old school-fellow (G. L. Tuckett)
heard of his whereabouts, and by the intervention of his brother,
Captain James Coleridge, his discharge was procured. He returned for a
short time to Cambridge, but quitted the university without a degree in
1794. In the same year he visited Oxford, and after a short tour in
Wales went to Bristol, where he met Southey. The French Revolution had
stirred the mind of Southey to its depths. Coleridge received with
rapture his new friend's scheme of Pantisocracy. On the banks of the
Susquehanna was to be founded a brotherly community, where selfishness
was to be extinguished, and the virtues were to reign supreme. No funds
were forthcoming, and in 1795, to the chagrin of Coleridge, the scheme
was dropped. In 1794 _The Fall of Robespierre_, of which Coleridge wrote
the first act and Southey the other two, appeared. At Bristol Coleridge
formed the acquaintance of Joseph Cottle, the bookseller, who offered
him thirty guineas for a volume of poems. In October of 1795 Coleridge
married Sarah Fricker, and took up his residence at Clevedon on the
Bristol Channel. A few weeks afterwards Southey married a sister of Mrs
Coleridge, and on the same day quitted England for Portugal.

Coleridge began to lecture in Bristol on politics and religion. He
embodied the first two lectures in his first prose publication,
_Conciones ad Populum_ (1795). The book contained much invective against
Pitt, and in after life Coleridge declared that, with this exception, and
a few pages involving philosophical tenets which he afterwards rejected,
there was little or nothing he desired to retract. The first volume of
_Poems_ was published by Cottle early in 1796. Coleridge projected a
periodical called _The Watchman_, and in 1796 undertook a journey, well
described in the _Biographic Literaria_, to enlist subscribers. _The
Watchman_ had a brief life of two months, but at this time Coleridge
began to think of becoming a Unitarian preacher, and abandoning
literature for ever. Hazlitt has recorded his very favourable impression
of a remarkable sermon delivered at Shrewsbury; but there are other
accounts of Coleridge's preaching not so enthusiastic. In the summer of
1795 he met for the first time the brother poet with whose name his own
will be for ever associated. Wordsworth and his sister had established
themselves at Racedown in the Dorsetshire hills, and here Coleridge
visited them in 1797. There are few things in literary