bloom as a rose, and to devote the rest of their time to higher things. Southey, whose nature was at bottom very practical, soon abandoned this grand scheme of "Pantisocracy," and his desertion alienated for a time Coleridge's friendship. In 1795 Coleridge married Miss Sarah Fricker, sister of the girl who soon after became Southey's wife. To support his new household Coleridge wrote a volume of Juvenile Poems and attempted to eke out the few guineas thus earned, by preaching and lecturing. To get subscribers for a projected periodical, called "The Watchman," he made a tour of the Midland counties, preaching on Sundays "as a tireless volunteer in a blue coat and white waistcoat," holding his hearers spell-bound with that marvellous eloquence for which he was already famous. A part of his early married life was spent in the village of Clevedon, in a little rose-covered cottage by the sea; the time was a happy one for Coleridge, but an ominous sentence or two in his letters show that he had already, in order to escape the pain of neuralgia, begun the fatal habit of opium-taking.

Friendship of Coleridge and Wordsworth; "The Ancient Mariner."-Early in 1797, Coleridge removed, with his wife and baby, to a tiny cottage in the village of Nether Stowey, in the green Quantock Hills; and a month later they were joined by Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, who took a house near by at Alfoxden. Coleridge was then twenty-five, his brother poet twenty-seven. For both of them the companionship was in the highest degree stimulating. In little more than a year Coleridge wrote all the poems which place him among the immortals. This was the year of “Genevieve," "The Dark Ladie," " Kubla Khan," "The Ancient Mariner," and the first part of "Christabel”—truly, as it has been called, an annus mirabilis, a year of wonders.

"The Ancient Mariner" was undertaken, singular to say, as a mere "pot-boiler." Coleridge and the Wordsworths had in mind a little autumn walking tour from Alfoxden over the Quantock Hills to Watchet. To defray the expenses of the trip, some five pounds, they determined to compose together a poem to be sent to the New Monthly Magazine. Coleridge suggested, as a starting point, a dream which had

been related to him by his friend Mr. Cruikshank, a dream "of a skeleton ship, with figures in it." To this Wordsworth added something he had just read in Shelvocke's Voyages, an account of the great albatrosses, with wings stretching twelve or thirteen feet from tip to tip, which Shelvocke had seen while doubling Cape Horn. Taking a hint from the same account, he suggested that a sailor should kill one of these birds, and that the guardian spirits of the region should take vengeance on the murderer. Wordsworth also suggested the navigation of the ship by the dead men.

Coleridge seized eagerly upon all these hints, and began to weave them into unity. The composition of the poem began at once, the two poets co-operating line by line. But they had not progressed far before their styles and manners of thought were seen to be so divergent that the idea of joint composition had to be abandoned. As "The Ancient Mariner" bade fair to take on dimensions too large to allow it to be put to the modest use originally intended, it was proposed to make a little volume by adding to it other poems which the friends had in manuscript, or were contemplating. In the course of the following year, the volume appeared, under the title Lyrical Ballads.

The "Lyrical Ballads."-The ideal which underlay this famous little volume was that of fidelity to nature, and the use of the least artificial means possible in reproducing nature. But nature, rightly conceived, is two-sided. There is first the world of external fact, the visible world of men and things; and there is further the inner world of thought and imagination. It was a part of the philosophy which lay back of the Romantic movement, that this inner world was just as "real," just as truly existent, and therefore just as worthy of being talked about, as the outer one,perhaps more so. This double aspect of the Romantic school is illustrated by the contents of the Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth writes in simple language of simple incidents and simple people, though he does not fail to find a suggestion of strangeness and mystery in them as they are seen by the spiritual eye of the poet; in other words, he makes the usual appear strange simply by fastening our gaze in

tently upon it. Coleridge writes of fantastic, supernatural things, but also so simply, with so many concrete and exact details, that the world of imagination into which he leads us seems for the time the only real one. The Lyrical Ballads, contained four poems by Coleridge, only a small portion of the whole; "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," however, has the place of honor at the beginning.

Coleridge's Later Life. The rest of Coleridge's life, though he wrote a good deal of verse, has little importance in the history of poetry. He made a trip, in the Wordsworths' company, to Germany, and there became absorbed in the philosophy of Kant. So far as his later life had any definite purpose, it was spent in interpreting this philosophy to his countrymen. He settled at first in the Lake Country, where he shared a house with his brother-in-law, Southey. The dampness of the lake climate brought on his old neuralgic troubles, and as an escape from pain he resorted again to opium. His bondage to the opium habit, made his life a heartrending succession of half-attempts and whole failures. He planned many books, and partly executed a few; but his chief influence was exerted in talk with his friends, and with those young men who, as his reputation for transcendental wisdom increased, resorted to him as to an oracle of hope and faith, in the years which followed the failure of the French Revolution. In 1814 he voluntarily put himself under the care of a London physician, Dr. Gillman. He lived in the doctor's house, at Highgate Hill near London, from this time forth, and gradually shook himself free from his bondage to the drug which had wrecked him, "the most golden genius born in that age."

Contemporary Glimpses of Coleridge.-William Hazlitt, the critic and essayist, who in his youth saw and talked with Coleridge, says, "His genius had angelic wings, and fed on manna. He talked on forever, and you wished him to talk on forever. His thoughts did not seem to come with labor and effort, but as if the wings of imagination lifted him off his feet. His voice rolled on the ear like a pealing organ, and its sound alone was the music of thought." Of his appearance the same observer says, "His forehead was broad

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and high, as if built of ivory, with large, projecting eyebrows; and his eyes rolled beneath them like a sea with darkened lustre." Carlyle, who saw him in his later years at Dr. Gillman's, writes: "Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill, in those years, looking down on London and its smoketumult, like a sage escaped from the inanities of life's battles. A sublime man, who, alone in those dark days, had saved his crown of spiritual manhood. The practical intellects of the world did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer. But to the rising spirits of the young generation, he had this dusky, sublime character; and sat there as a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma."

Characteristics of Coleridge's Poetry.-Coleridge's poetry transports us into a world of strange scenery and of supernatural happenings, illuminated by "a light that never was on sea or land." "Kubla Khan" paints an oriental dreampicture, as splendid and as impalpable as the palaces and plunging rivers and "caverns measureless to man," which we sometimes see lifted for a moment out of a stormy sunset. "Christabel," which seems in its fragmentary form to have been planned as the story of a young girl fallen under the spell of an unearthly demon in woman's shape, moves in a mediæval atmosphere blended of beauty and horror; a horror poignantly vague, freezing the heart with its suggestion of all that is malign and cruel in the spirit world. "The Ancient Mariner," Coleridge's one finished masterpiece, stands alone in literature for the completeness with which it creates an illusion of reality while dealing with images and events manifestly unreal. Its great pictures of night and morning, of arctic and tropic seas; its melodies of whispering keel and rustling sails, and of dead throats singing spectral carols; its strange music, richer and more various even than that of "Kubla Khan," though not so grand and spacious-these characteristics, to say nothing of the fruitful lesson lying at its heart, make "The Ancient Mariner" a poem without an equal in its kind. It is manifestly a dream, but a dream caught in a magic mirror, which holds it spellbound in immortal freshness.