It is true, he did but little of the promised and purposed much. His friend, Justice Talfourd, while testifying to the benignity of his nature, describes his life as "one splendid and sad prospectus,"--and, according to Wordsworth, "his mental power was frozen at its marvellous source";[L] yet what a world of wealth he has bequeathed to us, although the whole produce of his pen, in poetry, is compressed within one single small volume! Thus writes Talfourd, in his "Memorials of Charles Lamb":--"After a long and painful illness, borne with heroic patience, which concealed the intensity of his sufferings from the by-standers, Coleridge died,"--if that can be called death which removes the soul from its impediment of clay, extends immeasurably its sphere of usefulness, and perpetuates the power to benefit mankind so long as earth endures. Within a few months past I again drove to Highgate, and visited the house in which the poet passed so many happy years of calm contentment and seraphic peace,--again repeated those lines which, next to his higher faith, were the faith by which his life was ruled and guided:-- "He prayeth best who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all!" His remains lie in a vault in the graveyard of the old church at Highgate. He was a stranger in the parish where he died, notwithstanding his long residence there, and was therefore interred alone; not long afterwards, however, the vault was built to receive the body of his wife: there they rest together. It is inclosed by a thick iron grating, and the interior is lined with white marble. When I visited the tomb in 1864, one of the marble slabs had accidentally given way, and the coffin was partially exposed. I laid my hand upon it in solemn reverence, and gratefully recalled to memory him who, in his own emphatic words, had "Here found life in death." FOOTNOTES: [D] De Quincey more than insinuates that, instead of Gillman persuading Coleridge to relinquish opium, Coleridge seduced Gillman into taking it. [E] Gillman published but one volume of a Life of Coleridge. The volume he gave me contains his corrections for another edition. De Quincey says of it that "it is a thing deader than a door-nail,--which is waiting vainly, and for thousands of years is doomed to wait, for its sister volume, namely, Volume Second." It must be ever regretted, that of the poet's later life, of which he knew so much, he wrote nothing; but the world was justified in expecting in the details of his earlier pilgrimage something which it did not get.