font, as your Christian name, the name of a most dear friend of your father's, and who was to me even as a son, the late Adam Steinmetz, whose fervent aspirations, and paramount aim, even from early youth, was to be a Christian in thought, word, and deed, in will, mind, and affections. I too, your godfather, have known what the enjoyment and advantages of this life are, and what the more refined pleasures which learning and intellectual power can give; 1 now, on the eve of my departure, declare to you (and earnestly pray that you may hereafter live and act on the conviction), that health is a great blessing; competence, obtained by honourable industry, a great blessing; and a great blessing it is, to have kind, faithful, and loving friends and relatives; but that the greatest of all blessings, as it is the most ennobling of all privileges, is to be indeed a CHRISTIAN. But I have been likewise, through a large portion of my later life, a sufferer, sorely affected with bodily pains, languor, and manifold infirmities, and for the last three or four years have, with few and brief intervals, been confined to a sick room, and at this moment, in great weakness and heaviness, write from a sick bed, hopeless of recovery, yet without prospect of a

speedy removal. And I thus, on the brink of the grave, solemnly bear witness to you, that the Almighty Redeemer, most gracious in his promises to them that truly seek him, is faithful to perform what he has promised; and has reserved, under all pains and infirmities, the peace that passeth all understanding, with the supporting assurance of a reconciled God, who will not withdraw his Spirit from me in the conflict, and in his own time will deliver me from the evil one. O, my dear godchild! eminently blessed are they who begin early to seek, fear, and love their God, trusting wholly in the righteousness and mediation of their Lord, Redeemer, Saviour, and everlasting High Priest, Jesus Christ. O, preserve this as a legacy and bequest from your unseen godfather and friend,

July 13th, 1834,
Grove, Highgate."

S. T. Coleridge.

Is the writer of this epistle the man, who, twenty years before, even coveted annihilation !— Is this the man, who so long preferred, to all things else, the "Circean chalice!"-Is this he, who, at one time, learned, to his unutterable dis

may, what a sin was, "against an imperishable being, such as is the soul of man!"-Is this he, whose will was once extinguished by an unhallowed passion, and, he himself borne along toward perdition, by a flood of intemperance !-Is this the man who resisted the light, till darkness entered his mind, and with it "a glimpse of outer darkness!"-Is this he, who feared that his own inveterate and aggravated "crimes" would exclude him from that heaven, the road to which he was tracing out for others!-Is this he, that, through successive years, contended with the severest mental and bodily afflictions; who knew the cause, but rejected the remedy?—who, in 1807, declared himself, "rolling, rudderless," "the wreck of what he once was," "with an unceasing, overwhelming sensation of wretchedness?" and, in 1814, who still pronounced himself the endurer of all that was "wretched, helpless, and hopeless?" Samuel Taylor Coleridge is the man on whom all these charges and fearful anticipations once rested: but he is changed! but he is renovated! When refuge failed, an Unseen Power subdued the rebellious, and softened the hard, and he now, on the verge of life, in the serenity of faith, sits, clothed, and in his right mind.

Before the effect of this letter, the eccentricities of S. T. Coleridge-his indiscretions, his frailties, vanish away. There is in it a mellowed character, accordant with a proximity to the eternal state, when alone the objects of time assume their true dimensions; when-earth receding! eternity opening! the spirit, called to launch its untried bark on the dark and stormy waters that separate both worlds, descries light afar, and leans, as its only solace, on the hope of the christian.

Checkered indeed was the life of this great but imperfect man. His dawn was not without promise. Hopes and blessings attended him in his course, but mists obscured his noon, and tempests long followed him; yet he set, serene and in splendor, looking on, through faith in his Redeemer, to that cloudless morning, where his sun shall no more go down.

J. C.

THE END.