Coleridge, therefore, persuaded himself that he had really anticipated Schelling's thoughts and might justifiably appropriate Schelling's words. He threw out a few phrases about 'genial coincidence'—perhaps the happiest circumlocution ever devised for what Pistol called 'conveying'—and adopted Schelling in the lump. When he had come to an end of Schelling's guidance, he proceeded—with an infantile simplicity which disarms indignation—to write a solemn complimentary letter from himself to himself, pointing out that the public would have had enough of the discussion, and 'Dear C.' politely agreed to drop the subject, with proper compliments to his 'affectionate, etc.' And now I come to the very difficult task of indicating, as briefly as I can, the bearing of these remarks upon Coleridge's multifarious activity. It is not possible to sum up in a few phrases the characteristics of a man who wrote upon metaphysics, theology, morals, politics, and literary criticism; who made a deep impression in all the departments of thought; whose utterances are scattered up and down in fragmentary treatises, in complex arguments which generally break off in the middle, and in miscellaneous jottings upon the margins of books; whose opinions have been differently interpreted by different disciples, and have in great part to be inferred from his comments upon other writers, and can only be intelligible when we have settled what those writers meant, and what he took them to mean; who frequently changed his mind, and who certainly appears, to thinkers of a different order, to add obscurity even to subjects which are necessarily obscure. Nor is the difficulty diminished when, as in my case, the commentator belongs to what must be called the antagonistic school, and is even most properly to be described as a thorough Philistine who is dull enough to glory in his Philistinism. All that I shall attempt is to select a certain aspect of the Coleridgian impulse, and to say what impression it makes upon a radically prosaic mind.