy_, founded upon the teaching of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, were published in 1865, was sufficiently under the spell to devote a whole life-work to his master's teaching. With Coleridge, the metaphysician, it is impossible to deal here. Dr. Traill summed up his teaching very concisely in the following sentences: