“I have seen many curiosities; not the least of them I reckon Coleridge, the Kantian metaphysician and quondam Lake Poet. I will tell you all about our interview when we meet. 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, yet earnest-looking eyes, a high tapering brow, and a great bush of gray hair, and you have some faint idea of Coleridge. He is a kind, good soul, full of religion and affection and poetry and animal magnetism. His cardinal sin is that he wants _will_. He has no resolution. He shrinks from pain or labour in any of its shapes. His very attitude bespeaks this. He never straightens his knee-joints. He stoops with his fat, ill-shapen shoulders, and in walking he does not tread, but shovel and slide. My father would call it ‘skluiffing.’ He is also always busied to keep, by strong and frequent inhalations, the water of his mouth from overflowing, and his eyes have a look of anxious impotence. He _would_ do with all his heart, but he knows he dares not. The conversation of the man is much as I anticipated--a forest of thoughts, some true, many false, more _part_ dubious, all of them ingenious in some degree, often in a high degree. But there is no method in his talk; he wanders like a man sailing among many currents, whithersoever his lazy mind directs him; and, what is more unpleasant, he preaches, or rather soliloquises. He cannot speak, he can only _tal-k_ (so he names it). Hence I found him unprofitable, even tedious; but we parted very good friends, I promising to go back and see him some evening--a promise which I fully intend to keep. I sent him a copy of _Meister_, about which we had some friendly talk. I reckon him a man of great and useless genius: a strange, not at all a great man.”--1824. WILLIAM COLLINS 1720-1756 [Sidenote: _Gentleman’s Magazine_, 1781.] “Collins I was intimately acquainted with from the time that he came to reside at Oxford. In London I met him often.... He was of moderate stature, of a light and clear complexion, with gray eyes so very weak at times as hardly to bear a candle in the room, and often raising within him apprehensions of blindness. He was passionately fond of music, good-natured and affable, warm in his friendships and visionary in his pursuits, and, as long as I knew him, temperate in his eating and drinking.” [Sidenote: Johnson’s _Life of Collins_.] “About this time I fell into his company. His appearance was decent and manly; his knowledge considerable, his views extensive, his conversation elegant, and his disposition cheerful.”--1744. [Sidenote: J. Langhorne’s _Memoirs of William Collins_.]