my natural powers and to the
progress of my education._

This deplorable condition of mind continued "even unto my seventeenth
year." And now our readers must prepare themselves for a mighty and
wonderful change, wrought, all on a sudden, on the moral and
intellectual character of this metaphysical Greenhorn. _"Mr. Bowles'
Sonnets, twenty in number, and just then published in a quarto volume_
(a most important circumstance!) _were put into my hand!"_ To those
sonnets, next to the School-master's lectures on Poetry, Mr. Coleridge
attributes the strength, vigour, and extension, of his own very original
Genius.

By those works, year after year, I was enthusiastically delighted and
inspired. My earliest acquaintances will not have forgotten the
undisciplined eagerness and impetuous zeal with which I labored to
make proselytes, not only _of my companions, but of all with whom I
conversed, of whatever rank, and in whatever place._ As my school
finances did not permit me to purchase copies, I made, within less
than a year and a half, _more than forty transcriptions, as the best
presents I could make to those who had in any way won my regard._ My
obligations to Mr. Bowles were indeed important, and for radical good!

There must be some grievous natural defect in that mind which, even at
the age of seventeen, could act so insanely; and we cannot but think,
that no real and healthy sensibility could have exaggerated to itself so
grossly the merits of Bowles' Sonnets. They are undoubtedly most
beautiful, and we willingly pay our tribute of admiration to the genius
of the amiable writer; but they neither did nor could produce any such
effects as are here described, except upon a mind singularly weak and
helpless. We must, however, take the fact as we find it; and Mr.
Coleridge's first step, after his worship of Bowles, was to see
distinctly into the defects and deficiencies of Pope (a writer whom
Bowles most especially admires, and has edited), and through all the
false diction and borrowed plumage of Gray! But here Mr. Coleridge drops
the subject of Poetry for the present, and proceeds to other important
matters.

We regret that Mr. Coleridge has passed over without notice all the
years which he spent "in the happy quiet of ever-honoured Jesus College,
Cambridge." That must have been the most important period of his life,
and was surely more worthy of record than the metaphysical dreams or the
poetical ex