S. T. Coleridge possessed marvelous powers of mind, but he had no definite purpose; he lived in an atmosphere of mental dissipation which consumed his energy, exhausted his stamina, and his life was in many respects a miserable failure. He lived in dreams and died in reverie. He was continually forming plans and resolutions, but to the day of his death they remained simply resolutions and plans.

He was always just going to do something, but never did it. "Coleridge is dead," wrote Charles Lamb to a friend, "and is said to have left behind him above forty thousand treatises on metaphysics and divinity—not one of them complete!"

Every great man has become great, every successful man has succeeded, in proportion as he has confined his powers to one particular channel.

Hogarth would rivet his attention upon a face and study it until it was photographed upon his memory, when he could reproduce it at will. He studied and examined each object as eagerly as though he would never have a chance to see it again, and this habit of close observation enabled him to develop his work with marvelous detail. The very modes of thought of the time in which he lived were reflected from his works. He was not a man of great education or culture, except in his power of observation.

With an immense procession passing up Broadway, the streets lined with people, and bands playing lustily, Horace Greeley would sit upon t