Generally speaking, the selections were as injudicious and
as inappropriate as they were ill delivered, for among Coleridge's
accomplishments good reading was not one. He had neither voice (so at
least I thought) nor management of voice. This defect is unfortunate in
a public lecturer, for it is inconceivable how much weight and
effectual pathos can be communicated by sonorous depth and melodious
cadence of the human voice to sentiments the most trivial; [2] nor, on
the other hand, how the grandest are emasculated by a style of reading
which fails in distributing the lights and shadows of a musical
intonation. However, this defect chiefly concerned the immediate
impression; the most afflicting to a friend of Coleridge's was the
entire absence of his own peculiar and majestic intellect; no heart, no
soul, was in anything he said; no strength of feeling in recalling
universal truths, no power of originality or compass of moral
relations in his novelties,--all was a poor, faint reflection from
pearls once scattered on the highway by himself in the prodigality of
his early opulence--a mendicant dependence on the alms dropped from his
own overflowing treasury of happier times.
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