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afterwards became warm friends, but both had written verses on the French Revolution, and both were smitten by the same ardor for equal rights and human brotherhood.

Wordsworth left college in 1791 and went to France, then in the midst of her revolution. I may as well tell you here that the horrors of bloodshed which followed the revolution shook Wordsworth's faith in the ideas at work there, and led to a change in opinions which turned him from a violent democrat to a staunch English monarchist.

In the meantime, Coleridge went to Cambridge, from whence he ran away and came to London, with some vague idea of living by his pen. He soon grew so poor that, as a resource against starving, he enlisted as a private in the cavalry.

He knew nothing of soldiering, and could not even sit a horse properly. When suddenly asked his name, not wishing to give his real one, he says, "I answered Cumberback; and verily my habits were so little equestrian, that my horse, I doubt not, was of that opinion."

His friends found him out, and he was released from the service. Not long after he met Robert Southey, a young man of nearly his own age, and of opinions after his own heart. Southey, also, was a radical, and a budding poet, who had written in college a poem, Wat Tyler, which had been pronounced seditious and revolutionary. The two began a friendship natural to their age and their congenial opinions; a friendship afterwards made stronger by their marriage with two sisters. They made a plan to emigrate to America and form a colony here which should be established on the ideas of religion and government which they held sacred, but this plan failed, and while Southey went to cool his youthful opinions in a tour in Europe, Coleridge went down to a little town in the south of England, where he met Wordsworth for the first time. They were both filled with the same ideas, and both had published a little volume of poetry; it was natural that they should become warm friends, and

that they should exert a great influence each on the other. Their interchange of thought, their long rambles together in the lanes and woods of rural England, led to the publication of a little volume of poems, with a preface setting forth their theories about poetry, which finally gave them and those who agreed with them the name of the Lake School. They were given the name from the beautiful lake region of England, in Cumberland and Westmoreland, where Wordsworth and Southey afterwards went to live. Coleridge never took up his residence there, although he was constantly going and coming, till, as Southey said, "his movements could no more be calculated than those of a comet."

The Lyrical Ballads-the first publication of the Lake School-was written to the theory that poetry might be the simple, natural, language of men under the influence of strong feeling; that it should be free to treat the humblest incident of daily life; that the joys and sorrows of common men were the noblest motive for verse, and that a poet was no superhuman being, but "only a man speaking to other men." This statement of the poet's purpose was the key-note of the revolution in poetry, and you will see that it was a note in harmony with a spirit very different and more modern than that of Pope, or any poet before his time.

To us there seems nothing very alarming or strange in this statement, and we have learned to love and reverence the poetry which it introduced. But the storm of criticism, of laughter, of contempt, that was raised against these poets was tremendous. For nearly twenty years public opinion was dead-set against them, and soon after the first little edition of five hundred copies was printed, the discouraged publisher gave Mr. Wordsworth his rights in the book as a worthless gift. But neither the men nor their poetry was to be crushed, and from year to year it grew more and more into favor, till at Wordsworth's death (he lived to be eighty)

he knew himself judged by most as the great poet of his generation, and by many critics ranked as the sixth great poet in the line from Chaucer.*

Having thus given you, in as few words as I could, the story of the Lake School, let me say something of the poetry of the men who founded it.

TALK LI.

ON SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

Or Samuel Taylor Coleridge it is always to be said with regret, that he did not accomplish as much, or as good work, as the world had a right to expect from such a man. He has left behind him comparatively little to prove that he might have been a great poet. I think this lack of accomplishment is due more to physical causes than mental ones. His father, a delicate scholarly man, was over fifty when Coleridge was born, and from him came the inheritance of a weak body and nerves sensitive to pain. In very early childhood, too much reading of fanciful stories filled his brain with visions of spectres, and gave him a tendency to mope and dream. He was sent early to school, and was only ten when he went to Christ's Hospital, the famous Blue-coat School, where he gives in one of his letters this touching picture of his privations:

"Our diet was very scanty. Every morning, a bit of dry bread, and some bad small-beer. Every evening a larger piece of bread, and cheese or butter, whichever we liked. For dinner on Sunday, boiled beef and broth; Monday, bread and butter, and milk and water; Tuesday, roast mutton; Wednesday, bread and butter and rice and milk; Thursday, boiled beef and broth; Friday, boiled mutton and broth; Saturday, bread and butter, and peas porridge. Our food was portioned, and, excepting on Wednesday, I never had enough. Our appetites were damped, never satisfied; and we had no vegetables."

* Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth.

In another letter he says:

"Conceive what I must have been at fourteen. I was in a continual low fever; my whole being was with eyes closed to every object of present sense; to crumple myself up in a sunny corner, and read, read, read-fancy myself in Robinson Crusoe's island, finding a mountain of plum cake, and eating a room for myself, and then eating it into the shape of chairs and tables-hunger and fancy.”

The penalty he must pay for such an unwholesome and half-starved childhood appears early in Coleridge's life. He was hardly twenty-three when fits of torturing neuralgia seized him, for which he began to take opium, beginning with light doses, and increasing them till they grew into a habit of opium-eating, which held him for years in its bonds, and was no doubt the cause that so many of his poetic designs were not carried out. We feel that if he had had the painstaking industry of Wordsworth, he too might have realized some of those glorious plans for poetry with which he fired the minds of his friends when they were wandering together over the fields and along the brooks of Somerset. As it is, Wordsworth took the place at the head of the school which Coleridge more than any other inspired. In literature we see Coleridge as one of the powers standing behind those who climb the throne.

The Lyrical Ballads had been planned by the two poets to consist of two kinds of poetry: in one, the incidents were to be of a supernatural, imaginative kind; the other was to be on subjects drawn from ordinary life, such incidents and characters as are to found in any village. It was arranged that Coleridge should take the supernatural, and Wordsworth the simple subjects. They wandered about the fields and lanes of Somersetshire, following the course of woodland brooks, laying their poetical plans. Already their radical opinions, their former sympathy with the French Revolution, had come to the ears of friends of the government, and a spy was sent down to watch these young men, who, strolling about, note-book and pencil in hand, were suspected of mapping out the land to give it to foreign

enemies. But, although the spy listened closely, he could hear nothing but a great deal of talk about a certain Spynosy, which the dectetive, who was blessed with an ample organ of smell, supposed was a name given to him. This was all the treason he could report on his return to London. The two friends had already lost their ardor for republicanism and the French Revolution, and were busy discussing German philosophy; and it was the great Spinosa whose name the detective had taken to mean himself.

From what I have said of Coleridge's habits of work, you will not be surprised to find that when the Lyrical Ballads were to go to press, and Wordsworth had twenty-two poems ready, Coleridge had only the Ancient Mariner and a part of the wierd poem of Christabel, which was never finished. Hazlitt says that the Ancient Mariner is the only one of Coleridge's poems which he should like to put into any person's hands whom he wished to impress favorably with his great powers. No doubt he is right, yet this one poem is great enough for one reputation. It is a unique poem; there is nothing like it in literature, and every student of English poetry should read it till its beauties are familiar.

Christabel always remained a fragment, although Coleridge intended to finish it. He added a second part to it after it was first published, of which he said: "As in my first part, I had the whole present to my mind, with the wholeness, no less than the loveliness of a vision, I trust that I shall be yet able to embody in verse the three parts yet to come." It is like Coleridge that the mood for which he waited never came, and that to the last we have only the fragment. The poem of Genevieve or Love, was written as an introduction to a longer poem, which was planned and never written. It is, however, complete in itself, an exquisite little love-story in verse, and I quote it entire:

LOVE.

"All thoughts, all passions, all delights,

Whatever stirs this mortal frame,

Are but the ministers of Love,

And feed his sacred flame.

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