The passage continues:--
"In solitudes, and chiefly in the solitudes of nature, and, above all,
amongst the great and enduring features of nature, such as mountains
and quiet dells, and the lawny recesses of forests, and the silent
shores of lakes--features with which (as being themselves less liable
to change) our feelings have a more abiding associatlon,--under these
circumstances it is that such evanescent hauntings of our forgotten
selves are most apt to startle and waylay us."
The beauty of this passage seems to me marred by the awkward yet
necessary interruption, "under these circumstances it is," which would
have been avoided by opening the sentence with "such evanescent
hauntings of our forgotten selves are most apt to startle us in
solitudes," &c. Compare the effect of directness in the following:--
"This was one of the most common shapes of extinguished power from
which Coleridge fled to the great city. But sometimes the same decay
came back upon his heart in the more poignant shape of intimations and
vanishing glimpses recovered for one moment from the Paradise of youth,
and from fields of joy and power, over which for him too certainly he
felt that the cloud of night was settling for ever.
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