him to storm popular citadels, when Scott, Coleridge, and Byron were claiming attention. And immediately after his death Tennyson, with a more universal voice, held the ear of England. It was necessary, moreover, for the world, under the guidance of such excellent interpreters as Matthew Arnold, to grow to a comprehension of his meaning. There is in him a splendid spiritual power, an imperishable word to those who will truly listen.

"He is retired as noontide dew,

Or fountain in a noonday grove :
And you must love him, ere to you
He will seem worthy of your love.

"The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
And impulses of deeper birth
Have come to him in solitude.

"In common things that round us lie
Some random truths he can impart;
The harvest of a quiet eye

That broods and sleeps on his own heart."

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

"As to my shape," Coleridge said in a letter describing himself, "'t is a good shape enough, if measured but my gait is awkward, and the walk of the whole man indicates indolence capable of energies." Here are expressed the two most striking things about Coleridge: he was a very capable man, and he somehow usually failed to achieve the results he promised. He was one of the keenest critics of his time, he was a widely versed scholar, and he had a poetic skill rarely surpassed. Nor did he fail for want of divine fire; back of his scholarship and skill lay an especially bright genius. But physical irresolution possessed him from the first; he fell into indolence and then into opium-eating; and from a condition where he saw the bright visions of youth pass unrecorded, he sank rapidly to a condition where the visions grew feebler and more indistinct. As if to make his life more tragic, his reason remained good to the end; he saw clearly the awful penalty he was paying. There is something very sad in the humor of Lamb, in writing of Coleridge in 1810: "Coleridge has powdered his hair, and looks like Bacchus, Bacchus ever sleek and young. He is going to turn sober, but his clock has not struck yet." As early as 1794, when he was only twenty-two, Coleridge saw and expressed the tragedy of his life:

"Sloth-jaundiced all! and from my graspless hand

Drop Friendship's precious pearls, like hour-glass sand." Yet in spite of this curse of irresolution, Coleridge

one

did manage, because of a very great genius within him, to write a little great prose and poetry. Most of his work, however, is unfinished -as his whole life was. On this account people to-day are prone to underestimate his genius. It must have been necessary to know the man, to hear him talk, to see his eye, if would comprehend his real magnitude. For in discourse, which does not require the resolute girding up of loins that writing does, he was at his best. Among his contemporaries he would have been the undisputed successor of Dr. Johnson if such a dictator had been possible after the French Revolution.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the youngest of thirteen children, was born October 21, 1772, at OtterySt. Mary's in Devonshire. His father, the Rev. John Coleridge, was vicar of the village and a schoolmaster. His mother, John Coleridge's second wife, was Anne Bowdon. So many poets are spoken of as precocious in boyhood that a superlative is necessary in Coleridge's case. No great writer of the nineteenth century, except the marvelous Macaulay, was so precocious a child. He mixed little, he says, with other boys, but spent most of his time reading "incessantly" or acting out what he had read. "And I used to lie by the wall and mope; and my spirits used to come upon me sudden, in a flood; and then I was accustomed to run up and down the churchyard and act over again all I had been reading, to the docks and the nettles and the rank grass.' "The Rev. John, fearing the effect of fairy tales on the imaginative infant, burned the child's books. "So," he goes "I became a dreamer, and acquired an indisposition to all bodly activity. I was fretful and inordinately passionate; ... despised and hated by the boys..

on,

and flattered and wondered at by all the old women. And before I was eight years old I was a character." These are important words; they show in the child the man almost completely foreshadowed: the flashing, imaginative mind, the great learning, the irresolution, the disaster, and Coleridge the character. For of all his great contemporaries only Shelley can compete with him in strangeness of ways.

Such a boy, as may be imagined, was an odd figure at school. He was at a dame school from three to six, and at his father's grammar school from six to nine. Then his father died, and with him even a meagre financial support. Through Mr. Francis Buller, however, an appointment to Christ Hospital School in London was obtained, and on July 18, 1782, Coleridge became a blue-coat boy. The first six weeks were spent in the Junior School at Hertford, but in September he was removed to the Under Grammar-School in London and initiated into the mysteries of "milk porritch, blue and tasteless," and "pease soup, coarse and choking." "Come back into my memory," writes his schoolfellow Charles Lamb in Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago, "like as thou wert in the dayspring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before theethe 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 reëchoed to the accents of the inspired charity boy!" Lamb tells, too, of the hot summer nights when Coleridge gazed from the roof at the stars, and of the whole holidays when they roamed the fields about London or went to see the grim sights of the Tower; and he recounts, with incomparable drollery, the doings of the Head Master, the Rev. James Boyer, with his "Ods my life, sirrah! I have a great mind to whip you!" When, years afterwards, Coleridge heard that this rigorous teacher was on his death-bed, he remarked: "Poor J. B. May all his faults be forgiven, and may he be wafted to bliss by little cherub boys, all heads and wings, with no bottoms to reproach his sublunary infirmities."

Coleridge was a brilliant if wayward scholar, and he won easily a Christ Hospital" Exhibition" Scholarship at Jesus College, Cambridge, which he entered in the fall of 1791. He passed most of his time there till 1794, but his attendance was irregular and he never took a degree. He was of course in the forefront of those interested in the Revolution, and his rooms soon became a centre for youthful philosophers, poets, and champions of liberal views. A minute of a Literary Society is doubly significant: "Time before supper was spent in hearing Coleridge repeat some original poetry (he having neglected to write his essay, which is therefore to be produced next week)." First, it is evident that his verse was already a matter for admiration among his friends; indeed, he had already written (1793), besides many imitations and pieces of little merit, his Lines on an Autumnal Evening, and his poem To Fortune had just appeared in the Morning Chronicle. Second,