If we take into consideration the effect of the climates of the North, _Gothic_, in contra-distinction to Greek and Græco-Roman architecture, is rightly so named. Take, for instance, a rainy, windy day, or sleet, or a fall of snow, or an icicle-hanging frost, and then compare the total effect of the South European roundnesses and smooth perpendicular surface with the ever-varying angles and meeting-lines of the North-European or Gothic styles.
[The above is probably a dropped sentence from the report of the First or Second Lecture of the 1818 series. See _Coleridge's Works_ (Harper and Brothers, 1853), iv. 232-239.]
The demagogues address the lower orders as if they were negroes--as if each individual were an inseparable part of the order, always to remain, _nolens volens_, poor and ignorant. How different from Christianity, which for ever calls on us to detach ourselves spiritually not merely from our rank, but even from our body, and from the whole world of sense!
The one mighty main defect of female education is that everything is taught but reason and the means of retaining affection. This--this--O! it is worth all the rest told ten thousand times:--how to greet a husband, how to receive him, how never to recriminate--in short, the power of pleasurable thoughts and feelings, and the mischief of giving pain, or (as often happens when a husband comes home from a party of old friends, joyous and full of heart) the love-killing effect of cold, dry, uninterested looks and manners.
[Sidenote: THE HALFWAY HOUSE Wednesday night, May 18th, 1808]
Let me record the following important remark of Stuart, with whom I never converse but to receive some distinct and rememberable improvement (and if it be not remembered, it is the defect of my memory--which, alas! grows weaker daily--or a fault from my indolence in not noting it down, as I do this)--that there is a period in a man's life, varying in various men, from thirty-five to forty-five, and operating most strongly in bachelors, widowers, or those worst and miserablest widowers, unhappy husbands, in which a man finds himself at the _top of the hill_, and having attained, perhaps, what he wishes, begins to ask himself, What is all this for?--begins to feel the vanity of his pursuits, becomes half-melancholy, gives in to wild dissipation or self-regardless drinking; and some, not content with these (not _slow_) poisons, destroy themselves, and leave their ingenious female or female-minded friends to fish out some _motive_ for an act which proceeded from a _motive-making_ impulse, which would have acted even without a motive (even as the terror[E] in nightmare is a bodily sensation, and though it most often calls up consonant images, yet, as I know by experience, can take effect equally without any); or, if not so, yet like gunpowder in a smithy, though it will not go off without a spark, is _sure_ to receive one, if not this hour, yet the next. I had _felt_ this truth, but never saw it before clearly: it came upon me at Malta under the melancholy, dreadful feeling of finding myself to be _man_, by a distinct division from boyhood, youth, and "young man." Dreadful was the feeling--till then life had flown so that I had always been a boy, as it were; and this sensation had blended in all my conduct, my willing acknowledgment of superiority, and, in truth, my meeting every person as a superior at the first moment. Yet if men survive this period, they commonly become cheerful again. That is a comfort for mankind, _not for me_!