He said the liveliest and truest image he could give of Coleridge’s talk
was that of “a mystic river, the sound or sight of whose course you
caught at intervals, which was sometimes concealed by forests, sometimes
lost in sand, and then came flashing out broad and distinct; then again
took a turn which your eye could not follow, yet you knew and felt that
it was the same river....[M] Coleridge had been spoilt as a poet by
going to Germany. The bent of his mind, at all times very much inclined
to metaphysical theology, had there been fixed in that direction.”