text:  Heavens! what an ark of unclean beasts would have been Coleridge's private _menagerie_ of departed philosophers could they all have been trotted out in succession! But did the reader feel them to be the awful bores which in fact they were? No; because Coleridge had blown upon these withered anatomies through the blowpipe of his own creative genius a stream of gas that swelled the tissue of their antediluvian wrinkles forced colour upon their cheeks and splendour upon their sodden eyes