reader to study them until he feels them and imbibes their spirit. A mere reading is not enough.

Wordsworth wrote little prose except some excellent letters; but his "Essay on Poetry" embodies many exalted and elevating ideas. He was made poet - laureate on the death of Southey (1843) and retained the position until his own death, when he was succeeded by Tennyson.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was by nature and habit a dreamer. This must be kept in mind in endeavoring to set in order the events which made up that strange life, in the course of which we are constantly trying to make excuses for its subject. He was the son of a clergyman, and was a precocious child; read his Bible at three years old and the "Arabian Nights" at six; was entered as a charity-boy at Christ's Hospital School (the "Blue-coat"), London; studied for two years at Cambridge; and then, mortified at owing a debt of £100 which he could not pay, he left college and enlisted as a private in a regiment of dragoons. A young man passing through the town recognized him, and informed his friends, who soon obtained his discharge. We next hear of him at Bristol, where he formed with Southey and Robert Lovell (the latter also a poet) a plan for emigrating to America, and there, on the banks of the Susquehanna, founding a social colony, where all property was to be in common, and where the labor of two hours a day was to supply all needs. The government was to be a pantisocracy, or equal rule of all, and the funds — well, it was not so clear where the funds were to come from, but they thought so trivial a matter as the lack of money would not be a serious drawback to their plan. They invited a bookseller and publisher of Bristol, Joseph Cottle, to join their party, and he has preserved a delightful account of their simple-minded scheme in his "Reminiscences of Coleridge and Southey." Without absolutely discouraging the visionaries, he quietly watched their pro

ceedings, bought their poems, gave them good advice and suggestions, to which they paid no attention, and was finally much relieved when they came to him to borrow money to go into lodgings, for that meant that the pantisocracy was, for the time at least, given up.

It had been a condition of the pantisocracy that all who participated in the scheme should be married. Lovell had already married Miss Fricker of Bristol; Southey made a secret match with her sister Edith; and Coleridge, without secrecy, for there was no one to oppose him, married the third sister, Sarah.

The old question of ways and means was still an important one. Coleridge gave lectures, which were well attended, but to which he sometimes forgot to go; he began the publication of a paper called "The Watchman," but soon stopped it for want of subscribers; and in the year after his marriage he removed to Nether Stowey in Somersetshire, and devoted himself entirely to writing. It was while here that he made the memorable call on Wordsworth and his sister, which made the two poets friends for life. Dorothy Wordsworth, the lovely and gifted sister of the poet, has left a pen - portrait of Coleridge at the time. He was "thin and pale, the lower part of the face not good, wide mouth, thick lips, not very good teeth, longish, loose, half-curling, rough, black hair." But the moment he spoke, everything else was forgotten in his magical utterances. His conversation, to the end of his life, had a charm which fascinated all who met him. As has been said, he and Wordsworth published together the volume of "Lyrical Ballads,” which included Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner." In 1798 some members of the Wedgwood family (of pottery fame) presented him with an annuity which enabled him to realize the wish of his heart and visit Germany, whither he went in company with the Wordsworths. He mastered the language with wonderful quickness, and on his return trans

lated Schiller's "Piccolomini," two dramas of which Wallenstein is the hero. He continued to write, producing, amid some indifferent poetry, some of the most exquisite gems of which our language can boast.

For the first fifteen years of this century, the life of Coleridge is a miserable story of slavery to opium. He had been, as a young man, advised to take it as a medicine, which he did with the most satisfactory effect, and having thus acquired the taste for it, he had not strength of mind or will to break away from the habit of using it. He wandered from place to place, restless and unhappy, making now and then a brief return to social life. During these intervals he would give lectures, and enchant every one about him, as of old, with his wonderful conversation; then disappear again into mysterious obscurity, leaving his wife and family, meanwhile, to be supported by the generous, industrious Southey, whose house and heart were ever open to them. In 1810, Coleridge abandoned his family entirely, and five years later had the good fortune to be taken into the family of Mr. and Mrs. Gillman, at Highgate, who devoted themselves to him for the remaining nineteen years of his life. Mr Gillman was a medical man, and succeeded in restraining his patient's unfortunate propensity within such bounds as left him to some degree master over himself, and enabled him to live and die in tolerable comfort. Here he received his friends and indulged in the endless monologue to which all were so delighted to listen. There had not been such a talker since the days of Dr. Johnson; there has probably not been one since. Among his visitors was Thomas Carlyle, who has left a lifelike portrait of him in the "Life of John Sterling":

Brow and head were round, and of massive weight; but the face was flabby and irresolute. The deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow as inspiration; confused pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind of mild astonishment. * * A lady once remarked,

*

he never could fix which side of the garden walk would suit him best, but continually shifted, in corkscrew fashion, and kept trying both. A heavy-laden, high-aspiring, and surely much-suffering man.

Although most of his friends listened without criticism to his dissertations, there was occasionally one who took the liberty of quietly laughing at him. Hazlett says of him: "He did not cease [talking] while I stayed, nor has he since, that I know of." And Charles Lamb, when Coleridge asked him whether he had ever heard him preach, answered, "I never heard you do anything else!"

Coleridge's prose works are far more voluminous than his poetry, and are mostly of a highly philosophical cast. "The Friend" (a periodical), "Aids to Reflection," and "Biographia Literaria” are among the best-known of his prose works. His oldest son, Hartley Coleridge, a man of genius, a thinker and a poet, was ruined by intemperance. The second son, the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, wrote a memoir of his brother Hartley, and some theological works. Sara Coleridge, the poet's only daughter, who inherited much of his genius, wrote both prose and verse. She married her cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge, who was, like the rest of his family, devoted to literature. He undertook a memoir of S. T. Coleridge, but dying before it was completed, it was finished by his widow. She was also the author of "Phantasmion," a prose fairy-tale, and of several other graceful literary works.

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CHAPTER XLI.

SOUTHEY. CAMPBELL. MOORE.

OBERT SOUTHEY was not a great poet, but he

was a fine prose - writer, and so admirable a man that one can scarcely separate what he did from what he was. In the midst of constant and engrossing

occupation, he, like Scott, always found time for the claims of friendship, charity and civility; and his hospitable house was the constant resort of visitors, beside furnishing shelter, year after year, to his wife's widowed sister, Mrs. Lovell (who came, with her child, to live with him), and to the neglected family of his fellow-poet, Coleridge. Laborious, earnest and conscientious, his life was one of the busiest recorded among the literary brotherhood; and when at last his overtaxed brain gave way and the sad end came, we feel that his had been, like Scott's, a life nobly used.

Southey was the son of a linen-draper in Bristol, and was sent, at the expense of an uncle, to Westminster School, from which he was expelled, four years later, because he had taken part in the writing of an article against flogging. Afterward he spent two years at Oxford, where, according to his own account, he learned but two things— to row and to swim. While there he composed his first epic poem, "Joan of Arc," for which the generous bookseller, Cottle, gave him fifty guineas. His marriage, and the wild scheme of "pantisocracy," have already been spoken of in the sketch of Coleridge.

At the time of his apparently imprudent marriage, the same kind relative who had helped him before, remarked that he saw in him "everything you could wish a young man to have, except common sense and prudence;" and we, who see through to the end, know that these qualities were developed later.

A volume of poems, written jointly by Southey and his brother-in-law, Lovell, had appeared some time before the emigration plan was thought of. Southey now produced “Thalaba,” an oriental epic, and soon after settled at Greta Hall in Keswick, on one of the Cumberland lakes, not far from Wordsworth, where he spent the rest of his long life. In addition to the epics already mentioned, he wrote "Madoc," founded on a Welsh legend, and "The