are an infidel, are you? Then I'll flog your infidelity out of you," and a summary conversion was effected.

Coleridge's reading during these school years was prodigious not only in its quantity and variety, but also in its profundity. A brother came to London to study in the hospitals, and so he "became wild to be apprenticed to a surgeon," he says; "English, Latin, yea, Greek books of medicine read I incessantly." A Latin medical dictionary he learned "nearly by heart." But this interest soon gave way to "a rage for metaphysics," and he read deeply in the Neo-Platonists and Church Fathers. "At a very premature age, even before my fifteenth year, I had bewildered myself in metaphysics, and in theological controversy." For a time history, even poetry, had no interest for him. His greatest delight was to meet "any passenger, especially if he were dressed in black," with whom he could bring about a discussion of his favorite theme, "providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate." It was of Coleridge at about this time that Lamb's famous sketch portrait was drawn. "Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the day-spring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee the dark pillar not yet turned

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Logician, Metaphysician, Bard! How have I seen the casual passer through the cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus, or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar - while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the accents of the inspired charity boy!"

From "this preposterous pursuit" of metaphysics, as he afterwards called it, Coleridge was reconverted to the pursuit of beauty and things of the imagination through a rather surprising agency. He read the Sonnets of William Lisle Bowles and discovered a new heaven and a new earth in poetry. With "impetuous zeal," he labored to win other appreciative readers, and with his own pen made forty copies of the sonnets as presents

for his friends. Four years later, Wordsworth made the same discovery, and kept his brother waiting on Westminster Bridge while he read the volume through. This modest little collection of twenty-one sonnets seems to-day innocent enough of any such moving power, and one wonders what would have been the effect if Coleridge had first come upon Cowper and Burns. What surprised and transported him in these sonnets was the revelation of poetic simplicity and sincerity, and love of natural beauty, qualities strangely different from the placid conventionalisms of eighteenth-century poetry; and so for the time being the pensive Bowles became to Coleridge "the god of my idolatry."

In 1791 Coleridge entered Jesus College, Cambridge. Of his university life few details have survived. He won a gold medal for a Sapphic Ode, and just missed success in a close contest for a prize scholarship. A fellow student described his reading as "desultory and capricious." His scholarship apparently made no real impression except through the remarkable conversational powers for which he was distinguished throughout his life. Students flocked to his rooms to hear him discourse upon the exciting political issues of the time, when he would recite "whole passages verbatim" from the latest political pamphlets. Near the end of his second year occurred the most conspicuous episode of which we have any knowledge. Suddenly he went up to London and enlisted in the King's Light Dragoons, under the name of Silas Tomkyn Comberbach (S.T.C.) — an appropriate name, he afterwards suggested, as he presented but a sorry appearance upon a horse's back. Four months of soldiering was quite enough, and he managed to reveal his situation to friends, who procured his release and return to the university. This singular freak he attributed to debts and disappointment in love, but the real explanation is found in a constitutional instability of purpose, a tendency to pursue the fresh suggestions of impulse, new schemes of alluring colors, ignes fatui, that led him a deplorable race with the stern realities of life. It is not surprising, therefore, that a few months after the military ad

venture he left the university altogether, decoyed by a new appeal to his restless and romantic temperament.

While visiting a friend in Oxford, he met Robert Southey, a young enthusiast like himself, filled with the radicalism and democracy of the French Revolution. A friendship was at once established, a partnership tragedy was written, The Fall of Robespierre, which Coleridge published at Cambridge; and out of a kinship of ideals was swiftly evolved the utopian scheme of Pantisocracy, a state of individual and social perfection which was to be realized in a sort of communal paradise, established on the banks of the Susquehanna. For a time Pantisocracy was made famous in university circles, especially through the eloquence of Coleridge, and other idealists were enlisted in the project; but the very material consideration of the money required to emigrate to America was finally reached, and upon this rock the beautiful scheme went to pieces; not, however, until Coleridge's university career had been wrecked.

Coleridge now entered upon practical life, with a most unpractical grasp upon its responsibilities. Pantisocracy with its rose-colored idealism and inherent elements of disaster, was symbolical of his management of all of life's material problems. He began with a course of lectures, in Bristol, upon the burning question of liberty, which he called Consciones ad Populum. In October, 1795, in Chatterton's church of St. Mary Redcliffe, he was married to Miss Sara Fricker, whose sister Edith, a month later, became the wife of his friend Southey. The young couple settled at Clevedon, in a "pretty cot," over which "thick jasmines twined," where they could hear

"At silent noon, and eve, and early morn,

The sea's faint murmur."

The happiness of this first home is recorded in The Eolian Harp and Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement.

A generous publisher of Bristol, Joseph Cottle, offered Coleridge a guinea and a half for every hundred lines of poetry he would write. Upon this insubstantial vision of golden harvests

as a basis, he set up his domestic establishment. In 1797 he published his first volume of poetry, entitled Poems on Various Subjects, including in the volume three sonnets by his friend Lamb. He started a weekly magazine, called The Watchman, which came to an impecunious end with the tenth number. Very soon he proved to his friends, if not to himself - how precarious is literature as a trade to live by, especially when carried on by a genius. He wrote poems and book-reviews for the magazines, planned great works which came to nothing, preached in Unitarian chapels, but without pay; he received gifts and loans from friends; he took into his family as a boarder and pupil, Charles Lloyd, a wealthy young man of literary ambition, who became one of the "Lakers." But his finances became increasingly chaotic, and in deep distress he writes, "my anxieties eat me up."

A small cottage at Nether Stowey, provided by his friend, Thomas Poole, into which he moved in 1797, seemed to promise a happy remedy for all his ills. Here he will become a farmer, "and there can be no shadow of a doubt that an acre and a half of land, divided properly, and managed properly, will maintain a small family in everything but clothes and rent." He will give up meat and strong liquors, both of which are "perceptibly" injurious. "Sixteen shillings," he estimates, will " cover all the weekly expenses." To a friend who suggested the loneliness of so remote a place he replied: "I shall have six companions: my Sara, my babe, my own shaping and disquisitive mind, my books, my beloved friend, Thomas Poole, and lastly, Nature looking at me with a thousand looks of beauty, and speaking to me in a thousand melodies of love." And literature, "though I shall never abandon it, will always be a secondary object with My poetic vanity and my political furor have been exhaled; and I would rather be an expert, self-maintaining gardener than a Milton, if I could not unite both."

me.

It is worth while to dwell at some length upon this bucolic dream, for in its fragmentary realization Coleridge came nearer to peace and happiness than was ever his fortune again. Soon

after he was settled at Stowey, the most important event of his life occurred; at Racedown he met Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, and mutual admiration ripened quickly into a friendship that linked together forever the names of these two poets. In a few weeks Wordsworth and his sister removed to Alfoxden, a pleasant country house near the sea, three miles from Stowey, their "principal inducement being," as Dorothy wrote, "Coleridge's society." For about a year the two poets were together almost daily; both were great walkers, and the Quantock hills echoed in all directions their high talk of poetry and the poetic art; and in those delightful rambles a new age of English poetry began. A literary partnership was formed and the epochmaking volume of Lyrical Ballads was published in September, 1798.

That Coleridge received more from this friendship than Wordsworth, there can be no doubt. From Wordsworth's lofty and steadfast purposes his emotional and receptive nature absorbed quickly the influence needed to stimulate and concentrate his best creative energies. Indeed, it is safe to say that without this influence Coleridge would have remained the second-rate poet of vagrant thought and voluminous expression found in his early writing. The year 1797-8, the period of this association, is called Coleridge's annus mirabilis, the wonderful year; for in this brief period he wrote essentially all the poetry upon which his fame as a poet rests, the Ancient Mariner, the first part of Christabel, the Ode to France, Kubla Khan, Frost at Midnight, Fears in Solitude, and The Nightingale.

About this time Coleridge received an annuity of £150 from the Wedgewood brothers, sons of the famous potter; the only condition of the gift was that he should devote himself entirely to the highest intellectual pursuits. With this bountiful providence to attend him, he set out for Germany, accompanied by Wordsworth and his sister. Nine months were devoted to the mastering of the German language, literature, and philosophy, a feat which, through his omnivorous powers of acquisition, he approximately accomplished. The most immediate result of