was above all a stimulus to fancy.
Godwin was their prophet, but they built upon his speculations the
superstructure of a dream that was all their own. For some years,
Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth were caught and held in the close web
of logic which Godwin gave to the world in 1793 in the first edition of
_Political Justice_. Wordsworth read and studied and continually
discussed it. Southey confessed that he "read and studied and all but
worshipped Godwin." Coleridge wrote a sonnet which he afterwards
suppressed in which he blesses his "holy guidance" and hymns Godwin
"with an ardent lay."

For that thy voice in passion's stormy day
When wild I roamed the bleak heath of distress
Bade the bright form of Justice meet my way,
And told me that her name was Happiness.

To us who read Godwin with many a later Utopia in our memories, his most
valuable chapters are those which give his penetrating criticisms of
existing society. To these young men the excitement was in his picture
of a free community from which laws and coercion had been eliminated,
and in which property was in a continual flux actuated by the stream of
universal benevolence. They resolved to found a community based on
Godwinian principles, and to free themselves from the cramping and
dwarfing influences of a society ruined by laws and superstitions, they
lit on the simple expedient of removing themselves beyond its reach.
They lacked the manhood and the simplicity which had turned more prosaic
natures into agitators and reformers. It is a tale which every student
of literature has delighted to read, how Coleridge and Southey, bent on
founding their Pantisocracy, on the banks of the Susquehana, came to
Bristol to charter a ship, and while they waited, dimly aware that they
lacked funds for the adventure, anchored themselves in English homes by
marrying the Fricker sisters.

As one of the comrades, Robert Lovell, quaintly puts it in a letter to
Holcroft, "Principle, not plan, is our object." Lovell had visited
Holcroft in gaol, and one can well understand how that near view of the
fate which awaited the reformer under Pitt, confirmed them in their idea
of crossing the Atlantic. "From the writings of William Godwin and
yourself," Lovell went on, "our minds have been illuminated; we wish our
actions to be guided by the same superior abilities." Holcroft, older
and more combative than his poet-disciples, advised the founding of a
model colony in