time sufficiently great for a bookseller to offer
Coleridge, although he was as yet comparatively unknown, thirty
guineas for a volume of poems and a guinea and a half for each hundred
lines after finishing that volume. With such wealth in view, Coleridge
married a Miss Fricker of Bristol, because no single people could join
the new ideal commonwealth. Southey married her sister; but the young
enthusiasts were forced to abandon their project because they did not
have sufficient money to procure passage across the ocean.

The tendency to dream, however, never forsook Coleridge. One of his
favorite poems begins with this line:--

"My eyes make pictures when they are shut."[16]

He recognized his disinclination to remain long at work on prearranged
lines, when he said, "I think that my soul must have preexisted in the
body of a chamois chaser."

In 1797-1798 Coleridge lived with his young wife at Nether-Stowey in
Somerset. Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy moved to a house in the
neighborhood in order to be near Coleridge. The two young men and
Dorothy Wordsworth seemed to be exactly fitted to stimulate one
another. Together they roamed over the Quantock Hills, gazed upon the
sea, and planned _The Rime of the Ancient Mariner_, which is one of
the few things that Coleridge ever finished. In little more than a
year he wrote nearly all the the poetry that has made him famous.

Had he, like Keats, died when he was twenty-five, the world would
probably be wondering what heights of poetic fame Coleridge might have
reached; but he became addicted to the use of opium and passed a
wretched existence of thirty-six years longer, partly in the Lake
District, but chiefly in a suburb of London, without adding to his
poetic fame. During his later years he did hack work for papers, gave
occasional lectures, wrote critical and philosophical prose, and
became a talker almost as noted as Dr. Johnson. It is only just to
Coleridge to recognize the fact that even if he had never written a
line of poetry, his prose would entitle him to be ranked among
England's greatest critics.

[Illustration: COLERIDGE'S COTTAGE AT NETHER-STOWEY.]

Coleridge's wide reading, continued from boyhood, made his
contemporaries feel that he had the best intellectual equipment of any
man in England since Francis Bacon's time. Once Coleridge, having
forgotten the subject of his lecture, was startled by the announcement
that he would speak on a difficult topic