to
win'ard, but as it was he drifted straight on to the rocks. Her mental
troubles came from a lack of responsibility--a rusting away of unused
powers in a dull, monotonous round of commonplace. Had her heart found its
home I can not conceive of her in any other light than as a splendid,
earnest woman--sane, well-poised, and doing a work that only the strong
can do. Coleridge has left on record the statement that she was the only
woman he ever met who had a "logical mind"--that is to say, the only woman
who ever understood him when he talked his best.

Coleridge made progress at the Blue-Coat School: he became "Deputy
Grecian," or head scholar. This secured him a scholarship at Cambridge,
and thither he went in search of honors. But his revolutionary and
Unitarian principles did not serve him in good stead, and he was placed
under the ban.

At the same time a youth by the name of Robert Southey was having a like
experience at Oxford. Other youths had tried in days agone to shake
Cambridge and Oxford out of their conservatism, and the result was that
the embryo revolutionists speedily found themselves warned off the campus.
So through sympathy Coleridge and Southey met. Coleridge also brought
along a young philosopher and poet, who had also been a Blue-Coat, by the
name of Lovell.

These three young men talked philosophy, and came to the conclusion that
the world was wrong. They said society was founded on a false
hypothesis--they would better things. And so they planned packing up and
away to America to found an Ideal Community on the banks of the
Susquehanna. But hold! a society without women is founded on a false
hypothesis--that's so--what to do? Now in America there are no women but
Indian squaws.

But resource did not fail them--Southey thought of the Fricker family, a
mile out on the Bristol road. There were three fine, strong, intelligent
girls--what better than to marry 'em? The world should be peopled from the
best. The girls were consulted and found willing to reorganize society on
the communal basis, and so the three poets married the three sisters--more
properly, each of the three poets married a sister. "Thank God," said
Lamb, "that there were not four of those Fricker girls, or I, too, would
have been bagged, and the world peopled from the best!"

Southey got the only prize out of the hazard; Lovell's wife was so-so, and
Coleridge drew a blank, or thought he did, which was the same thing; for
as a m