Meantime--to resume the thread of my wandering narrative--on this serene summer night of 1807, as I moved slowly along, with my eyes continually settling upon the northern constellations, which, like all the fixed stars, by their immeasurable and almost spiritual remoteness from human affairs, naturally throw the thoughts upon the perishableness of our earthly troubles, in contrast with their own utter peace and solemnity--I reverted, at intervals, to all I had ever heard of Coleridge, and strove to weave it into some continuous sketch of his life. I hardly remember how much I then knew; I know but little now: that little I will here jot down upon paper. * * * * * Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the son of a learned clergyman--the vicar of Ottery St. Mary, in the southern quarter of Devonshire.[52] It is painful to mention that he was almost an object of persecution to his mother; why, I could never learn. His father was described to me, by Coleridge himself, as a sort of Parson Adams, being distinguished by his erudition, his inexperience of the world, and his guileless simplicity. I once purchased in London, and, I suppose, still possess, two elementary books on the Latin language by this reverend gentleman; one of them, as I found, making somewhat higher pretensions than a common school grammar.[53] In particular, an attempt is made to reform the theory of the cases; and it gives a pleasant specimen of the rustic scholar's _naïveté_, that he seriously proposes to banish such vexatious terms as the _accusative_; and, by way of simplifying the matter to tender minds, that we should call it, in all time to come, the "_quale-quare-quidditive_" case, upon what incomprehensible principle I never could fathom. He used regularly to delight his village flock, on Sundays, with Hebrew quotations in his sermons, which he always introduced as the "immediate language of the Holy Ghost." This proved unfortunate to his successor: he also was a learned man, and his parishioners admitted it, but generally with a sigh for past times, and a sorrowful complaint that he was still far below Parson Coleridge--for that _he_ never gave them any "immediate language of the Holy Ghost." I presume that, like the reverend gentleman so pleasantly sketched in "St. Ronan's Well," Mr. Coleridge, who resembled that person in his oriental learning, in his absence of mind, and in his simplicity, must also have resembled him in shortsightedness, of which his son used to relate this ludicrous instance. Dining in a large party, one day, the modest divine was suddenly shocked by perceiving some part, as he conceived, of his own snowy shirt emerging from a part of his habiliments, which we will suppose to have been his waistcoat. It was _not_ that; but for decorum we will so call it. The stray portion of his own supposed tunic was admonished of its errors by a forcible thrust back into its proper home; but still