el an overseeing power
To kindle or restrain."

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, 1722-1834

[Illustration: SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. _From a pencil sketch by
C.R. Leslie_.]

Life.--The troubled career of Coleridge is in striking contrast to
the peaceful life of Wordsworth. Coleridge, the thirteenth child of a
clergyman, was born in 1772 at Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire. Early in
his life, the future poet became a confirmed dreamer, refusing to
participate in the play common to boys of his age. Before he was five
years old, he had read the _Arabian Nights_. Only a few years later,
the boy's appetite for books became so voracious that he devoured an
average of two volumes a day.

One evening, when he was about nine years old, he had a violent
quarrel with his brother and ran away, sleeping out of doors all
night. A cold October rain fell; but he was not found until morning,
when he was carried home more dead than alive. "I was certainly
injured;" he says of this adventure, "for I was weakly and subject to
ague for many years after." Facts like these help to explain why
physical pain finally led him to use opium.

After his father's death, young Coleridge became, at the age of ten, a
pupil in Christ's Hospital, London, where he remained eight years.
During the first half of his stay here, his health was still further
injured by continuing as he was in earlier childhood, "a playless
daydreamer," and by a habit of almost constant reading. He says that
the food "was cruelly insufficient for those who had no friends to
supply them." He writes:--

"Conceive what I must have been at fourteen; I was in a continual
low fever. My whole being was, with eyes closed to every object of
present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny corner, and read,
read, read--fancy myself on Robinson Crusoe's island, finding a
mountain of plumcake, and eating a room for myself, and then eating
it into the shapes of tables and chairs--hunger and fancy!"

A few months after leaving Christ's Hospital, Coleridge went to
Cambridge, but he did not remain to graduate. From this time he seldom
completed anything that he undertook. It was characteristic of him,
stimulated by the spirit of the French Revolution, to dream of
founding with Southey a Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna.
In this ideal village across the sea, the dreamers were to work only
two hours a day and were to have all goods in common. The demand for
poetry was at this