INTRODUCTION

THE LIFE OF COLERIDGE

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE was born on the 21st of October, 1772, at the vicarage of Ottery St. Mary, in the county of Devonshire. His father, the vicar of the parish and the master of the Free Grammar School, was a visionary, eccentric man, well beloved by his people. By a rather abundant use of quotations from the Hebrew he gained the unbounded respect of many of his simple parishioners as using the language of the Holy Ghost. The poet's mother seems to have possessed some of the shrewdness her husband lacked. She was a plain woman, uneducated, a good housekeeper and manager, and possessed a great contempt for young ladies who played the harpsichord. Coleridge was a precocious child, and at three years of age he was sent to a dame's school. As the pet of his mother he gained the ill-will of his brother and his companions; he took little or no part in their sports and games, but gave himself over to his inordinate love of reading. He read all the children's books he could find as well as many beyond his age, lived in this land of imagination, and went about "cutting down weeds and nettles, as one of the Seven Champions of Christendom."" 1

In his sixth year the boy was stricken with a fever; and we may, perhaps, see something of the thought of the Ancient Mariner in his belief that four angels guarded the bed on which he lay, and that they kept away the armies of ugly things that were ready to burst in upon him. Another incident of this period should be mentioned. On one occasion,

1 Biog. Supplement to "Biographia Literaria," 1847. II, 320.

fearing a thoroughly merited punishment, he ran away from home. After wandering for several miles he fell asleep on the damp, cold bank of the river Otter. Here he was rescued the next morning by a neighbor, one of the searching party. is doubtful whether Coleridge's system ever recovered from the exposure of that night.

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Coleridge's father died rather suddenly when the boy was about nine years of age; and through the efforts of one of the pastor's old pupils, Sir Francis Buller, afterwards famous as a judge, the lad received a presentation to Christ's Hospital, a London charity school. The lot of the poet after he was enrolled among the blue-coated, yellow-stockinged, hatless students seems to have been anything but a happy one. The family, being proud, felt themselves disgraced by the boy's admission to a charity school. His brothers refused to permit him to visit them in the school garb, and Coleridge would not go in any other. “Oh, what a change," he wrote in after years to his friend, Thomas Poole, "from home to this city school; depressed, moping, friendless, a poor orphan, half starved." Charles Lamb, who as a student at Christ's Hospital during Coleridge's time became the life-long friend of the poet, has left us two pictures of the school in two essays, Recollections of Christ's Hospital, and Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago. One famous passage from the latter essay, a passage often quoted, may be cited here as perhaps the best picture we have of Coleridge in his youth:

"Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the dayspring 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 Jamblicus 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 Gray Friars re-echoed with the accents of the inspired charity boy."

On one occasion, when Coleridge was about thirteen, he went to a shoemaker and begged to be taken as an apprentice. The shoemaker, Crispin by name, an honest fellow, took him to Boyer, then headmaster of the school, who got into a great rage, knocked down the boy, and pushed the shoemaker violently out of the room. Upon the lad's declaring that he desired to learn the shoemaker's trade because he hated the thought of being a clergyman, and that he had become an infidel, Boyer administered to him a sound thrashing-the only just one, Coleridge afterwards remarked, he had ever received.

The training Coleridge gained at Christ's Hospital was both severe and thorough. With all his faults Boyer was an admirable drillmaster; and Coleridge was chosen as one of the Grecians, that little band specially prepared under the severe master's own supervision for scholarships at the universities. This master's labors did not end when he had trained the boys to be good Latin and Greek students-his most difficult lessons were those in English; and to his severe criticisms and repressions Coleridge was deeply indebted. About this time the young poet was attracted by the sonnets of Bowles, a writer long since forgotten. Bowles was by no means a great poet; but he was a sincere one, and his sonnets show the influence of the new forces active in the world of poetry. What little Coleridge had produced before this time bore the conventional marks of the eighteenth century. We have preserved several poems that he wrote in the Christ Hospital book, one of them an anthem for the children of the school-verses of little or no value except as specimens of his early handicraft. One poem, The Raven, written about the time he left Christ's Hospital, is interesting for the last two lines, in which we have in crude form the thought of the Ancient Mariner:

"We must not think so; but forget and forgive,

And what Heaven gives life to, we'll still let it live."

In 1791, when Coleridge was nineteen years of age, he was appointed to an exhibition at Jesus College, Cambridge. Later in his course there he was further aided by certain fellowships. During the first portion of his residence he worked steadily and successfully, and gained the Browne gold medal for a sapphic Qde on the Slave Trade. One of Coleridge's college friends has left us an interesting account of how the poet's room became the rendezvous of a number of companions, all eager to discuss the questions of the day, and how, when a new pamphlet appeared from the pen of Burke, Coleridge would repeat for them whole pages verbatim. Stirring times were these, the earlier days of the French Revolution, when new ideas of liberty and of the dawn of a better day were permeating the whole world, and when men felt that it was bliss even to be alive. Coleridge was one of the most radical of the many young men who gave their sympathy and their influence to what they conceived to be the cause of human liberty. The poet's enthusiasm, however, was temporarily checked by his solicitude over some college debts and possibly over a love affair of the time. At any rate we find him drifting about in London, penniless and ready for whatever might offer. The recruiting office of the 15th Light Dragoons invites him, and he enlists under the name of Silas T. Comerback. A sorry soldier he made, not even able to groom his own horse. After two miserable months he disclosed his whereabouts to his oldest brother, who secured his release and sent him back to the University.

Upon his return to Cambridge, Coleridge was not satisfied. He fell off in his studies and left the University without taking a degree. We soon find him enlisted with Robert Southey, a young friend from Oxford, in an attempt to establish an idealistic colony. This community, which they called a Pantisocracy, was to consist of twelve men and their wives, and

was to be established on the banks of the Susquehanna, recommended" for its excessive beauty and its security from hostile Indians and bisons." No one was to work very much-it was imagined that two hours a day of labor on the part of each man would be sufficient for their maintenance—and every one was to be supremely happy. Owing to a lack of funds necessary for its execution the project was finally abandoned; but not till Coleridge, in fulfilling one of the requisites of the society that each man should be accompanied by a wife, had become engaged to Sara Fricker and had married her. The wedding took place in October, 1795, in Bristol, at the old parish church of St. Mary Radcliffe, the church where Chatterton had spent a large portion of his brief life.

The young couple-Coleridge was but twenty-three at this time went to live in a tiny cottage on the outskirts of the village of Clivedon in Somersetshire; and we have left some beautiful lines about the tallest rose-tree which peeped in at the chamber window.1 Cottle, a Bristol publisher, had promised the poet a guinea and a half for each hundred lines of verse; and with his usual optimism Coleridge thought that he would be abundantly able to supply all their modest needs; but we soon find him resorting to various devices to keep the pot boiling. He undertook successively a number of plans, one of which was to establish a journal called the Watchman. With his customary enthusiasm for each new scheme he made a tour of the middle counties and secured a large number of subscribers; but through a lack of business judgment and tact the enterprise soon failed. He tried preaching in the Unitarian chapels around Bristol. Of this period Hazlitt has left us an interesting account: 2

"Mr. Coleridge rose and gave out his text: 'And He departed again into a mountain, Himself alone.' As he gave out this text, his voice rose like a stream of rich distilled

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1 "Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement."

2 Hazlitt's "My First Acquaintance with Poets."