At the Lakes, and summoned abroad by scenery so exquisite--living, too, in the bosom of a family endeared to him by long friendship and by sympathy the closest with all his propensities and tastes--Coleridge (it may be thought) could not sequester himself so profoundly as at the "Courier" Office within his own shell, or shut himself out so completely from that large dominion of eye and ear amongst the hills, the fields, and the woods, which once he had exercised so delightfully to himself, and with a participation so immortal, through his exquisite poems, to all generations. He was not now reduce to depend upon "Mrs. Brainbridge"----(Mistress Brain--Brain--Brainbridge, I say----Oh heavens! _is_ there, can there, was there, _will_ there ever at any future period be, an undeniable use in saying and in pressing upon the attention of the Strand and Fleet Street at their earliest convenience the painful subject of Mistress Brain--Brain--Brainbridge, I say---- Do you hear, Mrs. Brain--Brain--Brainbridge----? Brain or Bain, it matters little--Bran or Brain, it's all one, I conceive):--here, on the contrary, he looked out from his study windows upon the sublime hills of _Seat Sandal_ and _Arthur's Chair_, and upon pastoral cottages at their feet; and all around him he heard hourly the murmurings of happy life, the sound of female voices, and the innocent laughter of children. But apparently he was not happy; opium, was it, or what was it, that poisoned all natural pleasure at its sources? He burrowed continually deeper into scholastic subtleties and metaphysical abstractions; and, like that class described by Seneca in the luxurious Rome of _his_ days, he lived chiefly by candlelight. At two or four o'clock in the afternoon he would make his first appearance. Through the silence of the night, when all other lights had disappeared in the quiet cottages of Grasmere, _his_ lamp might be seen invariably by the belated traveller, as he descended the long steep from Dunmailraise; and at seven or eight o'clock in the morning, when man was going forth to his labour, this insulated son of reverie was retiring to bed.