“In height and breadth and in general configuration,” wrote Julian Charles Young, “Dr. Chalmers was not unlike Coleridge. I have, since I knew Coleridge, sometimes thought that if Chalmers’s head had been buried from sight, I could easily have mistaken him for that remarkable man. His face was pallid and pasty, and, I rather think, showed slight traces of small-pox. His features were ordinary; his hair was scanty, and generally roughed, as if his fingers had often passed through it; his brow was not high, but very broad, and well developed. His skull, phrenologically speaking, argued great mathematical power, but showed deficiency in the very qualities for which he was conspicuous, namely, benevolence and veneration.” Concerning Coleridge, Young wrote: “His general appearance would have led me to suppose him a dissenting minister. His hair was long, white, and neglected; his complexion was florid; his features were square; his eyes watery and hazy; his brow broad and massive; his build uncouth; his deportment grave and abstracted.” Charles Cowden Clarke, in his _Recollections_, spoke of Coleridge as “large-presenced, ample-countenanced, grand-foreheaded,” and said that “the upper part of his face was excessively fine. His eyes were large, light gray, prominent, and of a liquid brilliancy. The lower part of his face was somewhat dragged, indicating the presence of habitual pain; but his forehead was prodigious, and like a smooth slab of alabaster.” Leigh Hunt likened his brow to “a great piece of placid marble,” and added that even in his old age “there was something invincibly young in the look of his face.” “This boylike expression” he considered “very becoming in one who dreamed and speculated as Coleridge did when he was really a boy, and who passed his entire life apart from the rest of the world with a book and his flowers.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Carlyle’s portrait of Coleridge is peculiarly in the Carlylian vein. “Figure a fat, flabby, incurvated personage, at once short, rotund, and relaxed; with a watery mouth; a snuffy nose; a pair of strange brown, timid, and yet earnest-looking eyes; a high tapering brow; and a great brush of gray hair—and you have some faint idea of Coleridge.” Coleridge himself was not more flattering to Coleridge. In 1796 he wrote to John Thelwall: “My face, unless when animated by immediate eloquence, expresses great sloth, and great, indeed almost idiotic, good-nature. ’Tis a mere carcass of a face, fat, flabby, and expressive chiefly of inexpression. Yet I am told that my eyes, eyebrows, and forehead are physiognomically good.”