Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/202

192 ravages of disease in its physical aspects, the laying bare of bodily conditions and symptoms of decay, would be in themselves intolerably disagreeable, but it is much worse to be obliged to attend at the sick-bed of the mind; and in Coleridge's case the internal weakness of the spirit excites the greatest pity, and this feeling nearly passes involuntarily into disgust. The sensibility of his nervous organization was acute. He speaks of times when, as he was accusing himself of insensibility through incapacity to feel, his "whole frame has gone crash, as it were." Under the excitement of his emotions, he dissolves in weakness; the spectacle is not a pleasant one; there is something almost ignoble in such loss of self-control. When Wordsworth recited to him, if one can fancy such a thing, the entire thirteen books on the growth of his own mind, in 1807, Coleridge composed a poem, not very coherent or noble, though with personal pathos, in which he says that when he rose from his seat, he "found himself in prayer." It was apparently not an unusual termination to the access of emotion, and it occurred more than once in his relations with the Beaumonts. The mention of it, however, in his