I have listened to him more than once for above an hour, of course without putting in a single word: I would as soon have bellowed a loose song while a nightingale was singing. There was rarely much change of countenance; his face was at that time (it is said from his habit of opium-eating) overladen with flesh, and its expression impaired; yet to me it was so tender and gentle and gracious and loving, that I could have knelt at the old man's feet almost in adoration. My own hair is white now; yet I have much the same feeling as I had then, whenever the form of the venerable man rises in memory before me. I cannot recall now, and I believe could not recall at the time, so as to preserve, as a cherished thing in my remembrance, a single sentence of the many sentences I heard him utter; yet in his "Table-Talk" there is a world of wisdom,--and that is only a collection of scraps, chance-gathered. If any left his presence unsatisfied, it resulted rather from the superabundance than the paucity of the feast.[H] I can recall many evening rambles with him over the high lands that look down on London; but the memory I cherish most is linked with a crowded street, where the clumsy and the coarse jostled the old man eloquent, as if he had been earthly, of the earth. It was in the Strand: he pointed out to me the window of a room in the office of the "Morning Post," where he had consumed much midnight oil; and then for half an hour he talked of the sorrowful joy he had often felt, when, leaving the office as day was dawning, he heard the song of a caged lark that sang his orisons from the lattice of an artisan, who was rising to begin his labor as the poet was pacing homewards to rest after his work all night. Thirty years had passed; but that unforgotten melody, that dear bird's song, gave him then as much true pleasure as when, to his wearied head and heart, it was the matin hymn of Nature. I remember once meeting him in Paternoster Row. He was inquiring his way to Bread Street, Cheapside; and of course I endeavored to explain to him, that, if he walked straight on for about two hundred yards and took the fourth turning to the right, it would be the street he wanted. I perceived him gazing so vague and unenlightened, that I could not help expressing my surprise, as I looked earnestly at his forehead and saw the organ of locality unusually prominent above the eyebrows. He took my meaning, laughed, and said, "I see what you are looking at. Why, at school my head was beaten into a mass of bumps, because I could not point out Paris in a map of France." It is said that Spurzheim pronounced him to be a mathematician, and affirmed that he could not be a poet. Such opinion the great phrenologist could not have expressed; for undoubtedly he had a large organ of ideality, although at first it was not perceptible, in consequence of the great breadth and height of his profound forehead.