Bide a While with Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Here is one of the most intelligible and longest sentences in the English language. In Barbara Rooke’s edition she has a footnote - (J. Wordsworth Marginalia) “This sentence particularly pleased Wordsworth for its architecture.” My own observations will follow. Do take a deep breath:

As long therefore as I obtrude no unsupported assertions on my readers ; and as long as I state my opinions, and the evidence which induced or compelled me to adopt them, with calmness and that diffidence in myself, which is by no means incompatible with a firm belief in the justness of the opinions themselves ; while I attack no man's private life from any cause, and detract from no man's honours in his public character, from the truth of his doctrines, or the merits of his compositions, without detailing all my reasons and resting the result solely on the arguments adduced ; while I moreover explain fully the motives of duty, which influenced me in resolving to institute such investigation ; while I confine all asperity of censure, and all expressions of contempt, to gross violations of truth, honour, and decency, to the base corrupter and the detected slanderer ; while I write on no subject which I have not studied with my best attention, on no subject which my education and acquirements have incapacitated me from properly understanding; and above all while I approve myself, alike in praise and in blame, in close reasoning and in impassioned declamation, a steady friend to the two best and surest friends of all men, truth and honesty ; I will not fear an accusation of either presumption or arrogance from the good and the wise. I shall pity it from the weak, and welcome it from the wicked.

(from Essay IV: Vol.1 1818 edition)

Here S.T.C. is leaping through the billows dolphin like. Each ‘while’ breaks up the whole into sentence like semantic units functioning like is a catenary of propositions. However in the following long sentences from Essay VII and Essay XI vol. 3 he sounds the depths of understanding like a whale in a single plunge. You breach with him, astonished.

 The naturalist, who can not or will not see, that one fact is often worth a thousand, as including them all in itself, and that it first makes all the other facts; who has not the head to comprehend, the soul to reverence, a central experiment or observation (what the Greeks would perhaps have called a protophaenomenon; will never receive an auspicious answer from the oracle of nature.

(from Essay VII Vol. 3)

or this Platonic utterance:

Meditate on the nature of a Being whose ideas are creative, and consequently more real, more substantial than the things that, at the height of their creaturely state, are but their dim reflexes ; and the intuitive conviction will arise that in such a Being there could exist no motive to the creation of a machine for its own sake; that, therefore, the material world must have been made for the sake of man, at once the high-priest and representative of the Creator, as far as he partakes of that reason in which the essences of all things co-exist in all their distinctions yet as one and indivisible. 

(from Essay XI. Vol.3)

Find The Friend in Two Volumes at Internet Archive:
Vol.1: Vol 1
Vol.2: Vol 2

The Friend edited by Barbara Rooke in 2 vols. pub. Princeton University Press.