"The good man--he was now getting old, towards sixty perhaps, and gave you the idea of a life that had been full of sufferings; a life heavy-laden, half-vanquished, still swimming painfully in seas of manifold physical and other bewilderment. Brow and head were round and of massive weight, but the face was flabby and irresolute. The deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow as of inspiration; confused pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind of mild astonishment. The whole figure and air, good and amiable otherwise, might be called flabby and irresolute; expressive of weakness under possibility of strength. He hung loosely on his limbs, with knees bent, and stooping attitude; in walking he rather shuffled than decisively stept; and a lady once remarked he never could fix which side of the gardenwalk would suit him best, but continually shifted, corkscrew fashion, and kept trying both; a heavy-laden, high-aspiring, and surely much-suffering man. His voice, naturally soft and good, had contracted itself into a plaintive snuffle and singsong; he spoke as if preaching--you could have said preaching earnestly and almost hopelessly the weightiest things. I still recollect his 'object' and 'subject,' terms of continual recurrence in the Kantean province; and how he sang and snuffled them into 'om-m-ject' and 'sum-m-mject,' with a kind of solemn shake or quaver as he rolled along. [1] No talk in his century or in any other could be more surprising." Such, as he appeared to this half-contemptuous, half-compassionate, but ever acute observer, was Coleridge at this the zenith of his influence over the nascent thought of his day. Such to Carlyle seemed the _manner_ of the deliverance of the oracles; in his view of their matter, as we all know from an equally well-remembered passage, his tolerance disappears, and his account here, with all its racy humour, is almost wholly impatient. Talk, "suffering no interruption, however reverent," "hastily putting aside all foreign additions, annotation, or most ingenuous desires for elucidation, as well-meant superfluities which would never do;" talk "not flowing anywhither, like a river, but spreading everywhither in inextricable currents and regurgitations like a lake or sea;" a "confused unintelligible flood of utterance, threatening to submerge all known landmarks of thought and drown the world with you"--this, it must be admitted, is not an easily recognisable description of the Word of Life. Nor, certainly, does Carlyle's own personal experience of its preaching and effects--he having heard the preacher talk "with eager musical energy two stricken hours, his face radiant and moist, and communicate no meaning whatsoever to any individual of his hearers,"--certain of whom, the narrator for one, "still kept eagerly listening in hope, while the most had long before given up and formed (if the room was large enough) humming groups of their own." "He began anywhere," continues this