Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table-talking

The nephew of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) recalled of the poet, 'There were, indeed, some whom Coleridge tired, and some he sent to sleep. It would occasionally so happen, when the abstruser mood was strong upon him, and the visitor was narrow and ungenial. I have seen him ... when he shook aside your petty questions and doubts, and burst with some impatience through the obstacles of common conversation. Then, escaped from the flesh, he would soar upwards into an atmosphere almost too rare to breathe, but which seemed proper to him, and there he would float at ease. Like enough, what Coleridge then said, his subtlest listener would not understand as a man understands a newspaper' (see H.N. Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, London, 1835, pp. xvi-xvii).