preciations."

Shairp, J.C., "Studies in Poetry and Philosophy."

Sarrazin, Gabriel, "La Renaissance de la Poesie Anglaise, 1798-1889."

Brandl, Alois, "S.T. Coleridge and the English Romantic School."

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Haney, J.L., "A Bibliography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge."

INTRODUCTION

I. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

I. THE BEGINNINGS

Coleridge lived in what may safely be called the most momentous period
of modern history. In the year following his birth Warren Hastings was
appointed first governor-general of India, where he maintained English
empire during years of war with rival nations, and where he committed
those acts of cruelty and tyranny which called forth the greatest
eloquence of the greatest of English orators, in the famous impeachment
trial at Westminster, when Coleridge was a sixteen-year-old schoolboy in
London. A few years before his birth the liberal philosophy of France
had found a popular voice in the writings of Rousseau, which became the
gospel of revolution throughout Europe in Coleridge's youth and early
manhood. "The New Heloise" in the field of sentiment and of the relation
of the sexes, "The Social Contract" In political theory, and "Emile" in
matters of education, were books whose influence upon Coleridge's
generation it would be hard to estimate. When Coleridge was four years
old the English colonies in America declared their independence and
founded a new nation upon the natural rights of man,--a nation that has
grown to be the mightiest and most beneficent on the globe. Coleridge
was seventeen when the French Revolution broke out; he was forty-three
when Napoleon was sent to St. Helena. He saw the whole career of the
greatest political upheaval and of the greatest military genius of the
modern world. Fox, Pitt, and Burke,--the greatest Liberal orator, the
greatest Parliamentary leader, and the greatest philosophic statesman
that England has produced--were at the height of their glory when
Coleridge went up to Cambridge in 1791.

In literature--naturally, since literature is but an interpretation of
life--the age was not less remarkable. Dr. Johnson was still alive when
Coleridge came up to school at Christ's Hospital, Goldsmith had died
eight years before. But a new spirit was abroad in the younger
generation. Macpherson's "Fingal," alleged to be a translation from the
ancient Gaelic poet Ossian, had appeared in 1760; Thomas Percy's
"Reliques of Ancient English Poet