with undulating step, and giving me the precious document, said that that was his address, _Mr. Coleridge, Nether-Stowey, Somersetshire_; and that he should be glad to see me there in a few weeks’ time, and, if I chose, would come half-way to meet me. I was not less surprised than the shepherd-boy (this simile is to be found in _Cassandra_) when he sees a thunderbolt fall close at his feet. I stammered out my acknowledgements and acceptance of this offer (I thought Mr. Wedgwood’s annuity a trifle to it) as well as I could; and this mighty business being settled, the poet-preacher took leave, and I accompanied him six miles on the road. It was a fine morning in the middle of winter, and he talked the whole way. The scholar in Chaucer is described as going ----Sounding on his way. [14] My father was one of those who mistook his talent after all. He used to be very much dissatisfied that I preferred his Letters to his Sermons. The last were forced and dry; the first came naturally from him. For ease, half-plays on words, and a supine, monkish, indolent pleasantry, I have never seen them equalled. [15] He complained in particular of the presumption of his attempting to establish the future immortality of man, ‘without’ (as he said) ‘knowing what Death was or what Life was’--and the tone in which he pronounced these two words seemed to convey a complete image of both. So Coleridge went on his. In digressing, in dilating, in passing from subject to subject, he appeared to me to float in air, to slide on ice. He told me in confidence (going along) that he should have preached two sermons before he accepted the situation at Shrewsbury, one on Infant Baptism, the other on the Lord’s Supper, showing that he could not administer either, which would have effectually disqualified him for the object in view. I observed that he continually crossed me on the way by shifting from one side of the footpath to the other. This struck me as an odd movement; but I did not at that time connect it with any instability of purpose or involuntary change of principle, as I have done since. He seemed unable to keep on in a straight line. He spoke slightingly of Hume (whose Essay on Miracles he said was stolen from an objection started in one of South’s Sermons--_Credat Judaeus Apella!_). I was not very much pleased at this account of Hume, for I had just been reading, with infinite relish, that completest of all metaphysical _choke-pears_, his _Treatise on Human Nature_, to which the _Essays_, in point of scholastic subtlety and close reasoning, are mere elegant trifling, light summer-reading. Coleridge even denied the excellence of Hume’s general style, which I think betrayed a want of taste or candour. He however made me amends by the manner in which he spoke of Berkeley. He dwelt particularly on his _Essay on Vision_ as a masterpiece of analytical reasoning. So it undoubtedly is. He was exceedingly angry with Dr.